Because of The Day That's In It, it's become traditional at the Ebooks Direct store, on this date each year, to make a particular piece of reading available free.
This means that, for the next twenty-four hours, you can download the tale of how the Fair Folk of Dublin were threatened by a terrible alien force (that is to say, Late-Stage Capitalism in a particularly nasty form...): and how to save themselves from being wiped out, the Good People sought the help of Ireland's first superhero.
The 12,000-word novella Herself is free today!
Just go to the ebook's page at the Ebooks Direct store, go through the checkout process (naturally you won't be charged anything!) and download a copy.
And happy Bloomsday!
(With the usual warning to any British residents who may pass through: even though this is a freebie, due to the paperwork associated with Brexit, we can't let you "purchase" it through the store. Our apologies.)
me: yeah, so one of your most famous works is actually just that commission of a woman that you kept. Honestly, it's less of the piece itself that lead to its fame and more the mystery surrounding it, so I was hoping you could clear that up
the decayed corpse of Leonardo Da Vinci that I resurrected: Hai detto che hanno chiamato una tartaruga che combatte il crimine con il mio nome?
Sunless Knights by MacBudgie / @mushroomlasagna - a Hollow Knight/Sunless Skies crossover!! Casebound in folio. One copy for me, one copy for the author. Both games have very unique aesthetics, so I had fun figuring out ways to incorporate the iconography into the design.
Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor has been laboring under the thumb of legacy and tradition for years, as sous-chef to his brother at Maison Windsor, the restaurant his grandmother made world famous. When a less-than-perfect review of the establishment leaves his creativity not just stymied but totally cut off, he finds fresh inspiration (and something more) in the London's newest and most passionate chef-restaurateur, Alex Claremont-Diaz. (...)
I am so so so excited to finally share my bound version of this incredible story. This was one of the stories that I read very early on when I stumbled into the RWRB universe and that I immediately fell totally in love with. It really is delicious in every sense of the word!
It was also thanks to Orchid's generous sharing of resources and tips that I got bold enough to try bookbinding in the first place. So I just want to say: Thank you so much for writing this story that means so much to me, for replying to my comment and my random dm so many months ago, and for even being willing to share your incredible typeset with me! I am so grateful 💜
Typeset: Kindly provided by @orchidscript. Everything about this typeset is so lovingly created, including the newspaper articles and recipes cards, that I really wanted to do it justice with my cover design.
Bind:
A5
Round-back three-piece Bradel binding
Custom-printed bookcloth (which almost killed my printer 🙈)
Oxford hollow
Silk two-colour endbands
Because I am a massive foodie and the recipes that Orchid included looked soooo good, I decided to bind a separate little recipe book that I would actually be comfortable using in my kitchen. I came across the Steifbroschüre binding style, and thought it worked really well for this little booklet:
Many thanks to @armoredsuperheavy for recommending this super fun fic!
This is a rus-real AU (and if you don’t know what that means then lucky you) which immediately gave me IDEAS for the design.
🏢 So here we have my interpretation of Benjamin Elbel’s pixel binding, with the cover made out of 56 separate pieces of bookboard (with the basic square being 32x32mm), with staircase colored bookcloth and grey leather stamped (with handmade lino stamps) and painted to look like a classic Soviet era panel building.
🏢 The inner cover is red suede which is very fun because the pixel cover leaves these cute imprints in the soft suede.
🏢 The typesetting is relatively tame, with chapter names done in a stencil font (like something you might find painted on a rusty garage door), and the body font being Century Schoolbook, because of vibes.
This is a first attempt at a pretty tricky binding types so there are some imperfections but I’m really happy with the end result. (Also, I had a blast painting all the little windows!)
the poster that this incredible illustration is based on is extremely striking. but while searching for it, I also found earlier posters for conveying this message along with a corresponding one for summer, and I fucking love them. absolutely lovely graphic design work. (both are from 1924, artist is Austin Cooper)
the one I was looking for originally also has a summer variant. (artist is Frederick Charles Herrick: 'it is warmer below' is from 1927, 'it is cooler below' is 1926)
'Alligator Bites Never Heal', fanbind for @flawlessassholes !!!! A spectacular fic (with an ongoing sequel!) that I was genuinely so happy to make physical!! Also posted over on my AO3, along with my other ficbinds!
I couldn’t resist starting another Luminous once I saw this line of fabric. It’s called Color Collage by Shelley Davies from Northcott and it’s been in the back of my mind for ages.
I’m using six colours in the piecing, which should make it 92”x109” (unless I mess with the pattern even more and take one of the rows out completely) which will technically be a king size LOL The seventh colour pink is gonna be used on the binding so I get to use alllll the colours we had in stock in the shop 🎉
Someone please stop me, I can’t stop making these fucking things lmao 😭😭😭😂😂😂 I had a plan to do something else but I couldn’t help it!
I did take one row out of the centre so there are only two red centre blocks instead of three. 109” is too big for my queen bed, but I can work with 101” LOL
Technically this will still fit a king at 92”x101”, but I am a blanket hog and that feels like a really skinny king to me.
ALSO??
Because I altered the amount of rows (downsizing) but did not alter the amount of blocks I made, I ended up with just enough left over to make two matching pillow cases! They are even on point like the quilt.
Not as big as the greyscale king for my brother, but still. It feels big.
As you can see a little from the roll on the back of the long arm, I found a fun rainbow universe print to put on it with all the colours on the front.
I’m quilting the pillowcases too, though in a tighter pattern so they can handle more washing.
I love it so much. My favourite Luminous, I swear.
The pillow cases look so good too. As I mentioned, I quilted them much tighter than the quilt so they can be thrown in the wash a lot more. Same pattern, just smaller design.
It’s so busy, I could stare at it for hours finding things in the prints.
Also? I love the pink binding. I really did want to use every colour, so this was a nice compromise to having to resize everything LOL
The backing is also so busy LOL You can hide a lot of pet fur on both sides of this thing.
The pillowcases turned out great. I used the leftover from the backing to back the pillow cases so that everything matches. And they’re envelope style so the pillows won’t slip out. Hate it when the pillowcase slips off my pillow.
I had to sew three 45” wide strips of fabric together for the backing to fit on the long arm. Since the quilt was only 101” at its widest, I had a whole 30” strip that was usable and perfect for this.
You're Dr. Ryland Grace, teacher and scientist, guy who not too long ago teamed up with the first alien any human ever met (Rocky, he's great) to save the stars.
But you only managed to save two of them. So there's three total that aren't dimming: Sol, Eridani, and Tau Ceti.
You think about the other stars, and the planets that might be dying around them, more often than you admit. The ones whose civilizations didn't have the means to get to Tau Ceti, or to even figure out that Tau Ceti was the only star not dimming. The ones who died en route, or got there before or after you but couldn't figure out the taumoeba, who poured all their resources into an experimental ship that exploded on launch, who philosophically decided that there was nothing for it but to just huddle together and await the end, who prayed to their gods or charted the wrong course or suffered any number of a million catastrophes that could have also doomed the missions from Earth and Erid.
It doesn't seem like there's anything for it, and yet. You do have a lot of spare time to work on whatever projects you want to. Between helping Erid's scientists study humanity, and teaching pebbles about light speed and radiation, you and Rocky and Adrian start working on a little project involving some of the aspects of astrophage that don't really align with what you know about the laws of physics.
Building off of previous work, now with the added bonus perspectives of Erid's scientists. The Hail Mary mission was mostly about using the astrophage itself to get out to Tau Ceti and find a way to stop it from eating the sun, but without that being the goal it opens up a lot more avenues of experimenting and long story short: you're Dr. Ryland Grace and you kind of just figured out warp drive.
So the thing about the early versions of warping is, it's definitely not safe for most living things to travel with it. But! You can use it to send taumoeba to other planets with Petrova lines, which starts helping other stars in the cosmos brighten again. It also allows for faster communication between Earth and Erid. Scientists start trying to figure out which infected star systems are the most likely to still have habitable worlds somewhere nearby, to the best of their abilities, and you all start shipping out taumoeba bombs to air drop into the atmosphere of planets like Venus, Adrian, and Threeworld.
And then one day you're doing your research into trying to find ways to warp more stuff around the universe, and you pick up a structured signal. Weak and weird, but everyone gets excited because they leap to the obvious conclusion: some other solar system with life in it has survived. So you all start trying to locate the source of the signal, which is kind of difficult because warping creates distortions that possibly could have caused a weird signal in and of itself, but one thing leads to another and the one day you, Dr. Ryland Grace, fuck up just a tiny bit and somehow the nice comfortable artificial shore in your enclosure fills up with blood, and there's some kind of submersible crashed onto your beach.
The person inside is in... rough shape.
Even weirder, he's human? Or at least he sure seems to be human. On the one hand this is fortunate, because Erid's scientists have been studying a human for a while now with a particular focus on finding ways to potentially intervene for medical emergencies, and boy howdy is this guy a medical emergency. On the other hand, you are at a loss to explain how this happened, and it turns out that the whole warping situation might have been interacting with space and time in ways you did not previously account for.
Anyways, somewhat miraculously, this dude does not die. It also turns out that the blood pool in your enclosure has the initial composition of human blood (baffling? neat?) but also contains a multitude of other microorganisms, and basically is itself an alien life-form that has infected your new emergency house guest, as well as his submersible. Vessel? It's fascinating, the whole thing is coming apart so even though your guest isn't consciousness enough to ask for permission, ultimately everyone determines that there's no salvaging it so you all might as well study it before the blood-pool finishes, uh, eating it?
Samples are taken, with care. Exposure to the pool is minimized. Rocky hovers because he doesn't trust you not to fall in, even though you're not going to fall in, everyone's built some pretty great scaffolding and you know not to touch the weird lightly irradiated not-human blood with your bare hands, Rocky.
Anyway, the blood pool seems to mimic back sounds fairly often, sometimes screaming, talking with various voices, or echoing Eridani language that it picks up. It doesn't seem to have the actual cognitive ability to be processing language, but since you can't figure out how it's doing most of what it's doing, there's no ruling anything out. It's creepy, so the scientists on Erid build you a temporary barrier that seals you off from it, both as a genuine safety precaution but also so that you can sleep at night without hearing the screams of the damned. You coat it in a thin layer of astrophage as an extra precaution against potential radiation leaks.
The guy who was in the submersible also seems to be human, but badly infected by the stuff from the blood pool. However, you can't rule out that this infection isn't actually part of his own natural systems either, given that the blood also seems to be sort-of-human but sort-of-not. Coordinating with some experts on Earth, and doing a lot more medical experimentation than you ever anticipated, everyone concludes that whatever the case with this guy is, some of the not-human factors in his physiology are the only reason he's still alive. So trying to get rid of it would probably be a bad idea.
Instead you work together and make a lot of less-than-ideal "best guesses" and eventually get him stable. After the dust has settled, the man is a triple-amputee with significant facial scarring, and mostly comatose. But sometimes he sings, screams, and pleads with somewhat religious-sounding prayers before dipping back under again. He seems to speak English. You have so many questions for him. You talk to him while he's unconscious, asking some of them, speculating, or even just narrating what you're doing. Sometimes when he seems distressed, you just ramble soothing nonsense, the kind of comforting non-comments offered to distressed kids sobbing over scraped knees and sprained wrists.
When he finally wakes up, he's confused. Wary. You think he might have reflexively lashed out if he could, but he's hooked up to several monitors and is, again, a triple amputee, so his singular flail is not very threatening to you, Dr. Ryland Grace, who sometimes gets the zoomies and scales the cliffs of your enclosure, and does quite a bit of routine heavy lifting these days.
The man doesn't really seem to be violent, anyway. Just startled and disoriented. You ask his name, and he hesitates, looking around like he's waiting for a trap to be sprung, or an illusion to fall apart. When it doesn't, he tentatively introduces himself as Simon. He has some trouble speaking, due to the facial scarring, and also probably the coma. But he can speak, and he can count backwards and forwards, can track objects with his eyes and recite the letters of the alphabet, the days of the week.
He asks what station he's on. You tell him he's not on a station, he's on a planet, Erid. He says that's impossible. You open the windows to show him the sky, and he stares for a long time. You understand, even if you don't know the particulars of his situation. If, somehow, Simon is from a part of the cosmos that was going dark, then he probably cherishes the sight of a healthy sun even more than everyone else in the known universe does.
You try and get him to answer some of your questions, but he tires quickly and you have to shelve them for now. Having another human around is doing a number on you, you gotta say, whether he's conscious or not, injured or not. You love the Eridians and you wouldn't trade Rocky for anything, but there is something to this after so much time spent without anyone else that's difficult to put into words.
While Simon slowly recovers, you work on some mobility aids for him. Luckily some projects were already in the works to help you safely navigate more of Erid beyond your enclosure, so it only takes some modifications to a few those designs to get a few basic necessities hammered out -- a mobile chair, a walking exosuit, a prosthetic arm based on designs that were initially meant to help you safely interact with volatile objects, and so on.
Day by day, Simon spends a little more time awake. Everyone's anxious to get more information out of him, but you're the barrier to entry, the one who gets to actually make those calls as the only other human on Erid, and you decide to take it slow. There's no impending catastrophe that you can see, just curiosity an apprehension. The warping projects have been scaled back in case there's some unseen detrimental effect. Most of the taumoeba that can be distributed elsewhere has been, too.
Simon eventually starts to answer your questions, and responds with some more of his own. He seems to think that he's dead, and it's difficult to talk him out of it. He regards his lost limbs and scarred reflection mournfully, weeps and asks if this is punishment, if the fact that it's 'not so bad' is mercy. You call on everything you ever learned about talking to traumatized people to try and explain that it's neither, it's just a result of his grave injuries, and of you kind of accidentally warping him to Erid from wherever he had been. You explain what you can, breaking things down in their simplest versions to describe astrophage, taumoeba, the Hail Mary, the Eridians, Rocky, and your own one-way trip to try and save the stars.
That gets him.
"They sent you to die?" Simon (still no last name) asks.
"Yeah. They did," you say, because it's true.
"Did you volunteer?"
You laugh, rueful.
"I wish I could say I was that brave, but uh. No. I didn't. The project lead had me drugged and dragged onto the ship."
Simon doesn't seem disappointed. He thinks about it, nods, and looks at you a bit different after that. Not in a bad way, thankfully. If anything he seems to become more relaxed, more trusting. He also seems to decide that he's in purgatory of some kind, not punished but not redeemed, a place for men whose sins and virtues alike are too innumerable for even God to judge.
He tells you that where he comes from, the stars went completely dark. What humanity remained survived on space stations that were already built to withstand the void, but even they couldn't operate indefinitely without food from their worlds or light from their stars. There was disagreement, he said, on whether the stars had truly gone dark, or if somehow the stations had been dragged into some other lightless place.
Your first instinct is to think that the stars did go dark. The astrophage got them, infestation reaching a critical point where they dimmed the stars completely. But, you don't actually know. You don't know where Simon comes from relative to the known universe. For all you could tell, he might indeed have been from some dark layer of existence that was folded open by warping physics. The fact that he seems to be from some far-future Earth, that he's mostly human and mostly speaks English and can mostly understand references to a lot of human culture, definitely implies that some alternate reality situation is afoot.
You pass along all of Simon's comments to the interested researchers assigned to this project, even though you wince to consider the reception some of it will get. The Eridians handle it a bit better than what you hear from Earth, for them it's probably less creepy overall, but there is definitely an upswing in wild speculation on both worlds.
Apart from the science, what you can focus on is helping Simon adjust to the realities of his new situation, so that's what you do. Once his health seems to be about as stable as anyone can determine, you set him up in the walking chair. He doesn't want to see the blood pool, so you get permission and take him outside into Erid instead, traveling in your exosuit while Simon reclines in a dome-topped, four-legged sedan chair with a lantern hanging from it. Eridian cities are fun to look at. In some places they're virtually impossible for a human to navigate, gas or shadows too thick to see past and terrain too uneven to traverse. But in others they are a wonderland of towering structures and natural features, colors the Eridians can't perceive contrasting in dramatic mineral formations, light passing through clouds in rare spears of unimpeded brilliance and reflecting off of smooth structures in dizzying, boundless splendor.
"Like we can glimpse the gates of heaven," Simon says, as he tips his head up towards the sky. Not an unfair description, to be honest.
Simon's not a picky eater, which given the previous living situation he described isn't a surprise. Just eating until he's full is a luxury to him. He perks up more over time, reading books, watching movies, talking about little things. He confesses aspects of his life to you which you opt not to forward to the researchers. They don't seem like they would change anything, and he gets anxious at the prospect of being reviled.
"I didn't know the camera would do that," he insists to you one night, after waking in a panic. Sometimes he sleeps better in the dark, unaccustomed to light, and sometimes he has episodes. Tonight's an episode.
You tentatively offer him your hand. He reaches, fumbles, and then clasps it tightly.
"What camera?" you ask.
"On the Iron Lung," Simon tells you, which you know is the name of his vessel. He hasn't said much about what it was doing, or why he was on it. But you do know that it had a pretty strong x-ray camera on it. The Eridians had to be strenuously warned about the radiation. And you do know that however he got into it, someone must have welded him in from the outside.
"I didn't know it would do that, I just wanted them to listen to me. They weren't... they weren't listening."
You squeeze his hand. There are scars on the back of it. Pockmarks, like someone dripped acid onto it.
"So you hit the camera to get their attention," you surmise.
"I didn't know," Simon repeats, insistently.
"Why didn't they tell you?"
He barks a laugh at that. It's not funny, it's a broken, battered sound that's barely removed from a sob. He shrugs. The stump of his other arm moves, gesturing with the hand he doesn't have anymore.
"Pick a reason. Maybe they thought a convict like me would irradiate them on purpose. Maybe it never occurred to them that anyone would use the camera like that. Maybe they just sank so many other poor bastards down there that they forgot which ones they'd told what. Which answer is worse?"
Convict. He's mentioned that before, although never with context. You've been deciding not to ask, and you definitely haven't been mentioning it to anyone else. Rocky's picked up on it, but you don't think he's said anything either.
"So they sent you down in this thing, on this moon, into this ocean of blood, and they didn't even tell you what the equipment could do?" you ask.
Simon lets go of your hand to scratch at some of his scars. You halt him with a touch to his wrist, crane around and grab the ointment that some of the Eridians figured out for you instead. It doesn't do much except moisturize, but it'll help more than Simon's nails will.
He swallows, and lets you apply it.
"I'm sorry."
"All's forgiven, buddy. The past is past," you say, because you've found that's worked better than any other response. You tried telling him he had nothing to apologize for in the beginning, but it just seemed to make him spiral worse.
"I pressed the camera. Everyone in that room got hit by the radiation. The person nearest worst of all," Simon tells you. "I really... I wasn't trying to hurt anybody. I just needed them to stop."
"I know."
To be honest, while you wouldn't say that anyone deserves that kind of thing, you think it's their own fault. They could have put a chimp in that Iron Lung and run the risk of some ignorant button-smashing irradiating them, let alone an uninformed, panicking man whose concerns they were ignoring.
Maybe one day that will be the right thing to say to Simon, but right now you don't think it is. He's too lost in his head, so you keep it simple, just nod and shake your head at the right parts. What you hope are the right parts.
"It's like the station," he says. "No one believes me. I'm the Butcher, why would they believe me? But it wasn't supposed to happen like that."
You don't know what he's talking about, but you squeeze his hand a little tighter anyway.
"I believe you," you say. You do. Simon really just doesn't strike you as a man who would deny doing something he intended to.
It's not that it hasn't occurred to you that a guy who sometimes refers to himself as 'the Butcher' and 'a convict' might have done some serious crimes in the past. Frankly, you spent enough time working on the mission to become acquainted with a fair number of people who had done shady shit, up to and including killing. As things around the world started to worsen, violent crimes went up as well. Desperation is not a good look on anyone.
Erid's not that different. The Eridians are less prone to some types of violence and more prone to others, but they've also got concepts like 'desperate times call for desperate measures' and that what a person does when they're in a harsh survival situation, is not generally indicative of what they do otherwise.
"Grace," Simon murmurs.
"Yeah?"
You pause, then apply some ointment to the problem areas on his cheek. Simon's eyes close, and he doesn't answer or offer any further clarification.
You watch him sleep for a while. A habit you've picked up from Rocky, but Simon doesn't seem to mind.
Eventually, Simon starts joining you for your classes. The pebbles are fascinated by him, jumping up and down and clamoring to ask about why he's a different shape from you, why he's not from Earth if he's human, what colors he thinks they are (a fascination of theirs, that there's some unique feature they have that they can't perceive) and how this aligns with your statements on the subject, what Simon knows about physics, and so on. You intervene when you have to, but keeping things pretty straightforward seems to work best. Eridians understand the concept of lost limbs and trauma, Simon is bemused but does tell the pebbles what colors they are, and while he's not a scientist or engineer he knows enough about physics to participate in the class experiment.
The blood pool has been sectioned off from your home and the classroom, the beach reduced to a mere sliver. Simon stays well clear of it at first, but after a while he starts to venture closer. Your offer to let him go see it. For a long while he declines outright, before tentatively agreeing to it under the stipulation that both of you wear exosuits. You put on the one Rocky made for you, and lift Simon into his newly completed mobility aid version, that lets him walk around more or less steadily now.
His arm curls around you to help distribute his weight. You feel him lean into it, rest his head against your shoulder, let out something suspiciously close to a sigh. But he's leaning back as soon as you have him seated in the suit, arranging himself to keep the pressure off of the wrong parts of him.
You go in and pick up your usual tasks in studying the pool. The mysterious thing has long since eaten away the last of the Iron Lung, raising the overall iron levels in the pool and altering aspects of its composition, but you got plenty of samples and inspected and salvaged some parts before it finished the process. There are Eridian-made models of the Iron Lung all around the walkways. You've warned Simon that sometimes the pool distorts the surface into shapes that can resemble faces made of iron, and that sometimes they seem to scream, although there's no indication that the sound is actually originating from the mouths made of blood.
It's pretty freaky, of course, but you're compartmentalizing it. By the sounds of it a lot of people died in that blood ocean, and it's inclined to mimicry, so it's probably copying and distorting shapes from the only living beings it's had physical contact with. The Eridians use xenonite tools to interact and copious astrophage shielding to keep the radiation contained, so none of them have interacted directly with the materials of it.
Simon doesn't stick around for long, but you don't press him about it. Honestly, you're fine with him avoiding the blood pool forever if he wants to, you don't really need him to interact with it for anything that's more important than his own recovery. It's just that it's eating up a chunk of your enclosure and no one's figured out how to safely move it somewhere else yet, and it's kind of a shame to limit Simon's ability to go places.
The Eridian researchers take advantage of Simon's lack of scientific credentials to involve him in studying or questioning other things, like human psychology, the ways in which he seems to differ from you and from most other humans, and what insights he can offer about space station technology and living conditions.
You also involve Simon, at least on some levels, with your other big project: trying to trace back his point of origin, and warp some astrophage and taumoeba to his people, along with a message about what they can do and what the risks are. From what Simon has described, wherever he's come from is experiencing a degree of desperation that merits whatever intervention can be managed. Taumoeba can make food, and astrophage can provide power, and together they can be used to keep each other in check. Simon knows the interstellar coordinates of every space station in his people's records, but that's only potentially useful if they can find out how to reach his point of origin and warp things in relation to that, since it's possibly (probably?) a different parallel universe.
Honestly even you aren't sure what you're trying to do half the time, but damn if you're not trying to do it anyway.
"I think maybe I was in Hell," Simon tells you one morning. "But now I'm in purgatory. I have to cross this last hurdle, and then I'll be able to rest with you. I have to help you save everyone else. I just don't know if I can do it."
You're only half-listening, because he often says these kinds of things, and you're not wholly sure how to approach the subject.
"We're not dead, and you're doing just fine. All you've gotta do is focus on recovery, buddy. Everyone is doing so much science, we'll figure it out," you assure him for the umpteenth time, and reach over to pat his shoulder. He doesn't sound distressed, just thoughtful as he savors his glass of water, and eats his breakfast.
He tells you he wants to go see the blood pool. You ask if he's sure, but he seems determined. You and Rocky help him into his exosuit. He smiles, and then before you close him in, he reaches out with his hand and settles it onto the back of your neck. He tugs you in to press your foreheads together. The touch is close, intimate but solidly affectionate in a way that halts your breath. You don't think you've actually ever done this kind of gesture with anyone before, this sort of masculine, comrade-like near-embrace, close enough for your breaths to mingle. Simon is handsome, and he'd probably be kind of beautiful to you just for the sheer humanity of him, but you're not usually effected by those kinds of things.
'Not usually' isn't 'never', though.
Rocky interrupts.
"Simon hugging, question?"
Simon gives the back of your neck a squeeze, then lets go. You let out a shaky, kind of nervous breath of your own.
"Sort of," you say, since Simon doesn't seem inclined to answer.
"Good," Rocky decides. "Contact important for human skin, hug more."
You clear your throat.
"Uh we'll take that under advisement," you decide.
You head in to what you've started to think of as the Pool Room, even though it's still just a cordoned off section of the enclosure that's separated by a semi-transparent wall of xenonite.
So you're Dr. Ryland Grace, right, and the thing is that you often have trouble anticipating the actions of the people you care about. Like Stratt drugging you, like Rocky almost dying for you, and right now, like Simon just walking full-on into the radioactive blood pool that he's spent the past year or so visibly terrified of.
"Simon?!"
You nearly charge after him. It's thoughtless, not brave. Rocky stops you, exclaiming so fast that the translator can't pick up on it. Your ever-increasing Eridian linguistic comprehension tells you it's about what you would expect, though, several expletive-heavy variations on 'what the heck?!' and 'bad bad bad!'
The pool goes eerily still. The Eridians on the walkways watch, vibrating with confusion and uncertainty. Simon keeps going, ignoring your calls, heading into the pool like he's heading in for a baptism. The blood rises, swelling into a singular wave. You bolt for the mechanical arm that some of the researchers set up to pull bits off of the Iron Lung, some unformed half-idea that you could grab Simon's exosuit with it clamoring in your mind, but by the time you get there the pool has risen up and crested over Simon, and swallowed him up completely.
It flattens again.
No no no, you think, irrationally, trying to act anyway.
But there's nothing. The water has gone still and empty, and not only is there no sign of Simon or his exosuit, there's no sign of the blood, either. No traces of the Iron Lung. Just water, the same as it was before your warp experiment touched something it wasn't supposed to and once again dramatically reshaped the context of the universe.
No one is certain what to make of it, obviously. Speculation runs rampant.
Your house is quiet.
You sit on the beach, listening to the perfectly ordinary waves crash, the picture of some forlorn figure out of tragedy. Then you throw yourself back into it.
Not the water, obviously. The science. Whatever way Simon and his blood pool arrived by, that's probably the same way it all went back. Which means it's connected to your warping experiments, which means...
You get another signal.
This time, you're going to crack reality open like an egg.
BloodyMary where Simon wakes up on the Hail Mary before Grace.
Like, the universe blinks and some space/time phenomenon runs afoul of Simon's elder god moment and the next thing he knows, he's waking up inside some kind of space ship(?) that appears to be running on autopilot.
It's weird and the tech looks both dated and brand new, expensive and advanced but also extremely retro, like someone using a diamond-encrusted rotary phone to check their emails. Luckily it's all mostly in language that Simon can comprehend, unluckily a lot of the equipment still seems like it would require several degrees of expertise to operate. But eventually Simon figures out enough to find the ship's crew, and... it's not looking good for them.
Two of them are dead. Have been for a while. Whatever stasis system(?) they have has preserved the corpses pretty well, but it's past the point of being able to try and revive them. The other is still alive, but Simon's not sure how to safely wake him up or what to do if that starts to change. He decides to just keep an eye on the situation, presumably there's a system that will wake the guy up whenever the ship reaches its destination, and if he starts to look bad before that point then Simon can always try to manually revive him and hope for the best.
Anyway, the ship has medicine and supplies, which he desperately needs. He figures the other two crewmen weren't planning on dying, so they can probably spare enough of said supplies for him. He figures out the AI well enough to start asking questions and eventually puts together that he's time traveled(?) or crossed into another dimension, that this ship is on a mission to figure out why the stars are going dim, or rather why there's one star that isn't, and he's not sure what to make of it but it seems he's also landed on another one-way trip.
When Grace wakes up, confused and without his memories, Simon panics and because Grace assumes he must've been part of the crew he just... goes with that. Grace thinks that he woke up from stasis early and that his weirdness is a result of isolation. He's a little surprised that there's an amputee aboard but it would be insensitive to ask, right? Not that a one-armed guy can't be an astronaut, yeah? Although Simon is also weirdly cagey about what his specialty is supposed to be and seems vague on the mission too, Grace assumes his memory also suffered some kind of an issue from being in stasis, he's just glad he's not alone.
Then they run into Blip-A and they're even more not alone, Rocky moves in, everyone does science, Simon still doesn't really seem to have an area of expertise per se, Grace keeps waiting to remember the part where Simon joined the mission (he's sure he'd remember him), Simon's kind of sweating bullets still wondering how he's supposed to explain anything, and then the whole fishing trip on Adrian goes pear-shaped and Simon uses like. Eldritch blood magic...?
Grace is having trouble computing that but he definitely saw it. So. Guess that explains why he's on the mission, if someone found a literal space wizard they would want them on the Mankind-saving mission, if ever there was a time for some kind of secret cult society of wizards living under the radar to come out in the open it would be now, yeah. But Grace can also see where explaining that to an amnesiac would be awkward and seem too hard to believe.
He has connected the dots!
Anyway he doesn't really notice that his Simon Joins the Mission and Reveals Wizards memories never arrive, he's too distracted by the revelation that Stratt forced him to go on the mission and he didn't volunteer, and then there's the whole issue with the taumoeba breaking containment and turning back to rescue Rocky and save Erid, which they both agree to do. By that point Simon has established himself as a presence in Grace's mind and Grace no longer considers him that much of a mystery to be solved (Simon's abilities are, Simon himself is not), whenever Simon lets slip something about like, competing for food or being in prison or in a cult, Grace just assumes he himself was pretty sheltered from how bad the situation on Earth was getting due to being in the Project Hail Mary bubble, and is like yeah okay Stratt double fair play to you, I didn't realize it was getting quite so Mad Max out there.
Now up until this point, Simon has done a good job of staying out of Grace's logs. Grace has mentioned him but in such a way that everyone on Earth probably thinks he's hallucinated an imaginary friend in the isolation and stress, like well damn he's cracked but at least the science seems sound.
Yes sure Dr Ryland Grace, your good friend Simon the One-Armed Blood Wizard is up there with you and the aliens, and for that matter so are all of us in spirit. Godspeed and thank you for your noble sacrifice.
Grace himself thinks that Simon is making his own reports, but when they go to send the beetles he's like, no we should do one together to make it clear that we're both agreeing to this and have come to this decision as a team. At which point Simon is just like, well... okay? Still just kind of avoiding conflict by going with the path of least resistance. So he smiles and nods and waves at the camera, and is like Hello Earth, Simon the One-Armed Blood Wizard here. Um. Yeah I'm good with going back to save Rocky and Erid too. Best wishes, and all that.
Grace doesn't find out until they're on Erid and they get the first long distance transmission from Earth that essentially amounts to him discovering that not only did he make first contact with aliens, he also made first contact with interdimensional blood wizards.
after many months of not being able to do almost any bookbinding at all, i bring to you: handprint on a belladonna heart by the magical @maplesdonut! everyone go read it right now i'm so serious. pause and go read it. you can come back when you're done
ok, now that you've finished reading, WASN'T IT SO GOOD? obviously, i had to read it ten times and then bind it immediately.
i haven't done much typesetting lately either, so i was reminded how much i enjoy it while i designed this one and looked for the perfect wishing well graphic and spent an hour trying to decide exactly how the spacing on the title should be (i swear this is fun for me).
just in case you forgot earlier, here is another link to this fantastically devastating s2 death curse fic. go read it!!!!
This is One Step Forward and Like Footprints on the Seashore by @adrianainthesnow (Stepping Stones blog, AO3)
It's also double sided!
[video desc: op flipping the book over to reveal that both stories are on the opposite sides of the same book, with one cover for One Step Forward and one cover for Like Footprints on the Seashore]
I stole this gimmick from Lauren Oliver's Replica - it's 2 perspectives of the same story in the same way so I figured the format fit
"winners-verse" series triple bind also for @ellisonwongparty! such a messy series in the best way possible, i adore when characters are given the space to be deeply flawed and human. absolute rollercoaster to read, and a blast to bind! more images and details on my AO3.
This is a very charming illustration and I do approve of Accidental Latin, but unfortunately, that is not what this (Fake) Accidental Latin actually says. Google Translate seems to think "temu" is identical to "timor" (infinitive, "to fear"), which would then be conjugated in first-person singular as "timeo" ("I fear"). "Temu" is not a word in Latin. So that is a very weird leap on Google Translate's part to turn gibberish into... something vaguely etymologically similar sounding? Hmm.
Next, "die" does mean "day," though nominative singular is "dies," i.e. "dies irae." It could be conjugated "die" if it was in ablative or locative case, but "die ad die" would mean something more like "day to day." "Ad" is in a "to" direction and "ab" is from, i.e. "ab urbis," and ablative case is used to indicate the movement of a thing. In short, "by" is not really a way to translate "ad"; we might want "per" here? (Through, by means of, etc.)
Not to mention, it would be weird to put one "die" at the start and another at the end The verb also usually goes at the end in Latin sentences, just for that extra bit of fun. So yes, in short, this is not actually Latin, and Google Translate is very bad at Latin in particular. Nonetheless, still charming.
Agree, @qqueenofhades, except on the matter of breaking “die ad die” apart. It’s a common structure in poetic and oratorical Latin to jam one phrase in the middle of another. I can’t think of an example exactly parallel to this construction, but I could believe a Roman poet would write it!
Ah, that is true. My Latin is of the reading-medieval-documents (particularly charters and/or chronicles) variety, where the sentence and usage structures are often more formulaic and there is less poetic license to move words around. There is obviously far less fixity for word order in Latin, since the conjugations explain how they grammatically relate to each other rather than placement in the sentence. (Coincidentally, this is why I used to say that the best feeling in the world was walking past a Latin classroom and not having to go inside it. Ahem.)
So yes: true that poetical Latin might be more at liberty to split the "die"-s up that far, though "timeo" (verb) is still more likely in most cases to go at the end, which would place them together anyway ("die ad die timeo," "day to day I fear" if translated in strict word order, which would make sense to an English speaker and sound more poetic anyway). Keep in mind, however, that my Latin is a) fairly rusty and b) mostly used for said formulaic legal document reading rather than freeform verse, so don't super-hard quote me on this.
I saw that ablative “die” and that final -u on “temu” and thought of the ablative supine (as in “mirabile dictu”) but as you observe, there isn’t a verb that “temu” could be, and then also, the ablative supine requires an adjective, as far as I know.
But perhaps “temu” is a hapax legomenon (in which case we would need the rest of the text to gloss it) or a scribal error for temeratu, from temero, “I defile or disgrace”. In that case, and in true Tumblr form, I might translate it as “daily I disgrace, in the manner of the day”, with some errors attributable to the scribe.
....oh my god. You might be a genius. Because what else does Tumblr do but daily disgrace [itself, oneself, and/or numerous others] in the manner of the day, and make numerous scribal errors.
