PIDW Liu Mingyan who only wears white. She’s grown serious over her long life, morose from regret of how her actions condemned her shijiemei to death. She is more stateswoman than any of her sister wives, feeling responsible to manage this new world well, trying to wash the blood from her hands. She used to write. She doesn’t anymore. The only things she reads are laws and aid requests. The only hint of color in her outfit is the bit of blue embroidery on her veil, made from one of her brother’s uniforms. She carries three swords now. Her own, as well as the reforged blades of her brother and her master. She never uses them. She rarely leaves the palace. Even so, she itches for their hilts when she sees her husband. If she thought for a moment she could win, she would cut that man’s head off, just the same as her own master’s head was severed. But he knows better than to let his gaurd down near her.
PIDW Sha Hualing dresses in “proper robes” now, as humans would call them. No longer is she a saintess, sent to bring glory to demon kind. Now she is a general. There’s a piece shaped like her on the war table, moved across countless maps. Silk scarves and bells are impractical. She has reason to protect her skin. Plates of leather and thick fabrics obscure her figure. She has an axe now, no longer so juvenile as to rely solely on her claws. She hates it. She hates all of it. She is so full of hate and frustration these days, but the constant war takes it all out of her. When she’s finally able to lie down, there’s nothing left.
PIDW Ning Yingying wears only the finest, heaviest silks. She leaves her rooms in no less than 10 kilograms of fabric and jewelry. Her hair is heavy with gold, her fingers clawed with gems, her breast clinking with jade. She keeps a fan in one hand— her collection now big enough to use two a day and never repeat one in a year. She does not do anything useful for her husband or the kingdom, and she rather prefers it that way. She masters every instrument, reads every text, sees every play, and hisses at anyone who dares to tell her to try harder. By now she must be the most knowledgeable scholar in the world, yet she will not lift a finger to help those below her. Why should she? She is a part of the problem after all. Her life is built on the suffering of millions, the deaths of billions. There is nothing she can do to change or stop this, so why try? She has accepted that she is now the lowliest of scum, and she is content to remain passive in the face of this fact. Why do anything else?
Something something the idea of the ship of Theseus as shown through House of Leaves about how separated from the source material can a book be until it is no longer about the source material. Navidson is Theseus, his ship is the documentary, and the ship being taken apart and replaced is people’s analysis of the record. You, the reader, do not possess a single part of the actual Navidson record, nor does Johnny, and it does not exist to be found. At what point of analysis does House of Leaves stop being about the Navidson record? Is my collage still about it if the book itself never even existed but I still made this exact piece? the Minotaur is still crying and dead in the house on Ash Tree Lane.
During first season, the king was able to exert a sort of passive influence over the people around John and Arthur to make them go crazy and attack them in a rage.
This seems to stop in the later seasons, with Arthur saying he thinks the King gave up and isn't after them anymore. No one else flies into a manic rage in Arthur's presence.
However, there is a different emotion that characters seem to feel very strongly out of nowhere.
Oscar, whose only previous experience with Arthur was being threatened by him, trusts Arthur enough to tell him about his traumatic backstory and is literally calling Arthur "his purpose" within two days of meeting the guy.
Noel immediately trusts Arthur despite hearing him mere minutes ago admit to "at least" seven murders.
The Butcher literally says he falls in love with his victims and switches to Arthur's side after Arthur got him jailed and prodded at his Daddy issues.
I think the people around Arthur are still being influenced... but not by the King in Yellow; They're being influenced by John.
John's emotions for Arthur are literally spilling out and effecting those around him to trust him and seek guidance and tell him what a great guy he is, that he's special and amazing. It explains why so many different people and entities get immediately obsessed with Arthur after just one meeting. It's because John is obsessed with Arthur.
And you call it madness... ah, but I call it love.
Vlad Masters sat firm and proper on the Fenton Family couch, legs crossed, teacup pinched in his fingertips, fighting subtly against the sinkhole that came with the mistake of taking Jack’s usual spot on the couch. He appeared with all the same charm and delightfulness of an ant swarm rearranging your picnic.
Danny stood at the doorway, just-still-in-the-kitchen, just not inviting himself to join the adults in the living room where Jack boomed and rambled and Vlad sat so stiff and polite and nice that his tea in his hands was going cold.
“Oh, Danny you’ll love this story—Danny, you should join us—Danny this was, what, summer of ’84? When was that heatwave, Vladdy? The one where you—”
“There’s no need to bore Daniel with the mad ravings of two old kooks, Jack. Kids would rather be off at the mall or—some store, surely. No need to stick around Daniel on my behalf. I assure you I won’t be offended if you leave.”
“No worries, V-man. I’m good right here. I love hearing Dad’s stories." Danny met Vlad's challenge, speaking with more poisonous courtesy than Vlad had proffered first. "In fact I think he should tell a few more, if he’s got more in mind.”
“In fact I do have more in mind—” Jack answered.
Neither Danny nor Vlad were listening to Jack. They held eye-contact, Danny with a stern unblinkingness of a sheepdog on duty. A lot was said without words. A lot was understood when Vlad decided to visit through the front door. Vlad only used the front door when he wanted something.
And it was never good when Vlad wanted something.
“—the core reactor project, yeah? That summer? That was in the lab with no A/C. Top floor. We were sweating like pigs, all of us. And I dared you to eat the really moldy pizza from our fridge the night before and you ralphed right into—”
“—Surely you remember this more fondly than I do. Daniel, really, you can go.”
Not a chance.
“Actually,” Danny answered, brightening some as his opportunity struck. “I am interested in this. For science class I need to write a report on the invention of an important piece of technology. I was gonna ask Mom and Dad about the Ghost Portal. And now that you’re here, I can get the whole history.”
Jack made a giddy little noise. He leaned forward, words primed, but Vlad was quicker to the draw.
“Sorry to say, your faith in me is unfounded. I wasn’t the portal guy back in college—that was always your mother and father’s passion project. I was their skeptic.”
“Bet that’s got you feeling pretty foolish right now, doesn’t it V-man?” Jack chided, a quick jab to Vlad’s ribs that nearly unseated the teacup from his suspended saucer. “Considering the fully-functioning portal right beneath our toes.”
“I hardly feel foolish, Jack. Your calculation for the portal in college was never going to work.”
“What do you mean? Of course it did.” Jack thumped the ground with his foot. “It’s running the old girl right now.”
At this, Vlad’s eyes narrowed. For the first time he’d been shaken off whatever skeezy machinations had brought him in. His pride was being challenged, and by Jack no less.
“Absolutely not. With that calculation? Absolutely not.”
“Well forget the tea biscuits Vlad, because you’re going to be eating your words in a second. Mads, hold my spot,” Jack said, as if anyone was planning to take his spot. He bounced from the couch, scooted from the living room, and vanished into the dark maw of the lab stairs, leaving only the waning beat of his footsteps behind.
His absence filled only a swallowing few seconds. The footsteps returned, bounding upward, creaking with his heavy cadence, and Jack bounced back into the room in much the manner he left. A pad of yellow lined paper was clutched in his hand. When he dropped it on the coffee table, it revealed row after row of tight scribble, churning math, carrying down the page and occupying two entire pages more that Jack flipped through.
“Same baby I came up with in college. It just needed heavier dampening and higher voltage than what we made back then. The portal downstairs has that in spades. Well, in like two-thirds of a spade.” Jack tapped something on the last line. “The projection was still only hitting 70% of the threshold we calculated to reach dimension penetration. But it’s an art, not just a science. We fired it up anyway, and it took!”
Vlad grabbed the paper pad, agitated. His eyes ran over it. Then again. Until he settled on one line, a firmness overcoming his face. He tossed the pad back onto the coffee table, and Vlad leaned back into the couch, arms crossed.
“The lambda, Jack.”
“The lambda?”
“Check it again.”
Jack did, lips pursed, pad of paper nearly swallowed in his big meaty hand.
“What about--?”
“It squares. The units don’t balance otherwise. It originates from an integration step of λ*∂λ/∂t. It squares.”
Jack’s brow remained furrowed, firm, until delight cracked into his eyes, and he let out a laugh.
“Gods, my handwriting is gonna be the death of us. Mads,” he tapped something unseen on the second page. “That’s the genius of Vladdy. Cracked this puppy wide open with just a glance. I never noticed that in all my checking. That explains the missing 30%, at least. That explains how the portal took. Lucky for you Danny that Vlad was here—”
“Jack,” Maddie said.
“—your report can have the correct formula. It’ll be—”
“—Jack—”
“—A+ worthy—”
“—Jack,” Maddie said, curt. “Lambda is the ambient ecto-energy. It’s a few ten-thousandths of a unit.”
“It—huh.”
Maddie had surfaced a pen from her pocket. She sheared a few blank pages out from the back of the pad and started the formula fresh. She made quick work of copying it over, quicker work of solving it through – lambda-squared intact.
She hit the final line and hatched a pen mark beneath the number. Jack stared, confused.
“That can’t… no.”
He repeated the same. New pages torn loose. Formula copied over, processed, line by line by line—lambda squared—by line by line by line.
Jack settled on his answer. Same as Maddie’s.
Confusion made his face tense.
“So it’s not 70% of the way to the threshold… It’s 0.013% of the way to the threshold.”
He held the pen hard, his whole body holding firm and taut as the gears turned in his head. Jack’s eyes flickered across the formula, again and again and again. He looked to Maddie, like a dog issued a command he did not understand.
“But it worked,” he said, small. “But it worked.”
Jack stood, robotic almost, eyes lost in something far away. He disappeared into the lab almost as quickly as he had a few minutes before, but now he exited with a smoothness and a quietness so very uncharacteristic of him. It bothered Danny, somewhere deep in his gut.
Maddie followed, a possession matching Jack’s.
Danny’s fingers curled and uncurled. He’d succeeded. He’s successfully interrupted Vlad’s… whatever this was. But the disquiet infected him. He didn’t like it.
“So what does that mean?” Danny asked, perhaps to Vlad. “What’s wrong with the calculation?”
Vlad sipped on tea ice cold.
“Who knows?” Vlad lied.
…
The math didn’t work.
Maddie and Jack burned through paper, burned through pencils, burned through hours.
The math didn’t work.
Clothes stuck to skin. Sweat lingered fetid and stale in the cold basement air. Exhaustion beat like a slurry through their veins.
The math didn’t work.
The portal supervised all, placidly green, the light for their table, the light for their work when the lightbulb overhead burnt clean out and neither Jack nor Maddie could be pulled away to replace it. It stood, it watched, a testament of contradiction to everything they could not solve on paper, and yet everything they built directly into the fabric of reality.
And it should never have worked.
They threw every radical what-if they’d ever conceived over 20 years of ghost research.
The ecto-ether layer.
The latent activation stitches in space fabric.
The anti-ectomatter collision proposal.
The positive-feedback crystallization theory.
And still nothing worked.
All together, every crackpot theory in their favor taken for granted, racked them up to an activation energy 200x more potent than the calculation, and still just 2% of what would be needed to rip open, and hold open, a stable fissure between their reality and the ghost zone.
Maybe by pure luck, unfathomable luck, Fentonworks basement was directly situated atop a natural portal.
Maybe that would explain ripping it open. It did nothing to explain the stability. Natural portals were unstable by definition. There and gone in a few seconds. Not hours, days, weeks, months, a year, that the Fenton Portal had been open. Never so much as faltering.
It was late. 3am ticked away to 4am, and 4:30am. The discarded paper stacked higher than Jack and Maddie both. Calluses oozed from their hands at another attempt, and another, and another.
Maddie flipped through a folder’s worth of yellowed papers, aggressively thumbed over and over after two decades left untouched. And she settled on the one she’d passed over a few dozen times already, always seeking something else, something better.
This time she unsheathed it, and she placed it on the lab table.
“…If a mouse died. In the machine. If a mouse ran through the machine and accidentally bridged two live wires, and died of violent electrocution. 500 milliamps. Instantly melted into the circuitry.”
Maddie’s mouth was cotton-dry while she wrote. Ambient ecto-energy was low. Always very, very low.
Unless something very, very bad happened to something with the capacity to become a ghost.
The numbers wove. Maddie started the formula fresh, and it was pure muscle memory. A mouse. A big mouse, even. A 99th percentile beast of a mouse. And a wire that had been wired incorrectly. Something grounded that never actually grounded. An absolutely horrific amount of electricity.
0.37%, by pure numbers. If she included every permissive crackpot idea they had thrown on top, it topped out at 6% of the needed activation threshold.
Not a mouse.
“A cat,” Jack said, words gummy, tongue dry, face tired. “If we’ve got mice down here, maybe… a stray cat wandered in. Chased the mouse.”
Maddie nodded. It didn’t matter if it made sense.
She penned it in. A large cat. A devastating electrical short. Cats carried more ecto-potential than mice did. Ecto-potential did not necessarily go up with size. It went up with complexity. The things with the most ecto-potential were the things that most became ghosts.
1.45%, by pure numbers. 18% at absolute, absolute crackpot best.
“A dog,” Jack proposed with a shaky laugh. He swallowed. “A mouse… chased by a cat… chased by a dog… all electrocuted at once”
Maddie didn’t say the thing they both knew, which was that both of them would have noticed the evidence left behind by the electrically exploded pieces of a dog.
Maddie did it anyway. A mouse and a cat and a medium-sized dog, maybe just small enough to notice no evidence of, all together. All at once. All violently ripped apart, sacrificed to a machine still asleep in its wall.
Mice did not often make ghosts. Cats did not either. Dogs, occasionally. But infrequently. Very infrequently.
37%. At best.
“Jack.”
“Maddie, I know just—maybe something really smart—”
“—Jack—”
“—like an octopus—”
“Jack.”
“I hear, maybe, pigs are smart. If it was—”
Maddie was writing, already. Not for a pig. Not an octopus. Jack watched, and he knew what the numbers meant. The ecto-potential she penned gave her away. An ecto-potential that high.
65kg, an estimate
10,000 milliamps, a catastrophic accident, a death certificate.
A human’s amount of ecto-potential.
Maddie wrote.
And she wrote.
And she did not apply a single crackpot theory, not a single discredited proposal, not an ounce of exaggeration.
138%.
Threshold, and then some.
Comfortable, easily, then some.
For the first time, after all the hundreds of times she and Jack had penned this equation over the course of 2 decades, the number met her and Jack’s threshold.
A breakthrough.
A revelation.
A pure eureka moment.
Jack and Maddie were silent.
Alone in a humming basement. Alone with only the soft swirls of the portal for company, happy, stable, purring its contentment, singing to the cold air.
“It has to be something else,” Maddie said. And she said it weakly. And she said it childishly.
“You’re right. It can’t be this,” Jack echoed. “If someone died down here, we’d know. Dead bodies don’t walk away. We’d have seen it. O-or even if, if the body got stuck in the portal, we’d have heard of someone going missing.”
Maddie sat, quiet. A thought held her mind hostage.
“Unless they didn’t go missing,” Maddie said, and she said it barely audibly. “Unless the portal spit them right back out.”
“Then—that’s what I said—a dead body, on the floor, we’d have seen.”
“Not a dead body.”
“It had to be lethal, Mads—”
“I know Jack. But if they died, here, in the portal Jack, then their ghost did not get ripped away from the body and sent to the Ghost Zone. …They ripped the Ghost Zone here.” Palms slick with sweat smoothed over her notes. She pointed to one specific line and found her pen tip trembled no matter how badly she stabilized it. “The ecto-potential of a creature is how strong of a pull their ghost creates on the Ghost Zone. A strong enough pull means the ghost can reach the Ghost Zone and stabilize, like a fish reeling itself up, yeah? We agree on this Jack, yes?”
“Yes,” Jack answered.
“It’s what makes the math even work, Jack. Someone dying in the portal didn’t reel themselves to the boat. They reeled the boat in. Jack, they brought the Ghost Zone here…” Maddie wasn’t breathing right. She pulled sweat-soaked bangs away from her face. “Their ghost never left their body Jack. They died, Jack. And they walked back out.”
“…No. No,” Jack said. “No, they didn’t.”
“Then what?” Maddie asked.
Jack stared. He looked away. He didn’t like the expression on Maddie’s face.
“It—what about the ecto-ether theory?” Jack said, of the theory they’d tested and retested and tested all over, all night. He grabbed his pencil back up and pointed it aimlessly at Maddie’s piece of paper, pointed end out in self-defense. “If the ecto-ether is maybe… if it’s only 250-times stronger than we calculated. Then it could…”
Jack’s voice died. His pencil hung idle. Maddie’s paper remained unblemished.
“If it… was a pig,” Jack offered. “If it was a pig that died in the portal.”
“How, Jack? How would a pig get in? We lock all the doors at night, Jack. No one else can get in, Jack. It’s just us, Jack.”
Jack and Maddie were not there when the portal turned on.
Maddie’s statement carried two possibilities. Only two. Both felt like claws digging all the flesh right out of Jack’s heart.
“I want… I want to try the ecto-ether theory again,” Jack choked. “I think it’s the ecto-ether. I think it’ll work.”
Jack slid a piece of paper over, already covered in scribbles. In its single untouched corner, he started the equation for the several-thousandth time that night.
Above their head, birds were singing.
Sunrise hailed unseen from the windowless laboratory.
…
At 6am, Vlad answered his cell phone. The reception crackled, struggling through the layers of sheetrock above his head.
“Vlad?” Maddie’s voice crackled. “Sorry, did I wake you up?”
“Not at all my dear.” Vlad leaned his weight against the wall, playing with the singsong melody in his voice. “But you sound exhausted. Is anything the matter?”
“Yes. Well… Yes. Jack and I have—all night—trying to fix the equation.”
“Naturally.”
“We found something that maybe works.”
“Oh?” Vlad asked. He straightened, pacing now, cracklingly attentive. “And what might that—”
“If someone died. Activating the portal. We have an on-switch inside the portal’s interior. The trigger we use to press it is external to the portal, of course. But if someone went inside the portal, and they pressed it directly, and if they died, and pulled the Ghost Zone here—”
Vlad’s red eyes reflected pools of iridescent green. He twirled his free hand in the fringes of his cape, tongue working over the fanged edges of his teeth. He stared, consumed, forward.
“—and just, you, I was thinking, you’re the only other expert I’d trust to… maybe weigh in.”
“What does Jack think?”
“He denies it. He’s still. He’s trying other theories.”
“Well who knows, surely? The answer may lie somewhere you haven’t looked.”
“…I’ve looked everywhere, Vlad. That's the thing. There is no more ‘somewhere else’. I’ve looked.”
“You sound like your mind is made up.”
“I just… if maybe you have some idea.”
“Am I meant to talk you out of this idea?”
“Vlad.”
“Do you think I have some secret information you don’t? Sorry to say, I’m just your skeptic.” Some noise came through muffled from the other side. Vlad flashed a smile. “But…as your skeptic I will offer you this—It all sounds a bit absurd, doesn’t it? To kill someone and have them come back intact and… for you to never notice? Who would they be? How would they be? Surely not human anymore, surely. How would you never notice?”
Vlad paced forward, booted feet clicking along his laboratory floor.
“It would be ridiculous,” he continued, with a building crescendo, “so unfathomably self-centered surely, to not notice something like that befall someone so close to you, who died at the hands of your own invention? …If I’m correctly inferring who, in your household, you suspect of having activated the portal?” Vlad’s tongue lingered along his teeth.
Maddie’s line held, quiet. And the seconds of static drew long.
“Ah, apologies. I’ve overstepped,” Vlad continued. “I meant this as a vote of confidence in you. You and Jack both. Two people as attentive, caring, compassionate as yourselves. You would notice. I promise.”
“You’re… Okay, thank you, Vlad. I appreciate it.”
“Is there anything else, my dear?”
“No. No. Thank you, Vlad. I’ll think about this.”
Maddie’s line clicked dead. A chuckle built to Vlad’s lips and he let his head tip back with mirth. It lasted only a moment. He stowed his phone. And as if the interruption had never happened, Vlad reaffixed his attention on his own portal swirling in front of him. It bathed him, swimming green, purring contentment.
The tribes of Tumblr appeared to worship Apollo as their primary patron deity, most often under the epithet Apollo Spairahemon ("Apollo the Ball-Thrower") as a god of prophecy and sport. His name was typically invoked to celebrate a user blessed with uncommon prescience. Moments of prophecy were considered highly sacred and were often recorded, and such texts are sometimes accompanied by an artistic depiction of the god — either his traditional masculine image or, unusually, in the form of a young woman, which appears to have been an earlier style before a conservative shift toward more conventional iconography — preparing to cast a round rubber ball that our scholars believe was used in the sport known as "dodge ball". Much as other cults regarded his arrows as bringers of disease and health, this community believed that being struck by this ball would bestow prophetic visions.
Some icons are reproduced below:
An earlier depiction (c. 2020) of Apollo as a girl clad in a simple tunic and playing with other children. Figures are smiling and the image is brightly colored, indicating a celebratory outlook toward knowledge of the future.
A later piece (c. 2022) that resembles the traditional appearance of Apollo. References to childhood and play are omitted, and the god carries a more frightening aspect; perhaps this icon represented grim omens rather than good tidings.
A lot of fantasy goes with Tolkien explanation of fantasy racism being the result of ancestral grudge.
Then you got Dungeon Meshi which is like:
"Elves and Dwarves hate each other because their respective empires make up 2/3 of the imperial core and are stuck in a cold war as the planet runs out of uncolonized land to grab. Elves are able to live in pastoral paradise because they've horded most of the settings farm-able land and natural capital, displacing and mass murdering any natives in the process. Orcs and goblins are hostile to other races because there the primary targets of an ongoing slavery and genocide campaign. The dividing line between human and inhuman is arbitrarily assigned via a phrenological pseudo-science that quickly falls apart when questioned by anyone who wasn't indoctrinated into it since birth."
germansingergirl
vaporwave
gracieabrams
romaincrisis
amandla
2087
titsay
dailybridgerton
