sadoeuphemist

Hero's Journey

2017-11-10T10:31:12Z

I. Return

1. The Call
You have made your journey, and you've returned empty-handed. You've found nothing out there worth keeping, worth fighting for - or, no fights that you could win, at least. You spent your days away homesick, in thin and distant longing, an unfinished song in the back of your heart. You drift the last few feet, carried by the tides, and your feet touch the shore. You are home. After all these years away, you are home at last.

2. Refusal
Your hometown is in no mood to welcome you. It is dying, sluggish, rudely indifferent. Your home is all crumbling concrete and stone, slow stagnation, and you were meant to either stay and help revitalize it, or to escape it. You have done neither. All you've given it is a history of debts, a past left unfinished. So many long-forged chains reeling you back in.

3. Crossing the Threshold
There are no great upheavals to your return. You slot back in easily, as though you'd never left. There are the glances, the snide remarks, the insinuations, the barely buried resentment, but for the most part you have returned to the quiet cozy town of your childhood. Much has changed, but much more is just as how you had left it. You feel as though there should be some mark on you, some irreconcilable alteration to your spirit, that sets you against the home and the family that you left behind. But the lot of you are simply older, and more weary. Nothing more than that.

4. Supernatural Aid

You've begun to have the most vivid dreams. Who wouldn't? There's a box that's been cracked open in your subconscious, all the long-buried things come flooding out. If you have not accomplished anything in life, you can at least be anointed by your dreams, made significant by the burden of premonition. You hear the howl of wind in an endless black sky. You see ghosts. You see visions of the future. You see death. You see death. You see death.

5. Belly of the Whale
The rot has grown, metastasized, but it was there from the beginning, pulsing and fecund even from the carefree days of your childhood. Your home is rotted through: beneath the floorboards, up through the grand stone buildings, in the very air you breathe. It was invisible to you at first, but your time away has made its presence so much more repulsive. It extends past your hometown, to the very corners of the land you traveled. It is bad here, and it is better elsewhere, but there is nowhere that you know of that is safe.

II. Descent

6. The Road of Trials
Your days are full of simple pleasures and anxieties, people and their problems, those who you once knew and those who are by now unfamiliar. You are not from here, after all, not really, you were not witness to the last several years of their lives, you are not bound up in their internecine disagreements. There is an air of unrealness to you, as if you were not meant to return, as if you will soon once again vanish. People talk to you freely, grudgingly; they are scattered all across the land and social stratum. You are helping them, you think, or they are helping you. Either way, it is a reason for being.

7. Atonement with the Father
Your parents are alive, still there to support you, as they have always been. They are older now, more fragile than you remember. Perhaps one of them has died. Even in this case, they are an ever-present absence, a void that warps the space around it, grounds you in its gravitational pull. You have never built anything of your own, you have not yet cut these ties. They are disappointed, they are supportive, they are struggling, they will keep you afloat amidst everything. They are human now, so much more than you were previously capable of understanding.

8. The Meeting with the Goddess
Of all the people whose lives you intercede in, there is only one who truly matters. She is in the end the reason you returned, the business you had left unfinished. There is still so much you owe her - explanations, apologies, missed opportunities - nothing that can fully be repaid. You are an ancient thing to her, a flickering, long-forgotten hope, someone who abandoned her in her time of need. She welcomes you back regardless, holds you to her heart. There is so little here that she loves. It's unsettling to see how much you still matter.

9. Temptation
You were cruel to her in your departure. No, cruelty could be renounced, could be forgiven. This was not so much a willful act as it was an utter lack of conviction. You did not fight for her, you did not contact her. She has suffered all these years you were away, watching her world constrict around her, and from you she heard not one word, gained not one ounce of comfort. There was nothing stopping you but your own insecurity and regret, the gnawing sensation that you had discovered nothing to offer her. Even in your tender moments together, you can tally up the records, you can list down your sins and know: you do not deserve her.

10. Apotheosis
You cannot save her. You cannot save anyone.

11. The Ultimate Boon
Your anxieties will coalesce into a monster, someone who has thrived amidst the rot, someone who at times grows impatient and reaches out and suffocates the weak. He is well-heeled and respectable, not powerful as such, but someone beyond your reach. He has killed someone you loved, and he will draw you in, toy with you as prey, and you will charge in heedlessly. He is an individual, or a small group of them, with eyes and arms and hungers. You will see his face. Here is something you can hurt. Here is someone you can kill.

III. Departure

12. Refusal of the Return
You will die here. You will die in the depths of your despair. It is an incontrovertible, mathematical fact. The arc of your life has led to this, its momentum, its trajectory. You have returned to this dark place, again and again and again, like some sick compulsion, a slow spiral around a drain. You have been given your chance at joy, your chance at freedom and escape, and you have wasted every opportunity. You returned to this place voluntarily. You will die here. You deserve no less.

13. Magic Flight
The path from here is long and stumbling and uneventful, with nothing to bar your way. The monster is dead, diffused, distracted; you are once again beneath its notice. All you must do now is walk, put one foot in front of another, walk through the dark and past these crumbling walls. These halls do not end, they simply widen out into the world, into the open night sky and all the streets and walls of your hometown, where all the evidence of your uselessness surrounds you. All you must do is walk, as far as your legs will carry you. All you must do is walk, as far as you can bear to go.

14. Rescue from Without
Along the path is everyone you have ever met, everyone you have ever helped, listened to, comforted, manipulated, scorned. All the ties you've formed, everyone who would remember you, miss you, resent you, everyone who would be made lesser by your absence. It is not grace that saves you, for there is no God here to administer it. It is not hope, for there is nothing left to hope for. The only thing left is another person's presence, that you are here, and they are here, and for now you are all here together, regardless of whatever has come before and whatever will come to pass.

15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold
Your home is dying, rotted through, and the rot has spread far beyond its borders.The rot is vast, and ever-present. You would see the world burn down before it died, you would see deaths in the millions. If there is to be revolution, you will not lead it. The most you could do is be swept up in the flames, live to stumble among the ashes. The rot has infected everyone you know and love; even now it pulses through your veins. You understand this now with an almost fond familiarity. You are home. You are dying, and you are home.

16. Master of Two Worlds
You will have a moment, a week or so, a moment's worth of love, of earnest and wholehearted devotion. You cannot save her, you cannot save anyone, no more than you can stop the course of death and rot, no more than you can change the world. This is the Hero's Journey of our times: you circled back whence you came so that she could know that there was happiness for her still - for a moment, for a week, for a moment that would last you the rest of your lives.

17. Freedom
The world will end, and you will meet it with open eyes.

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Fantasy

2017-10-02T12:19:33Z

Here and there a whole new world is lurking, just waiting to be written down. It comes in hints and references, one word at a time, the terms breeding and multiplying with one another. There's the loamy, fertile medium of established tropes, everything so commonplace as to be beneath notice: the Elves and Dwarves, the Mages and Rogues, all the inbred and indistinct cousins. And then there are the seeds of something new. Ashen-Born that shuffle forth from razed fields and burnt-out fires. Sightless cultists who comprehend the world through the palpitations of their flesh and skin. Brands of ice that sear onto forearms and lash out with frost, instantly identifiable, impossible to remove. Just add a single, barely-original idea - a single simple word, sometimes - and cross-reference it with the components of an already exhausted world. And just like that, you'll have created a Fantasy of your own.

The beauty of Fantasy is in its taxonomy - lists of races, and racial traits and abilities; classes, attributes, skills and specializations; artifact and weapon types of all varieties; schools of magic and the laundry lists of spells to choose from; bestiaries teeming with monsters and their modifiers; elemental alignments, resistances, weaknesses; subclasses, domains, clades, and orders; any category you could imagine. This is the potential of human imagination: going down a list of options and ticking off the boxes. Modular fantasies, units of prefab inspiration, mix'n'match 'em as you please. Select a race

[Dwarf. Elf. Goblin. Human. ]

and from there pick your class.

[Rogue. Bard. Fighter. Mage.]

Take up a weapon,

[Sword. Spear. Staff. Bow.]

name a home from which to start

[Plains. Mountains. Forest. Swamp.]

and with just 16 words there are 256 different people you could be, 256 different identities to inhabit. Add a new column, a new set of modifiers, and watch the possibilities multiply exponentially. Select male or female, and double the possibilities. Select an alignment, select a main stat, go through the skills and count all the combinations. Add to the lists at your leisure. Make up new names, new variables to multiply with. Be a Chalk Giant. Be a Chirurgeon. Be a Half-Breed. Be Undead. Dual-wield. Dual-class. Multiply them, and multiply them again, and again, and again, and again. What did you want to be when you grew up? Could you have imagined a thousand, or four thousand, or twelve thousand, or all the multiplicity of options open to you?

Listen. We could be anything we wanted.

Our daily wanting's just so stunted in comparison, so dull, so undefined. Try to imagine a world of your own, without restriction: speak of your dreams, your fears, your barely-repressed anxieties, your hopes, the deepest parts of your soul. How rich and diverse and variegated of a world and its inhabitants can you create? Write, and write, and write, and see how long it takes to get as far as a table of 16 worn-out words would take you. Or, if that's too hard, imagine yourself as you are now. You are a thermodynamic miracle, a multiplying of improbabilities whose existence is nothing less than astonishing - the improbabilities of existence, of life, that your parents and your parents' parents and so on ad infinitum should all happen to meet. But without the statistics, without all the tables and factors multiplied against each other, how can you qualify that, how can you separate yourself from the crowd, how can you earnestly convince yourself that there's something unique about you compared to every other person in the world? How could you possibly live accordingly?

What do you live for? What do you most desire? Fight for your class, your race, your nation, the god you worship - and fight the ever-gnawing sensation that none of this is meaningful. There's none of the cleanly-differentiated factions of Fantasy here, no single words that set in stone your alignments and alliances. Don't all your most precious identifiers Balkanize and schism and drift and blur and crumble into obsolescence over time? Can you imagine your children's children living in the same world that you lived in? Don't even your mortal enemies likewise laugh, yearn, sicken, bleed, don't they share with you some same essential humanity that's impossible to strictly define? Isn't there some empathy there, some inescapable recognition? There's a part of you over there, on the other side. There's something that knows what it is to want, to delight, to suffer. There's nothing inherent about you or your clan or your ancestry. All that separates us is the arbitrary and reversible benefits of circumstance, of old debts left unsettled.

What would you want to be then? What's worth wanting? What speck of identity can you claim other than being Yourself - and what's left for you to aspire to then? Change everything you can about yourself, change your job, your nation, your allegiances, immerse yourself in different schools of thought, reinvent yourself entirely - and all you have is the same simple skein of flesh stretched along some other imaginary axis. A different set of delusions, a different set of arbitrary values to defend. Deep, deep down, aren't we all the same? Then how could you hope to ever be anything different?

Real life has no discrete variegations, it all just slurs together into points on a spectrum. Fantasy's when you delineate all the options. Fantasy's when you read out all the rules. Fantasy's extrapolation from a series of variables, combinatorics, because math is so much more imaginative than any human could ever hope to be. All our identifiers in real life are arrangements of convenience, blinkered, tribal allegiances designed to set us against each other. We're born and raised in largely pre-generated roles, all attributes neatly correlated, a series of predetermined futures for us to imagine. Fantasy takes our inbred biases and abstracts them - Good and Evil, Chaos and Order - makes them clean and distinct and separate, and lets us believe in the possibility of assembling something new.

So imagine a world of your own to inhabit. Put a name to it, a hybrid word, a derivative, a variation. Write your demons down - reduce them to a single word, something tangible, something concrete. Write about something that can stain the pages, or something that can wear a stain. Write of Ash, or Snow, or Sightless Skin, or Stone. Write in compound words, in broad generic building blocks slotted clumsily against each other. Write of the Eyeless Sea that roils at the borders of the world, the Ashen Maw, the Eyeless Stone, the Ashen King, the Sea of Ash that stretches far as eye can see. It's simple, isn't it, once you've got the words written down. The churn of creativity, words permuting under their own momentum, an entire world waiting for you to fill it in.

Write, and pretend you're writing down your dreams, elaborating on your fears, that all the words form something meaningful. This is Fantasy. None of it has to be true.

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Monsters

2017-09-20T10:07:58Z

(shamelessly stolen from Beast: The Primordial)

All categories, by their nature, are human constructs, artificial. We may pretend there's a difference between a thing warm-furred and a thing with scales that crosses the sea, but link blood to blood and you'll find a tangled skein of nerve and vein. We all crawled out of the water, once. We all burnt in the heart of a star.

So here's the difference between the kin, just a blood-thick membrane between them.

ANAKIM
Nightmares of Helplessness
to walk and feel the world shudder beneath you

You are the giant, the earthquake, the storm, the enormity that sends humans cowering. Some may say you represent the fear of Power, but the truth is much simpler: humans are scared of things bigger than they are.

Cruelty comes naturally to you, with every shift and rearrangement of your limbs, as if effecting pain from a great distance. You have been dimly aware of others' suffering, their fear, but there have always been more consequential things to focus on. Namely, your own satisfaction. You have never had quite enough food, enough space, enough opportunity to exert your will. No matter. You continue striving. This is not ambition, or even appetite, not any more than it is your lungs' ambition to take in air. You're a growing child. You need to eat. It's as simple as that. You've crushed people, animals, heard their bones break, heard them whimper and beg and scream. You are of the Anakim. All this is beneath you.

NOCTIS
Nightmares of Vulnerability
to reach out from the darkness to extinguish a flickering flame

You are the boogeyman, the stranger, the hidden knife, the thing lurking in the darkness. Humans feel the hairs stand up on their necks and know fear of the Other. They live in terror that there's something out there that wants to hurt them.

There's something absent from you, you've always known that, and so you've lived so as not to attract attention. People nod past you, take you for granted, and that's how you like it. Humanity fascinates you, the mundanity of their day-to-day lives, and you enjoy playing with them at your leisure. You are never bored, but very easily distracted. Sometimes you want to see them joyous. Sometimes you want to see them suffer. You've never known satisfaction, satiation. There's only ever the dull disappointment at the end of your most in-depth pursuits, after you've finally revealed yourself to them, after you've broken your toys to see what's inside. Still, no matter, it's not as if there's a shortage of humanity anyway. You are of the Noctis. They're all equally beautiful to you.

ABYSSI
Nightmares of Insignificance
to study a mirror and look upon an empty face

You are the depths, the abyss, the leviathan, the gaping maw that threatens to swallow everything whole. Humans all know fear of the Void, and perhaps that proves the truth of it: they fear that everything they have wrought so far is worthless.

No matter where you look, you see yourself. In the television screen, in the shrieking invective online, in a politician's smile, in the averted eyes of your fellow subway passengers. There's a pleasing reliability to this pattern, as if you could extend outwards and outwards and outwards until there's just the molecule-thin membrane of your skin encompassing everything. People are mostly horrified by you, once they see you clearly, and yet none of them can ever look away. You would be happy alone, and you are. If there's any disturbances that happens around you - a spate of suicides, a doomsday cult, a lost generation - that's only inevitable. These things happen, and you happen right alongside them. You are of the Abyssi. The end of the world comes turning on its axis.

NIRGALI
Nightmares of Contamination
to turn your gaze upon the world and reveal it as diseased

You are the plague, the swarm, the rotting corpse, the inevitable revulsion humans feel at their world. Some may say you are the fear of Entropy, but what humans really fear is seeing the world without delusion.

You've never been satisfied with the easy answers, popular narratives, the trends and factions of the day. Inconsistency rankles you, all the little blind spots people maintain in order to continue living their comfortable lives. Everything you've previously believed, you've since reevaluated and judged as insufficient, all the twisted hypocrisies standing out in knots on the back of your mind, crawling up the back of your neck. In truth, you take a great pleasure in gouging out the hypocrisies one by one, like so many wriggling maggots. There's a teeming beauty in it. Flesh rots, and the maggots and bluebottles swarm in and feed. People may resist your accusations, but more often than not the horrifying reality of it becomes too compelling for them to deny. You are of the Nirgali. You cannot help but pick at lies.

STRYGOI
Nightmares of Exposure
to claw out the heart and feed on dead flesh

You are the harpy, the ghoul, the gawker, the set of leering eyes that feed on humans at their worst. Humans are wracked with fear of Judgement, but in simpler terms, humans are scared of each other.

Unlike your many siblings, you were human, once. That part of you is long since dead now, a distant memory, but you can still recognize it in others, with a sort of yearning that verges on nostalgia. Other people become precious to you, fragile sparks of potential that you hope to cradle and nurture into fully-actualized human beings. A hot red reminder of what you once were. The marrow in the bone. Of course, it never happens. The past is the past, and all the yearning in the world won't turn back time. People are stumbling, nervous, fallible, perhaps even more so under your gaze, incapable of realizing their full potential. That's fine by you, though. The appeal of nostalgia is in its bittersweet tang, the delicate stirrings of loss. You are of the Strygoi. You could watch them struggle and fail forever.

URGES:

HUNGER FOR POWER
The Tyrant

ANAKIM
Jo's a ball-buster, quite literally. She's crushed a man's testicles, felt them pop in her grip. All fully justified, of course: he got violent first, and as a woman all her self-defense classes tell her to go for the groin, the eyes, the throat. Jo's blunt, assertive - enough in itself to arouse resentment - and she's learned to target men with violent tendencies and poor self-control. It's not that she's after pleasure, or revenge. Too many men view violence as posturing, a show of strength. Women don't have that luxury; they have to aim to disable, to kill. Jo's just marking out her territory.

NOCTIS
Reynold's a health inspector for the city, and sometimes he likes to go above and beyond the call of duty. He visits sites ahead of schedule, incognito. He looks up employees' personal details, follows them on social media, occasionally takes a drive out to their houses. Most people hold quite a bit of resentment for their jobs, and Reynold puts that to use. When he's doing his inspections (stringently thorough, of course), he asks all the right questions, knows what to look for. He feels a certain ownership of them. He wants them to succeed.

ABYSSI
Ari's a cabbie and he's assembled quite a collection of regulars by now, knows their schedules - people who'll find his cab waiting and ride around for hours, going nowhere in particular because they have nowhere they want to be. The guaranteed income's nice, of course, but really Ari just likes the driving, the long and empty side streets, the skyline blotted out by buildings, the numbing hum of traffic. Sometimes his passengers can't stop talking. Sometimes he lets them sit in silence. Sometimes they tell him to drive out to a bridge overlooking the river, or to the entrance of a subway station, or to the front of a skyscraper, and that's the last ride they ever take with him. He always makes sure they reach their destination.

NIRGALI
Ms. Blaise is an assistant principal, and she's absolutely diligent with dealing with problem students. She makes calls to parents, asks about their home lives, sets up meetings, is always perfectly understanding. She can always get right to the heart of the matter, tell you why a student's acting out. It's such a tragedy, though, that none of her cases ever seem to get any better. The parents are always indignant, belligerent, the children always lashing out and resentful. All her insights only ever seem to give them more cutting insults to hurl at each other. She never gives up on a student, though. That's just not her way.

STRYGOI
Dave's a self-made man, worked his way up from the mail room. Did night school, got his MBA, was promoted to supervisor, and now he's got a corner office. He's given a commencement speech at his alma mater, does volunteer work at the local homeless shelter where he talks up job opportunities and shares his story. Every time one of his guys gets hired, or gets the slightest promotion, Dave's always there to hype it up beyond all measure. Sometimes he stands at his window, looks down at everything beneath him, and imagines a tower teeming with his little people, all crawling atop each other in an attempt to reach the top.

HUNGER FOR ACQUISITION
The Collector

ANAKIM
Zmei's been arrested for theft, sure, done time for it, but more often than not he just takes what he wants. If a man or woman takes him home for the night, in the morning he'll help himself to their food, any money they leave lying around, any shiny bauble that catches his eye (he's partial to silver). "A gift for me, yes?" he'll say, daring them to deny him. If he can't find anyone for the night, he'll turn up at an old acquaintance's without warning, and leave with what he likes. He doesn't use violence, of course. If anyone's strong enough to stand up to him, he'll leave empty-handed without any fuss. After all, there are so many more people out there who won't dare to speak up.

NOCTIS
Rose collects teeth, children's teeth, and it's slow but rewarding work. She doesn't take them by force, of course not; children lay teeth out for collection all the time. The key is the timing: there's only a single night in which to strike, before the teeth are secreted away by the parents to disappear somewhere into the trash. That's fine by Rose, though, there's a certain joy in just watching, night after night, being privy to a child's development, waiting patiently for the harvest. Rose has a full set of baby teeth from a single child, pieced together over years, and that's the prize of her collection, her pride and joy. Lately, though, a thought's been turning over in her mind - oh how she'd like the full set of adult teeth as well.

ABYSSI
Yin's hometown lies on the coast, and the storm a few years back was one of the worst they'd seen. That's history now, people are rebuilding, but Yin's found a little hollow just off the coast where the floodwaters ran back into the sea, where everything washed through and a few things stayed. That's where she dives deep, in that murky depth full of things not worthy of salvage, rotting timbers and rusted metal and the refuse of houses and homes and lives. She goes down there once a day, sorts as best she can according to their previous owners, rebuilding a hollow effigy of their lives. Every few years, she adds to her collection.

NIRGALI
Tim's a culture vulture, an outsider artist, and his photos of roadkill have gotten him quite a bit of acclaim. They're like diagrams of a death, a life turned inside-out. Anyone can look and see that here's where the tire crushed the spine, flattened fur into the asphalt; here's a tiny paw outstretched in a panicked attempt to flee. There's also an unnerving clarity of background to his photographs: he renders quiet neighborhoods and scenic roads into crime scenes. The dead dogs and cats are what get the most attention, sure, but they're not Tim's favorites. He only shares his most precious photos with a very select audience: the drivers who helped him make his art.

STRYGOI
Anya owns a picturesque apple orchard just outside the city, a momentary retreat from the cares of the world. Many of her employees are previous customers of hers, lured by her charm and enticing tales to give up city living and start a new life working at her orchard. She has each of her new employees plant and tend to their own sapling as a symbol of their growth. And then, weeks or months later, when their new lives inevitably fall apart, she transplants their saplings into a little out-of-the-way grove. They flourish there; they're well fertilized. Anya makes sure her trainees always leave a part of themselves behind.

HUNGER FOR PREY
The Stalker

ANAKIM
Darius likes to hunt, it's that simple. It's a good, clean predatory urge. He doesn't have the teeth of a wolf, nor its packmates, but the basic principle is the same. His fingers dig into flesh, rip out chunks of muscle, spill blood. Sometimes he'll manage to get his arm around their neck, his fingers up their nostrils, and he'll choke them out in a matter of seconds, but more often than not it's a death by attrition: a faltering, a stagger, a collapse, and then Darius' hands digging in. They're usually still conscious when he starts to feed, but that's only because by then he's too eager to restrain himself. Whether they're screaming or not is entirely incidental.

NOCTIS
Father Landon isn't the only predator in his diocese. He's watched more than one troublesome priest be shuffled around from parish to parish, and he's uncovered their past sins. Their victims are often skittish, reluctant to trust someone in Father Landon's position, so he's had to get creative in collecting his evidence, the precious little mementos of the sin. Then he plants his little scraps of bait where his fellow priests are bound to find them. Sometimes they turn to prayer. Sometimes they have a breakdown and confess. Sometimes they're driven to re-offend. Father Landon doesn't have a preference either way. He's just in it for the hunt.

ABYSSI
Brianna hit her Awakening early. She's in middle school now, captain of the swim team, and there's a special initiation ritual she's established. They sneak down to the beach, a quiet spot where they won't be disturbed, and then they swim out to sea. It's always just Brianna and the new recruit, swimming as far as they can until their limbs weaken, until the current's too strong and they're gasping for breath, as the rest of the team watches from the shore. No one ever drowns; Brianna makes sure of that. She just wants them to get a taste of what it's like.

NIRGALI
Vanessa likes blood, likes the uncovering of it, the revelation of what lies beneath the skin. She's learned to sniff it out from behind long sleeves and scars, learned to recognize those who have already gone digging, or those who have the gnawing urge to start. She shows them her own designs on her forearms, tempts them, coaxes them, arranges it so that they can both bleed together. There's never any completion to the designs, never any sense of fulfillment, just the constant urge to keep digging deeper. Vanessa lives vicariously through her prey. At least for them, there's eventually an end to their search.

STRYGOI
Dawson owns the big empty house on the south side of town, full of big empty rooms with high rafters where he invites people to stay. They're always just temporarily out of a home, just until the next payday, just until they can get back on their feet. He provides them with toiletries, food, all the basic necessities, accepts their promises that they'll pay him back. And then the weeks stretch on into months, and they're still living in the big empty house, huddling in the empty rooms, helplessly indebted to him. He's always very compassionate when he turns someone out. They've had their chance, after all, and there are always so many more people who need a place to stay. He never really abandons anyone, though. There's so very little difference between the inside of his house and the outside of it.

HUNGER FOR PUNISHMENT
The Judge

ANAKIM
Ogre got his nickname back in high school, where he learned that the only thing you're worth is what you're owed. Hurting people got inconsistent results at best. Being on the wrestling team, with a set of rules that laid out just what he could expect when he hurt people - now that opened up the world to him. Ogre likes rules, oaths, contracts, promises, IOUs and debts. He's good at collecting what's been promised to him, and even better at extracting promises from people. He's even drawn up a meticulous exchange rate - so many bones broken for so many unfulfilled debts.

NOCTIS
Even among zir fellow monsters, Jess is a boogeyman. No one knows zir real name, or zir assigned gender, what ze does in zir human life. No one knows how ze hunts, or how ze picks zir prey. It's just, sometimes people disappear. Sometimes some terrible secret emerges in the wake of their disappearance: child abuse, or date rape, or sexual harassment. But more often than not, there's just the absence: the absence of motive or meaning or justification, the absence left in other people's lives. That's the way Jess likes it. So much cruelty is senseless, arbitrary, inflicted without reason. Why should justice not be the same?

ABYSSI
Ahmed and Patrick are a pair of Abyssi lovers. Patrick's an interior designer, and maintains a collection of photos of the homes he's so carefully crafted: intimate, almost intrusive pictures that reveal how his clients live. Then Ahmed uses that knowledge to go sneaking in. He keeps watch as the inhabitants of his lover's homes grow uneasy, dissatisfied, until the homes and possessions and lives they thought they wanted begin to box them in. He waits until they lash out, disrupting his lover's designs. And then he tears their homes apart for them.

NIRGALI
Angela's a lawyer known for her pro bono work, her tireless advocacy for those with little other recourse, the poor and marginalized who would otherwise be railroaded by the legal system. It's taxing work, and her victories are few and far between. It's not court wins she's after, though. Her cases inevitably highlight the injustices inherent in the law, leaving almost everyone involved with a bitter taste in their mouths afterwards. And she visits her own brand of justice on them afterwards, one that comes to them in their sleep, on many crawling legs.

STRYGOI
When Benjamin comes for people, most of them mistake him for an angel. He catches them in a moment of guilt, snatches them up and carries them away to some dizzying height, and tells them that God has intervened in their lives. They must make a choice, he tells them: to confess themselves as sinful and repent, to declare themselves unworthy and relinquish all hope of salvation, or to give themselves up entirely to God's judgement. Benjamin has seen people take all of the three options. It's not his fault that all three options tend to lead to people leaping to their deaths.

HUNGER FOR UPHEAVAL
The Destroyer

ANAKIM
Grace is fascinated by cars, by how even the puniest person can command two tons of metal and send it hurtling through the world with deadly force. She thinks it gives people a sense of what it feels like to be her. When she goes joyriding, she revs the engine at stoplights, cuts in, blares her horn, taunts, challenges, dares other drivers to stand up to her. She relishes her impromptu drag races, the flares of road rage, other cars vying alongside her until she inevitably swerves the wheel and slams into them in a carnage of steel and glass and bone and blood. It's almost comradely, she thinks. Almost like making a friend.

NOCTIS
Lester loves breaking glass - windows, picture frames, mirrors, display cases. There's something about the fragility and transparency of it that appeals to him, as if people have erected the flimsiest of barriers between themselves and the world. He comes in the dead of night and breaks into people's homes, shattering their delusions of security. His real pleasure, though, is watching them try and go about their lives afterwards, watching their facades crack again and again each time they stumble upon more of the shards of glass he's hidden.

ABYSSI
Naia tries to keep her appetites contained to her volunteer work for the city, helping clean out homeless camps and reveling in the detritus of other people's lives. But inevitably she goes seeking out disaster areas - typhoons, earthquakes, floods - wandering among the ruins of a city and witnessing the traumatized survivors struggling in the aftermath. She doesn't consciously cause any of the destruction, no. It's simply an inevitability, as regular as the tides rushing in, as regular as a city's expansion and rot. As regular as her pangs of hunger becoming uncontainable.

NIRGALI
Amon breeds all sorts of spore and bacterium and virus, his home full of Petri dishes and centrifuges and planters full of rich, moist soil. It's amusing, he thinks, how ill-equipped society is to deal with outbreak, how simply his strains can be bred given the right sort of equipment and know-how, and how a little package sent through the mail or left exposed in a public place can cause such complete pandemonium. It's not even that his little projects are particularly deadly. It's that the world is such a fertile medium for chaos.

STRYGOI
Diana works as an assassin, ironically because she deeply believes in the value of a human life. A single person can have an impact on thousands, even millions of others, and a single bullet can do the same. The targets she's commissioned to kill tend to be especially prominent or influential in their communities, but Diana's no elitist. Off the job she's found that any random person on the street, seen through the scope of her rifle, will have just as significant an impact in their deaths.

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Inventory Management

2017-03-09T06:07:31Z

PLAYERNAME! The world wants you dead, PLAYERNAME! You have died so many times, and you will die so many times more!

Your spirit has wandered, restless, rootless, clutching at the dirt with eyes fixed on the horizon, and now finally you have been born into paradise. You will make your way to the center of the world, and there you will find Death waiting for you. You have never before felt so alive.

You were born empty-handed. You were born clenching your hand into a fist. You raise your head to the sky and listen to the howls of the wind. You strike flint against steel. You make fire. The flickering flames light the crumbling walls of dawn. We live in the ruins of Empire. We crouch between the rusted-out husks of war machines, skulk through sunken labyrinths whose purpose is lost to time. There are treasures down there, the discarded dreams of gods. The world is overgrown, our parents dead, the wilderness come creeping in through the cracks. We live upon the carcass of some great beast, and we have built houses of its bones, picking away at the flesh. We are a carrion generation. We trace the boundaries of fallen walls and cross them easily, lightly, marveling at our lack of restriction. We wander. We take in the sights and marvel at our dreams come to pass.

Our dream is a fire, a moment to warm ourselves by, and a world that requires moments of warmth. Our dream is a torch raised against the dark. Our dream is a bent tin cup that fits in our hands, and a river to fill it from. Our dream is an ancient and broken beast of war, lurching across the landscape waiting to die, its eye bright and deadly as we crouch low and follow its tracks. Our dream is the strain of a bowstring drawn taut, the line of sight down the arrow to a quavering heart. Our dream is a herb to quell the bleeding, another to inflame the blood, combining in the desperate rush and fever of battle. Our dream is a weathered armory: broadswords, daggers, battleaxes, spears, all unearthed from the ground or pried free from an enemy's fist, lovingly adorned in notches and rust. Our dream is everything we can carry on our backs, and all the world waiting for us to harvest.

You take circuitous routes; you uncover. You discover names from a previous life. PLAYERNAME! You have lived a life before this, have you not? You have journeyed far to reach here. You have come seeking your death.

Here is the backstory, here is the secret: You are a child of Empire. You were born from here, indubitably, born of the same impulse for conquest. These dead war machines once warred in your name, in lands far, far from your sight. You have felt the weight of Empire upon you, the records and the registers, the rows of ordered streets, the cogs of the machines that once built your life. The soldiers kept you safe and the Empire extracted your weight's worth of toil. You earned a salary. You walked through these once-lit halls, these labyrinths, these intricate interlocking grids, and at one point in your life made sense of them as if you had been born and bred to do so.

You knew your place, your position, your purpose. You were numbered and weighted according to your worth. You labored secure in the belly of a great beast, scurrying through its veins, as it strode across the world and razed it clean. There were no wolves or dragons or crows to menace you then, merely the churn and metabolism of the machine - the prospect of demotion, unemployment, a slow and ordered obsolescence. You sat at your workstation and you dreamed. You dreamed of paradise. You dreamed of death.

This is what you have sought, is it not? The end of civilization. The end of security. All the walls that once restricted you come tumbling down. In the end, the empire that built all this could no longer sustain its own appetites. You have witnessed the decline of the ages of man. Here, at the end of the world, we own only what we can forage, what we can take for ourselves, what we can carry on our backs. There are no more machines to partition out our meager shares, no more rules or accountings. You have seen your masters killed, you have seen your coworkers massacred in the thousands, and you thrilled at it, at all the new possibilities. This was not an empire worth saving. Now there is birdsong. Now there is a space for you to call your own.

You are pulled between the corners of the world. You move through the countryside and reap the remains of the dead - teeth and pelts and arrows and pouches of jingling coins, crudely-drawn maps and lists of instructions, boots and cloaks and tunics too commonplace to wear. You slit a throat. You uncover a bounty. There is a hole in your heart that you despair at ever filling. It is impossibly deep, bounded by the lines of a grid. It is a void. It is a blueprint of a house of empty rooms.

At first you picked mushrooms, herbs, fruit, wildflowers, everything that grew freely in the countryside ready for the taking. You stripped dead bodies clean, weighing new weapons in each hand, judging their heft and weight. You took everything that sparkled, everything new, everything that shined. You delighted in discovery, that a vole's fur could be used to line the inside of your boots, while a fox's could make a hat. That bristlewood burned quick and that asphodel drew spirits to its warmth. That the green mushrooms would keep you from death while the red would make you swift. You made a rainbow of bottled potions. You jangled with empty bottles that you hoped to eventually fill. Your coats grew thick. You bulged with possibility. You were at first amazed by all that you could carry, and then gradually frustrated by the limits of it once you came to take your capacity for granted. You would find a new trinket and lack the space for it, wasting accumulated hours sorting and resorting, choosing what to discard. Why had you ever harvested so many vole pelts to begin with? What purpose did they serve? There were so many better things to own, better things to accumulate.

You grew stronger by possession, and then stronger still. You unearthed the weapons of our ancestors. You bore the weapons of the Dead. Now you wield a flaming sword, bear a quiver of gleaming arrows that can pierce the heart of steel. You have bottled aether that renders you impervious to harm, impossible to touch. A resurrection stone pulses in your pocket, a second heartbeat. Your armor is dragonbone, twisting outwards into serpentine coils like evil taking root, impossible to ever fully destroy. Your steed can chase the four winds and trample them beneath its hooves. What have you left to desire? What have you left to fear? The flowers of the earth are useless to you now, as are the fruiting trees and the delicate creatures that scamper across the soil. Everything you own is parceled out, judged fit for use, classified, sorted, valued, and ultimately discarded as inferior to what you already carry. You have only ever interacted with the world via possession.

You cannot conceive of the wily fox without accounting for its pelt, its meat, its tooth and fang, the arrow used to kill it. You cannot understand a tree without the axe you used to fell it, the wood it provides. A fire is the wood, flint, steel, or a torch or an elemental flame or an explosive to light the spark. A human being is what they have to sell, what they will buy from you, what you can give them and what they will give you in return, and now they have nothing left that you need. You have discovered paradise and through your works rendered it worthless. This is the inescapable disease of your soul. You have been born into a world without restriction, and yet you only understand it through accounting. You only understand the world through Inventory.

The Empire is dead, murdered by your desire, and yet you have brought its blueprints forward with you. You have reproduced the beast in miniature, ever rapacious, mindlessly acquisitive. You have conquered the world. You have weighed it and found it wanting. You have resurrected the war machines of the dead, and you stand poised to destroy. What now, PLAYERNAME? What further progress can be made from here?

You abandon your caches, your hidden stores of goods. You wander into the wilderness. You will find your way to the center of the world, and there you will find Death.

Do you hear the song? Do you hear the voices of the damned? They sing for salvation. They sing for retribution.The world will turn, the cosmos will complete another cycle. Everything we have earned and known is lost. You will forget. You will begin again.

PLAYERNAME! The world wants you dead, PLAYERNAME. You have died so many times, and you will die so many, many times more.

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Cosmic

2017-02-22T11:45:18Z

Captain America is in a battle against reality! Aren't we all, aren't we all.

His foe, the Red Skull, wields the Cosmic Cube, an artifact of pure imposition. It is reality, compacted into its most stable form: six faces, twelve edges, eight vertices. It is a comic book construct inked in with a ruler and the Hand of God, it is a comic book itself, all the panels folded in on each other to take on a three-dimensional form. It is a what-if, it is an elseworld, it is an imaginary story. Within its six faces it contains every single story that has ever existed or could ever possibly be told.

The Cosmic Cube, being geometrically perfect, fits poorly in a human hand. The edges cut into the skin, the vertices pierce the flesh. It is the antithesis of organic design. It is a doomsday weapon, it is a plot device, it is the reduction of the world to a set of straight lines. It would take a fascist to effectively wield it, or an artist, someone with the ego to rewrite reality in their image.

Captain America, at the mercy of the Red Skull, throws himself against blank white walls, tenses and holds his shield at the ready. He is a spot of ink, a figment. His history is erased and rewritten. His screams disappear into the ether. His body blurs. He is a double-agent, he is rendered into a fascist. His allies are arrayed against him. Across the sides of the Cube are the Red Skull's fingers, encompassing his world. The odds are insurmountable. By all rights, the Red Skull should obliterate him completely, smear the red, white and blue into an ugly little splotch on the backside of history.

So: Why does Captain America continue to exist?

The only reasonable explanation is metatextual, bleeds upwards to pathology. The Red Skull, fascist that he is, cannot imagine an existence post-victory, cannot imagine an end to the battle. There must always be a foe to defeat, to humiliate, to dominate, to stomp into the dust. To call it overconfidence would be to underestimate the depths of the human spirit. The Red Skull does not believe he is sure to win. He believes he will cease to exist once he does. Poised on the verge of eliminating his nemesis entirely, he would rather resort to self-sabotage: a weak grip, an overlooked variable, a faltering of the will. Captain America is all but irrelevant in the conclusion to this battle. The Red Skull inevitably engineers his own downfall.

The Cosmic Cube, six faces, twelve edges, eight vertices, comprises the limits to imagination. These are the comics we read. These are the stories we tell. Every month another comic book comes out, and the never-ending battle continues. Captain America persists, and so does the Red Skull. They die and are resurrected, they change costumes, they change forms. They are replaced by successors and impostors, they resurface under different faces and different names. For all his Cosmic power, the Red Skull is an archetype, a caricature of a Nazi, just paper and ink like his nemesis. The stories tell us that even in the most dire of circumstances, Nazis are self-defeating, that all the American spirit needs to do to triumph is to keep alight its flagging flame, to battle against all odds with neither fear nor surrender.

The stories tell us that America is set against an omnipotent foe, besieged, ever-noble, battling against an existential threat for his survival. The stories tell us that America exists within the parameters of a fascist imagination.

***

Captain America, in one of his myriad forms, is Sam Wilson, an African-American man with a history subject to revision. Sam Wilson was a partner of the original Captain America, and eventually took on the mantle as his replacement. He is a creation of the Cosmic Cube, or a victim of it, defined by the limitations of reality. Subject to the Cosmic Cube, Sam Wilson contains multitudes:

In one dimension, Sam Wilson is a social worker who comes upon an indigenous tribe under the control of a cabal of fascists, and leads them in a rebellion. He is an intrinsically good and righteous man, the stuff that heroes are made of. He would only naturally partner with Captain America, would only naturally be chosen to serve as his successor. Good is good and evil is evil, transcending the petty divisions of race, and the heroes inevitably triumph and are recognized.

In a second dimension, Sam Wilson is a construct, sleeper agent, an invention of the Red Skull. His original identity is Snap Wilson, a man who weathered a harsh world to succeed as a mobster, his identity overwritten into the perfect black man to appeal to America's imagination. "I knew exactly what kind of man would most appeal to your sniveling liberalism," the Red Skull sneers, Cosmic Cube firmly in his grip. "An upright, cheerful negro with a love of the same 'brotherhood' you cherish!" The lurking evil is the failure to accept reality, gladly swallowing up a happy fiction while ignoring the possibility for malice and betrayal. But in the end the trap is sprung, and as always, the Red Skull's machinations fail. Sam Wilson's heroic nature prevails, artificial and constructed though it might have originally been.

In the third dimension, the pimp-suited street hustler Snap Wilson is a cruel caricature, a lie created by the Red Skull to undermine and discredit him. The Red Skull was lying all along, using the Cosmic Cube to cast doubt on a good and noble black man, and the true evil in the world is having the lie resonate. Only a bigot could believe it, only a bigot could expect it to be believed. Sam denounces the lie and takes flight, free from the prejudice that sought to defame him.

All three planes of reality intersect at a single point: Captain America is blameless, victim of a sinister plot, battling the unfortunate facts of reality. The truths about Sam Wilson were true until they weren't, the dodgy racial politics of the past foisted off onto a Nazi. Captain America can be re-imagined as anything, anyone, but only within the rigid confines of the Cube, only so long as he suits the purposes of its wielder. The old Captain America can be reborn as the fascist resurgence of the nation, plotting to overthrow the black man who succeeded him, but only so long as the doctrine is imposed on him externally, out of his control. This is not the America we knew, this is not the America we believed in. We must denounce its existence as a lie, a Nazi imposition. Captain America is still noble and brave and true at heart; Captain America is in a battle against reality!

Aren't we all.

We grip the Cosmic Cube in trembling fingers and feel the power thrumming through its surface; we force the world to reshape itself according to our will. We tell stories. America is a hero. America is a fascist. There is a patriot or traitor in the White House, behind the skin, behind the mask. We look out and see the edges of the Cube enclosing us, gleaming glass framing our cities and streets. We see the fingers closing around the sides of the Cube, another person's will imposing onto ours, threatening to overcome our reality. We are transformed, our histories rewritten, virtue and blame shifting to lead us inevitably to our current reality. We see our own fingerprints on the other side of the glass. And in that moment, we see the limits of our imagination.

***

The Cosmic Cube is six faces, twelve edges, eight vertices, reality compacted into its most stable form. It is the embryonic stage of something greater. If left to exist, allowed to evolve, it inevitably develops its own intelligence, develops sentience, breaches the strict boundaries of its design. It expands past its faces, its edges, its vertices, it abandons stability for volition. It extends hands out to the cosmos, it looks upon the universe with new eyes. It unfolds into a heretofore unimagined potential.

It becomes a living being.

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