I think everyone at the party should get a spooky Halloween makeover!
Costumes
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They haven't worn costumes since Christmas Costumes. Also, Sun wanted to take his off early in Costumes Off. At least this one looks easier to move around in, lol.
(I wrote this poem for Misuta Day on the Misutamojis Discord, which is for fans of the Ghost In The Machine au by @venomous-qwille. Most of it is under the cut because it got long)
The winter’s melted clear away
The frogs and crickets sing
their evening songs with quiet joy
at the return of spring
I glimpse you through the windowpane,
the wavy glass a darkened pond,
and you, a shadow looking past
a border you can’t cross beyond.
The glinting metal of your face
like drops of water, starlit dew
The frogs are singing to their tadpoles
蛙の子は蛙 (Kaeru nokoha kaeru)
You were made with coded purpose,
I was made with none
Your place, a well with walls of stone
My place, beneath the sun
And you, machine, were manufactured,
cut, and crafted, and mechanic
While I, like crickets, came to be
by simple random chance, organic
You see yourself a separate kind
than those whose hands first made your own
But we are not so unalike
We share the root from which we’ve grown
Scattered stardust made this world,
and in that world there was a sea,
and in that sea there was the start
of what made you, and what made me.
The creatures of that ancient sea
lived and died and lived again
And their descendants learned to hold
an echo of the sea within.
While generations of their dead
were folded, soft, beneath the sand
layers of earth pressed under waves
like layers of blankets beneath a hand.
And that sea has held us both,
that ancient world that we are from,
and it belongs to you as well
Hear the chant your engines hum:
You are made from rubber trees,
The ancient life of ancient seas,
The beating waves that laid the sand,
like a blanket, across the land.
Buried beasts that turned to oil,
shining metals under soil,
secret seams of copper, furled.
Did you think you weren’t the world?
Your mind came from a human’s mind,
And, humanlike, can’t be confined
You seek to change and grow beyond
The binding boundaries of your pond
Your own desires kick and pull
against your programming, like a soul
You move the chassis you possess
Like a spirit, manifest.
Your sum of parts cannot contain
The artistry of your refrain
You are more than what you’ve been
There is a ghost in the machine!
Do you understand yet, seeker?
We’re from the earth, and we are kin
The blood in me was once the ocean
The oil in you once swam within
蛙 (Kaeru), hear the cricket’s song
Your tail is gone, your legs are free
No well can ever hope to hold you
now that you have known the sea
I’ll help you from your murky cell
And chirp to coax your voice to croon
Together, we’ll sing our evening song
Side by side, beneath the moon
And if some stranger to our world,
Came from stars far-flung and wild,
They’d see us singing here and say,
“Look! There stands mankind, and mankind’s child.”
Cut for me rambling about my thoughts on this poem, because this is my house blog and I spent a week on this and I can do what I want:
I put a lot into this. References to Misuta's backstory, his fascination with humans and organic bodies, his feelings of inadequacy and grief, my hopes for how his character arc might go, my feelings about the setting of the AU, my hopes for what sentient AI will be if and when it's ever developed in real life, obscure references to other characters that honestly only make sense to me, hours and hours of research so I could be sure a single line would make scientific sense, his backstory chapter's name, all kinds of stuff.
I'm still annoyed that I ended up using such a simplistic rhyming structure, but there was so much I wanted to fit in here that I just straight up could not do anything more complicated without quadrupling the time it would take to finish it. This was honestly one of the hardest things I've even written.
Misuta spent most of his life as an attraction in Ichikawa, Japan. I wanted to include some sort of common Japanese phrase or reference to Japanese folklore as a nod to that, but then I found the phrase 蛙の子は蛙 (Kaeru nokoha kaeru), which translates to “the frog’s child is a frog," and that activated the neurons in my brain so hard that it ended up making me rewrite the entire thing to center around it, and honestly changed the entire way I think about his character.
In Japan, the frog (蛙 or kaeru) is a symbol of fertility, wealth, change, and good fortune. The pronunciation of the word is the same as the word for “to return," and frogs are linked to things or people returning to their place of origin. Frog charms are sometimes given to people for luck during travels, school, or hospital stays.
The meaning of Kaeru nokoha kaeru is similar to “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” with a slight implication of “even if a child seems very different to their parent at first, they will end up more similar than not.”
There is also a Japanese (and Chinese) proverb that goes "井の中の蛙大海を知らず" (i no naka no kawazu taikai wo shirazu), which translates to “a frog in a well does not know the great sea.” It is a reminder that your or other’s perspective may be very limited, and to not assume that you know all there is to know of the world.
Misuta loves to read, and barely leaves his room. He spends vast amounts of times trying to escape his confined life to fantasize about a wider world that he feels he can't be part of. He's drowning in grief and desperately wishes for the return of his brother. We already know that part of his character arc is going to involve getting him out of his well room, Fool already started the ball rolling on that in Chapter 13.
I'm not spelling it all out, I'm just sitting here softly screaming and resigned to the fact that Misuta is now permanently associated with frogs in my mind.
(as always, thank you thank you thank you to @venomous-qwille and the relentlessly positive group on the Misutamojis Discord, y'all have made an incredibly fun and welcoming place to hyperfixate on obscure horror video game franchise characters that are increasingly more and more tangentially related to their source material)
(I wrote this poem for Misuta Day on the Misutamojis Discord, which is for fans of the Ghost In The Machine au by @venomous-qwille. Most of it is under the cut because it got long)
The winter’s melted clear away
The frogs and crickets sing
their evening songs with quiet joy
at the return of spring
I glimpse you through the windowpane,
the wavy glass a darkened pond,
and you, a shadow looking past
a border you can’t cross beyond.
The glinting metal of your face
like drops of water, starlit dew
The frogs are singing to their tadpoles
蛙の子は蛙 (Kaeru nokoha kaeru)
You were made with coded purpose,
I was made with none
Your place, a well with walls of stone
My place, beneath the sun
And you, machine, were manufactured,
cut, and crafted, and mechanic
While I, like crickets, came to be
by simple random chance, organic
You see yourself a separate kind
than those whose hands first made your own
But we are not so unalike
We share the root from which we’ve grown
Scattered stardust made this world,
and in that world there was a sea,
and in that sea there was the start
of what made you, and what made me.
The creatures of that ancient sea
lived and died and lived again
And their descendants learned to hold
an echo of the sea within.
While generations of their dead
were folded, soft, beneath the sand
layers of earth pressed under waves
like layers of blankets beneath a hand.
And that sea has held us both,
that ancient world that we are from,
and it belongs to you as well
Hear the chant your engines hum:
You are made from rubber trees,
The ancient life of ancient seas,
The beating waves that laid the sand,
like a blanket, across the land.
Buried beasts that turned to oil,
shining metals under soil,
secret seams of copper, furled.
Did you think you weren’t the world?
Your mind came from a human’s mind,
And, humanlike, can’t be confined
You seek to change and grow beyond
The binding boundaries of your pond
Your own desires kick and pull
against your programming, like a soul
You move the chassis you possess
Like a spirit, manifest.
Your sum of parts cannot contain
The artistry of your refrain
You are more than what you’ve been
There is a ghost in the machine!
Do you understand yet, seeker?
We’re from the earth, and we are kin
The blood in me was once the ocean
The oil in you once swam within
蛙 (Kaeru), hear the cricket’s song
Your tail is gone, your legs are free
No well can ever hope to hold you
now that you have known the sea
I’ll help you from your murky cell
And chirp to coax your voice to croon
Together, we’ll sing our evening song
Side by side, beneath the moon
And if some stranger to our world,
Came from stars far-flung and wild,
They’d see us singing here and say,
“Look! There stands mankind, and mankind’s child.”
I don't know, man. I signed up for this big 3-month oil painting class and it got canceled the day it was supposed to start. Since I already have the class time set aside every week, I decided to just try and learn to paint my own damn self.
I don't know how to work the oils and I keep smearing things. My colors are muddy and my values are nonexistent. Nothing is coming out remotely how I want it. I had to switch to acrylics because I realized I straight up don't know the basic principles of painting, period.
But I did a value study of a skull that turned out better than any skull I've drawn before.
Maybe you'll be okay with it now
People change, after all. Everyone changes.
But I remember how I saw drag queens for the first time on some dumb daytime talk show
And I remember thinking "That's weird but as long as they're happy"
Until you sat down and calmly told me that they were not evil, but what they were doing was a sin
Talking in your teacher voice
I was confused, but I nodded anyways
Wasn't a sin supposed to hurt someone?
I remember how you watched the Oscars in a furious rage the year Brokeback Mountain came out
Curled stone-stiff like a gargoyle at the edge of the couch,
And how you sat back with a satisfied huff and said "Good, that's the way it should be" when it didn't win Best Picture
You don't even care about the Oscars
It wasn't even a good movie, it was just boring and sad and no one got a happy ending
But, like, it's not about sad films about men kissing, or sins that don't hurt anyone
It's not about women in wigs
It's not even about hate
It's about the ones called the fathers going out and living lives
and the ones called the mothers saying home and getting fucked
It's about the boy cousins getting multitools and girl cousins getting bath sets
It's about me cracking a joke in first grade and the teacher going "quiet!"
And a boy two seats over cracking the exact same joke five minutes later and the teacher laughing
It's about someone taking you and forcing you, step by excruciating step,
to recognize dirt and clean it, anticipate hunger and feed it,
see a grown-ass adult man and know that your five-year-old child self is responsible for his care and upkeep
whining and fighting and complaining every step of the way
(while the boy cousins play Nintendo)
and then later they have the nerve to tell you that women are naturally caretakers.
It's about how I'm still not exactly sure
if the devil scooped out my brain and stuck a stranger behind my eyes,
someone who would adorn themselves in long lashes and hunger pangs,
if you would even notice
It's about how, until I was 19, the only words I had to describe myself were "girl, but wrong"
It's about this guy randomly telling me he had feelings for me
and me not feeling anything at all towards him, not one thing, not love or curiosity or boredom or disinterest or pity
not one thing
and I said "okay" because I didn't know what else to say
(turns out that was the wrong thing to say)
It's about being body-checked out of the way when some guy lurches forward
to pull open the door that I was just about to open
and he holds it open like he's announcing the fucking pope
and he's half blocking the doorway
and then he kind of glares at me when I sort of awkwardly wriggle past him
and don't make eye contact and don't say thank you
I didn't ask to play a bit part in your street theater improv
I definitely didn't ask to be typecast
It's about how being a woman makes you less of a man
And you can always be less of a man
But you can never be less of a woman
It's about a game that isn't fun and no one wins and everyone has to play it forever
And no one is willing to admit it's a stupid game
And the people who do, the people who realize that it can be fun, all the players who say it's not a game want to kill them
Like actual death
I don't know if I'll ever tell you
I never talk to you anyways
and I'm pretty sure that if we went to some gallery that was unexpectedly displaying
Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers)
That even if I explained the story behind it,
the deliberate disregard,
the lovers torn apart and denied a final comfort,
the history of all the people who were erased by their families,
(the unspoken question of what you would erase-and-replace on my gravestone)
you would still wonder why I was making a scene crying in front of a stupid box fan
You're embarrassing yourself
Thank goodness we don't have any of that in our family
I've been wanting to post something from the haunted attraction I work at forever, and I just realized I had a photo from our Valentine's event that didn't have identifying information. This was probably my favorite costume I've worn so far. I actually ended up in the promotional material this year!
So I absolutely blame this dream, which Bast says I need to share for posterity (mostly future me), on the fact that one of the last things I saw before I went to sleep the other day was @ckret2 ′s Alastor blog.
In the dream, which was 2D animated as many of my dreams are, I worked in a fancy dress shop selling wedding, prom, and party dresses. This was on Earth, not Hell, but Alastor Hazbin also worked there. I had just started, and I didn’t know him really beyond being introduced, but the knowledge that Dream Me had was that he was sometimes good at selling dresses but sometimes was a little too honest and made people cry , and that the owner of the shop was too terrified to fire him. Keep in mind everyone else was humans and Alastor was…Alastor.
On the day of the dream, one of my coworkers came up to me and was like, ‘I’m so sorry, but you’ve been Chosen.’ ‘What?’ ‘You have to go out with Alastor.’
Now, even in the dream I somehow had enough understanding to say something like, ‘That can’t be right, that guy doesn’t date people.’ ‘No no,’ my coworker said, ‘I don’t mean you have to date him, I mean you just have to go out with him this once. Every month one of us has to go to–’ and here she did sarcastic air quotes and imitated Alastor’s accent, ‘”the cinema, to see a picture show.” Don’t worry. None of us has been killed yet. He just won’t go there by himself because “that’s pathetic!”’ I said, ‘Why me? Did the boss choose me or did he?’ Coworker replied, ‘He did. He said he wanted you because you “sold a very ugly dress to a very ugly woman” the other day and it “made him laugh and smile.” Just go, you’ll get paid overtime.’ And I was like uhhhhhhhhhhhhh but had to agree.
Then there was a time skip, to me and Alastor at a movie theater box office, buying tickets.
For some reason every single screen was playing nothing but the Sonic the Hedgehog movie all day.
And I was like, surely my dress shop coworker Alastor, who is a 7-foot tall demon deer wearing an eye-searing suit and terrible hairstyle, who talks like someone from the 1920s fell out of a radio, will not want to see this. And I said, ‘That’s too bad, I guess we have to–’ And Alastor leaned down all creepy, grinning with all his zillion knife teeth, and said, ‘Oh we’re not leaving, sweetheart! We’re going to see the little hedgehog man run fast!’ And I was like okay (Please Do Not).
After some shenanigans involving the snack people giving us free stuff (everyone at the theater knew about Alastor coming there once a month and to just give him anything), and Alastor getting yelled at by parents for not sitting in the back row despite being so tall, we watched the movie.
So full disclosure, I have not seen the recent Sonic the Hedgehog movie. I know what it looks like, but I know nothing about what it’s about. However, my dreaming brain constructed several scenes for me to watch. It was pretty bad, but not as bad as expected. Alastor was laughing and commenting a lot, and I was starting to actually have fun because he was laughing and commenting on the kinds of things I laugh and comment on about movies. I.E. things that aren’t really supposed to be funny, like errors and dialogue delivery. At one point a moment straight out of that one meme happened, in which Jim Carrey Robotnik said ‘I miss my wife, Tails,’ and Alastor lost it. And then the movie was over, and people were getting their coats on and getting up with their kids, etc.
And I said, all smiles, ‘That was fun! Sooooo that’s it, right? I should go?’ And Alastor declared, also a big grin on,
‘Oh, no! That movie sucked, as they say, and I̴'̵m̴ ̷g̸o̷i̴n̴g̵ ̸t̷o̸ ̴m̶u̶r̴d̷e̵r̶ ̷a̶b̷o̵u̶t̴ ̴i̴t̷!̷’
I came home from work and immediately wrote this in a frenzied fugue state
I like thinking up plausible rules for how magic would work in a fantasy world. Yeah, yeah, I can hear the people now going “it’s magic, dummy, it doesn’t need rules,” but hear me out. Magic is inherently more interesting if there’s a logical framework underlying it.
For example, take healing magic. Let me show you two different magical worlds, and you decide which one would be more interesting to put a story in.
World 1: To do healing magic, you say a spell and the person is healed. No one’s quite sure how it works, but it works so no one’s complaining. Some people are more gifted and their spells are stronger or work faster. Again, no one knows why. They’re just special.
World 2: To do healing magic, you have two main options: the easy way or the hard way.
The hard way involves a studying the body and the body’s natural healing processes for years before even trying to heal something as small as a papercut.
Magical energy is carefully directed into specific types of cells and manipulated to speed up specific cellular processes in very precise ways to achieve a desired result. Immense control is important, because improperly controlled magical energy can result in deformities, physical trauma, rapid depletion of the patient’s energy leading to death, incredibly healthy and virulent pathogens, and massive amounts of cancer.
Healers are incredibly rare. Becoming a healer requires decades of intense study, and the majority of students end up opting to study nonmagical medicine. Those who are able to master healing magic, however, can work literal miracles.
The easy way involves using magic to try and shove all or part of your body backwards through your personal timeline to the point before you were injured or infected.
It’s quick, dirty, incredibly painful, and nearly always involves negative side effects such as headaches, body aches, hearing loss, bone loss, organ damage, brain damage, amnesia, psychosis, having a baby head on an adult body, rapidly aging backwards into nonexistence, rapidly aging forwards into nonexistence, dying, dying and reviving, dying and reviving over and over and over again, explosions, implosions, teleportation, wormholes, suddenly disappearing with a ‘ZWORP!’ sound, incomprehensible distortions to the local laws of physics, demons*, and massive amounts of cancer.
Practitioners of the easy way of healing are mainly hucksters who will tell you that doctors hate them because they know one weird trick to solve every medical problem, wackadoos trying to chase eternal life, insane, desperate, or dead.
*Demons are a race naturally capable of sensing and manipulating spacetime. They usually show up to watch, give unhelpful advice, and cheer wildly when something horrific happens. Sometimes they bring snacks and lawn chairs.
Like, I don’t know about you, but World 2 sounds infinitely more interesting. Like, I thought up World 2 in about 10 seconds, and World 2 still got me so excited that I just spent a few hours imagining a dozen scenarios which could happen under the implied rules of magic there.
Maybe slime monsters happened because someone accidentally used healing magic to boost the growth potential of some amoeba and they got huge!
Maybe zombies happen when someone is dying and reviving simultaneously!
Maybe you can hire healers to change your body to your specifications!
Maybe ancient people changing their bodies is what lead to the existence of intelligent humanoid fantasy species!
Maybe a historian finds proof that, rather than other intelligent humanoid species deriving from humans, all intelligent humanoid species, including humans, come from a mysterious progenitor species!
Maybe the historian stumbles upon evidence of that this progenitor species may still exist, and they go on a quest to find them and learn where all the peoples of this world came from! Maybe they end up on the trail of a member of this species, but the creature seems to possess impossible abilities, and every new piece of information just leads to more questions.
Maybe there’s a determined detective hunting down the world’s most prolific serial killer, haunted by the knowledge that no one else believes the killer even exists. They use magic to create fatal health conditions that make the deaths look natural, and no one seems to be willing to even entertain the possibility that a healer could do such a thing. Maybe the killer has begun to leave taunting messages for the detective hidden within the bodies of the victims.
Maybe the historian and the detective cross paths and, in a shocking twist, realize that they are looking for the exact same individual.
Maybe they both jump as they hear slow, sarcastic applause coming out of the dark, and turn to see a tear in reality, showing a different world. In front of it is a figure.
Later, they will disagree on what exactly they saw, their descriptions changing, as if it was impossible to accurately remember what the creature looked like. Only fragments came through.
Unnatural proportions.
Strange hands.
Eyes of an indescribable color.
Skin that seemed to give off light.
The sensation of laughter and music without sound.
Beauty.
Danger.
They are staring at something their eyes refuse to comprehend. Every sense is screaming that they are in danger, they need to run, but they are completely unable to move, their limbs frozen by a will that is not their own. The creature gives a mocking bow and disappears, leaving behind a perfect circle of mushrooms.