Slushpile 17

Slushpile Index

Not posting does not mean not writing, I can assure you of that much.

1. “Power loves victimhood” (Austin Walker, A More Civilized Age, can’t remember the episode)
2. The fountain has a slime in it that can be dissolved with the alcohol
3. The famine has entered its third year. The roads are littered with the dead.
4. Post apoc currency based on trading cards (real-life yakuza already do this w/ Pokemon cards)
5. Angels are not independent messenger entities, they are the message
6. Using vampires / undead to study dead languages.
7. Eigengrau & phosphemes (real thing)
8. Niedendollerdorf stone (real thing)
9. Occult artifact: the 37th vermeer 
10. “It doesn’t matter how transparent the lie is when the person telling it to you has a gun to your head. You nod along and agree with whatever he says.
11. Pixilated = “pixie led” = confused or drunk; out of sorts (actual word)
12. An issue of Maxim with a gold-tasseled bookmark. Someone took a marker to the insides and inscribed the formula for Shape Flesh as a blackout poem.
13. Video billboards display an obnoxious ad for health drinks.
14. Unwritten module name: “Blue Sand and Burning Eye”
15. Ancient Scrapped Post: What appears to be a sci-fi version of “In Corpathium”, designed for an entire solar-system.
16. Sons of Noah but humans / elves / dwarves
17. Alt history where proto-orthodox Christianity fails to take hold in Rome but Manichaeism goes huge and imperial in its place (well, more than normal - thanks, Augustine /s)
18. All those humanoid aliens with suspiciously themed monocultures are leftovers of mi-go experiments - they’re trying to find a stable template for a human civilization that doesn’t implode every few generations. The colors are just to keep everything organized.
19. Mothership prompt - sperm donor sibling pods of up to a hundred plus people with up to a 30 year gap that have weird internal politics add alien vector oh no
20. Michelle: Black woman in her mid-40s, with a scar on her chin and a look in her eyes like she does the haunting.
21. 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
22. Opening line: There's an alien on Sesame Street. It's 201X and Big Bird is talking to an astronaut from Sigma Draconis.
23. DG scenario: dig site in Midwest reveals old indigenous settlement / tomb complex. Tribe wants the remains returned as per agreement with the University running the dig. DG called in because one skeleton is a giant. There is a “monster” in the complex that is the giant's old space suit, its automated systems having gone rampant. Aiming for ancient astronauts, but more human-centered and sad.
24. It splits at the waist into two torsos: one types furiously on an empty typewriter: the other rising up behind with its six arms weaves the silvery spittle pouring from its eyeless chitin-cased head into…
25. Dream: Return to Darwin 4 tv series. More variation in environments, forests, rivers, fungi forests, etc. Hothouse Darwin? Dark, cool colors, like Pacific Northwest.
26. Dream: I tell Samuel L. Jackson about 'boops boops boops boops boops'.
27. Dream - In a car backseat. Riding through the desert, undefined driver around trying to locate the sniper shooting at us. They’re not a good shot. I have a baby sea turtle with me, maybe a manatee, and it shits all over my hand
28. Dream: Real life Blue Prince scenario, except instead of drafting rooms it was things like the amount of change left on tables or positions of pieces on a game board. A bookshelf of fantasy novels I thought was a prop but were all real and was going to be ours when we cracked the the puzzle. My partner found a bottle of spoiled vegetable oil in a closet
29. Dream: Hrtomos from K6BD (the big golden baby) is the local form of an 8D entity (and eaten by humans? Fucked up.) We are apparently 7th dimensional.
30. Dream: an old space station of two habitation drums orbiting each other, connected pole to pole by two long arms, above the capital city / a back door to it, accessible from the ground / a mountain path? An old church and a nun I had met once before but not in real life
31. Dream: Luke and Vader fight on top of a ruin-filled lake on Yavin-4.
32. “Classical demons are hostile to humans mostly because we’re annoying. Imagine you were constantly getting interrupted at work by a bunch of monkeys demanding that you give them money and teach them how to be better at sex.”
33. The Raimi Spider Man movies just absolutely ooze proto-incel martyrdom complex, ye gods. 
34. Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy temporary blindness. Append enough zeros and suddenly people stop seeing all sorts of things. Like the contents of a particular train departing from Samarkand.
35. When you die, you meet a caveman. His name is Oji; he was born on August 2nd,  20,482 BC, and he died from a bronchial infection when he was 48.
36. First contact (between humans) scenario goes better than expected when one of the parties farts loudly and the reminder that we are all weird ape-shaped bags of watery meat that sometimes make silly noises eases the tension a bit.
37. Dear James Cameron: Replace the Na'vi with cordyceps-internet-linked space lobsters and let Jake Sully fuck a mi-go, you tepid coward.
38. Arthur getting beaned in the head with a Colt revolver chucked at him by the Lady of the Lake
39. Swamp dragons fill the niche of crocodiles.
40. The dog on Mount Golgotha has left his post.
41. Spells that recharge overnight vs spells that recharge over day as sun/moon schools of magic.
42. Spells recharge daily because you have to renew the ritual with the spirits that oversee them, it’s part of the deal (no memorization or spell weasels, it’s “who have you wished good morning to”) and limitations on spell slots are because you don’t command respect yet from the bigger spirits.
43. Merge gnolls with ghouls to serve niche of hyena-based corpse-eaters.
44. Hook: A second book written in the Voynich script is found
45. Ecological worldbuilding / spec-evo for a setting that only has monstrous / magical fauna.
46. An Ecuadorian single mother of two, still smelling faintly of toilet bowl cleaner, walks up to the smartboard and stars speaking in the clipped, over-enunciated speech of a Librarian. 
47. The Moscow-Washington hotline procedure was updated in ‘71 with mutual agreement to alert the other of “accidental / unauthorized / unexplained” nuclear incidents. This expanded to anomalous incidents in ‘72, after the emergence of GALLSTONE PRIME.
48. A man once said that mankind lived as if within a cave, watching shadows dance on the wall in ignorance. The truth, he said, was attained by the few who escaped. He did not consider the possibility that the truth of absolute reality is not necessarily a good thing for a human to witness. 
49. Nahanni National Park has enough DG-adjacent material that it feels on the nose to suggest it.
50. Magic as sympathetic resonance vs sleight of hand vs spirit-work vs hypergeometry vs understanding.
51. The Mystery may be known, but never solved. 
52. Novel that doesn't exist: Ten Thousand Wretched Things 
53. Novel that doesn't exist: Calamity arrives in Ulm 
54. EP Pandora Gates (or similar devices) generate basement universes, rather than sending you around the galaxy as we know it.
55. Should a teacher of the mysteries say to you “All is true, all is false; everything I say is a lie”, they know enough that you should listen, but they are also an ass so you should not listen too closely.
56. Could probably do a fun art project by downloading individual Wikipedia pages and directly editing the HTML. 
57. Anime that doesn't exist: a series of PSAs featuring a big-boobed office worker on subjects like breast cancer screening, anti-harassment, consent, sexual health.
58. Real-world grimoire: the exorcism manual of Babylonian scholar Esagil-kin-apli.
59. “Looking out my window it does not seem like the meek have inherited the earth just yet. Mr. Tarr. I may be mis-remembering the text, but I don’t believe Christ put any stock in the nutritional value of a private jet when it came to feeding the hungry.” 
60. “Communication officer and contact liaison Yykruzhegil. Or you can call me Ch- wait, no… call me Buchakka. Forgot y’all still had copyright lawyers.”
61. Pocket Guide to Faiths of the Hidden World, 3rd Edition (2018) 
62. The spirits of those who die with sins unconfessed are made to enact reparations not paid in life.
63. The oracular profession exists in a permanent state of crisis: from the very beginning predictions have been plagued of doom have been ignored, predictions of boon are so vague as to be useless. No one has yet managed to develop a channeling method that provides both accurate and believable forecasts. 
64. An opposite to early modern taxonomic/categorizational language, predicated on that all things existing both in a state of change and in relation to each other.
65. A third category of “middle spirits”, which are not of the world but can be interacted with.
66. Alien monocultures in space operas are the result of AI-based cultural flattening.
67. This specialized organelle, formed of reconstituted godflesh, is capable of holding the atum. The bacteria have developed a soul.
68. “It means I don’t have to think. I don’t have to exist within the world.”
69. Compound word calqued as love-wise or love-wisdom 
70. DAI - Distributed Algorithmic Intelligence
71. OSMAT - Outer Systems Mutual Aid Treaty 
72. SLA - Synthetic Liberation Army 
73. DINESU - ???? 
74. Spacer’s best friend: portable airgapped proxy server, now in convenient briefcase size!
75. The timeline where fantasy as a genre becomes codified as "the folktales of cultures that don't exist" rather than going hard on the secondary world epics.
76. Each sentence has what is essentially a framework that the content words are slotted into, represented by the summoned spirit. 
77. The camera pulls back, revealing a cramped apartment and an extremely old TV. We hear a man mutter “Jesus Christ, what a load of shit.” 
78. Useful paleontology fact: Amargasaurus both looks very cool, and is only about the size of an elephant, which would make it a feasible option for domesticated sauropod. 
79. I wonder if anyone has ever done solo Band of Blades? 
80. The language differentiates between begetters and fathers, as they are not always the same person. 
81. Kyfreith Cath: medieval Welsh cat laws (yes from that episode of Cambrian Chronicles)
82. "Which notebook has my fucked up Latin in it?" (I still cannot find it) 
83. “If you strike a dog, do not blame it for biting you.” 
84. Generating a conlang through randomly selected traits on WALS and grambank
85. Consider the version of Shmi Skywalker who sidesteps the entire podracing subplot plot by simply beating Watto to death with a wrench and threatening to throw Qui-Gon under the hover bus by ratting to Jabba if she's not taken along with Anakin.
86. The Necronomicon familiar to the general public is a work of pseudepigraphic forgery, originating in Constantinople during the latter half of the 10th century. Among its many faults, it claims that Al-Hazred was Muslim; in reality, he was Mandean.
87. Yithian Standard is a purely written language used to facilitate the Pnakotic Library. Its grammar is typically described as “brutally straightforward” and “oppressively mechanistic”, but with no comparison to yithian language(s) beyond the Library, it’s uncertain if it was constructed or if they simply process language like this. 
88. Civilization evolution stages for random tables of events:  stable, downturn, retraction, collapse, transformation upturn, growth...
89. Fantasy novel written in Cherokee; if you tear out and eat page 403, it will thereafter always contain a hollow just big enough for a handgun

 

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[So a recent episode of the Manicumum featured The Crop-Eared Dog, which contains a very long and effusive description of an incredibly beautiful and extremely suspicious knight. This is me taking it directly into left field.]

At once, five men-at-arms leapt to their feet and without offering challenge attacked the White Knight in an ugly and dishonorable manner. They hacked him to pieces as the king roared in fury and demanded an explanation. One of the five, an aged veteran of Arthur's wars on the continent, looked up from his butchery and said:

“My lord, you are a just and wise ruler, but you have been away from the field for a long season, by my count. Three signs there were, visible at once to any many here, that identified this man not as a knight, but as a demon wearing a charming guise."

Though he boiled with rage at this improper speech, Arthur's better nature remained cogent, and he ordered the man to explain himself before he ordered Galahad to execute the five on the spot.

"Gladly, sire," said the man-at-arms as he raised a finger. "The first sign! He was a beautiful man in a hard-lived profession. Two!” He held up a second finger. “He wore parade dress and full regalia at night, and he had neither a horse nor mud on his boots. THREE!” He pointed at the corpse “He has a shield made of human fucking skin!"

The king was silent; the man-at-arms continued:

"If he fulfilled one of three, or even two, he would be a fool or a madman and no cause for alarm. But three? All three? My lord, I think you’ve lost your touch. Here, hand me his shield. God and the Virgin Mary as my witness I'll show you a fourth sign."

Another of the five wrested the flesh-colored shield from the dismembered knight and handed it to the man-at-arms, who inspected it briefly, nodded solemnly, and showed it to the king.

"Observe the writing around its edge, the boasting that no other man is skilled enough to wield it. Look here at the top, between these two words: do you see it, my lord? By the torchlight it is difficult to make out, true, but I know this signet must be familiar to you. Do you not see the Yellow Sign? He was from Carcosa."