#ftc tag

[peliginspeaks]

I think one of my favourite things about the Neath as a setting is the number of ways there are to be totally obliterated. Not killed, killed is different than Obliterated. Obliterated is a loss or transformation of self so utter and complete that it leaves you unrecognizable. There's something about that, the destruction of it, the way there's still something left after but it isn't necessarily You anymore. The way the line between obliteration and just change is permeable enough to be non-existent. Do you still feel like yourself? Does an answer of yes make your youness somehow more able to be verified? Does your new form love you, even if you aren't there anymore to love it back?

[peliginspeaks]

More lighthearted FTC fact: On better standing days they will absolutely smack people with their cane. Their reason is that people who earn a smacking are not worth leaning that far over for, and that also their hand is too important to risk on some idiot's face. Only issue is, their cane has self-balancing Correspondence symbols inscribed on it, so it's normally very hard to turn it horizontally. They spent a week developing a sigil containing a special exception to the effect of "An upset allowed by exceptional need for contact". They published a minor paper on the change in tilt needed to make sure the 'contact' part of the symbol means physical and excludes emotional. A paper. From their dedication to making sure they can smack a bitch (gender neutral) with their cane.

[peliginspeaks]

The Shattered Relic

A cloud of mirror-shards, too numerous to count, and most too small to discern what they might reflect. From the tint of the pieces and a look at those few still large enough to see through, you can guess very little of them show the same thing.

The reflection of the Frostbitten Tomb-Colonist.

(No effects version + fun facts under the cut)

Each shard of the Relic represents a different role, persona, or facet of the Frostbitten Tomb-Colonist that they've played over their lifetime. Their original reflection cracked down the middle the first time they outlived their previous version of self, and the shards have only increased in number in the hundreds of years since.

The Relic is dissolute in personality, the shards often contradicting each other in morality and disposition. It is nearly incapable of making a unified decision.

The Relic can form other constellations with its glass: a sharp cloud that can rip through a target, a symbol of the Correspondence, or any other form for a very brief amount of time. The form shown is the one it falls into naturally, a loose mimicry of FTC's silhouette.

The more the Frostbitten Tomb-Colonist learns of the Discordance, the more shards are blacked out. Peering deeply into one will harm you. There is nothing to be seen inside. The nothing has no form, no bricks for the castle within.

The Shattered Relic emits a high-pitched shriek that sets the teeth on edge, like a shard of glass scoring down a window. You will not remember this sound when you wake up, but you will remember the way it made you feel. You will know her form, but you will not be able to recall the details of its fragments. The feeling will cling to the backs of long silences for years. You will not be able to forget it.

[peliginspeaks]

Thinking a lot about apocyan lately. I've always had a hard time pinning down the difference between it and Violant mentally, since they both relate so heavily to memory, but it seems to me like Apocyan is more about feeling, and Violant is more about detail.

Violant scours the edges of an object into your brain, so you can't ignore it. You could recreate the dimensions of it fully one to one a week after seeing it, or read letters written in violant ink straight from the backs of your eyelids. Apocyan memories, on the other hand, feel more like flashbulb memories, always with emotion attached. You remember a moment in time, the exact smells and feelings and some vivid imagery from when it happened, but if you try to pin down small-scale details, it goes wobbly. The overall image feels very clear, but it's like a painting. Try to zoom in on any part of it, and you'll just see brushstrokes. Step back, take in the feeling of it instead of peering so closely, and the shapes resolve into forms you recognize.

[peliginspeaks]

I miss my city.

I - I ?

E ye I ii I i us...? We - you don't agree you don't agree you don't agree you don't agree you don't even think about it. You do not remember the way I(you(us(we(you(I))))) would sing to the sun. You d

You do not think like the weaver anymore

Was I the weaver?

Was there ever a weaver?

Remem

Ber remem

ber there is not enough to remember there is not enough. It will break if you(I(we)) touch it. There is not enough.

I miss the way [. ?] left [?]s table messy on the porch after painting the tiles. The brushstrokes were so smooth and tiny, and I didn't understand h

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

I promised I promised I promised I promised and you forgot, I forgot, we forgot, I hate you I hate you with the strength of every sea you threw her away like so much sawdust and I -

Shrieking glass, grinding against itself. A shard tries to punish, to score down the others, to pull them to themselves and to their senses. She is quelled quickly. She has moved too much, the reflection shifted. The reflection has forgotten who it was.

.

I can rest. There was too much of me. I was bursting at my seams, and the world was so tiresome, and no w I can only feel how little it all ever mattered. It's so refreshing. You all have no appr

Silly. The way you think about such things is ridiculous. There is and has only ever been only one of

- trees and green grass, he said he'd bring me there and I only lau

- trees and green grass, he said he was going back to the Surface and I cut his throat

Shut up shut up shut up I do not know the languages you speak and it hurts m y [. ] it hurts hurts hurts why do I have no ears I want to cry what did you do what did you do

- and he held his calloused fingers over m ine to guide the brushstrokes and the mastery of time flowed into m

I'm better than this. I'm be tter than you. I can't believe I was ever this dramatic.

trees and green grass, trees and green grass, they will bend to my touch if

The cloud meets the jungle. A waft of viric light catches in its shards, and for a brief, transient moment, a drowsy consensus is reached. The false-dream grips them, more powerful than any of the fragments of glass and mind are alone.

A taste lingers on my lips, a satisfaction in my chest. I have none. I have none. I do not remember if it was sweet. I know it must have been, to have been worth it. It must.

[peliginspeaks]

In terms of clothing, FTC tends to latch onto an era of fashion they like as they pass through it and then just not let go of it for decades and decades afterward, until the world manages to kick out something else they find appealing. They liked hoop skirts. They're still wearing them. All this "puffed sleeve" nonsense is ridiculous. You will make way for her skirt like a respectable individual or you will be engaged in a two hour lecture on the merits of minding your damn business.

[peliginspeaks]

The Frostbitten Tomb-Colonist has a lab at Benthic university, a large old one befitting of a well-tenured professor (which she has taken the better part of two decades to become, offering her services as an authority on the subject of linguistics and then proceeding to study a different sort of language entirely). Ostensibly her lab is meant to be for chemically dating transcripts and clarifying old ink, but no academic needs that many lab assistants and that much fireproofing for that. Her high assistant turnover rate is something that she lets the rumours of dreadfully boring work answer for her, but the former interns will whisper in dismay of a teacher who feared death so little that she did not most times seem to remember or care that her assistants were mortal - and the work she assigned really was dreadfully boring. What a tedious chore, to be caught ever within the blast radius and never to be trusted with the pen!

Still, between all the comings and goings, she did get a reasonable amount done. Nothing useful per se, but she did crack the conjugation of a sub-type of Correspondent slang that the Masters use, and replicate the inflection that communicates sarcasm between the stars, and solve the mystery of how to remove stains in both violant and irrigo from clothes. Some pick up candlemaking and then stow the supplies in a closet for a year or two, before rediscovering them on a rainy afternoon to craft a paltry two or three before putting away the kit again. The Frostbitten Tomb-Colonist picks up and puts down the Correspondence, language of fire and florid truth, at intervals of a few hundred years. This recent turn in London was refreshing. They seem to value eccentrics here, or at least like to play at it sometimes, and so she was allowed to get away with a good deal. Freeing, but the sort of thing that gets old fast. A challenge next, perhaps, to last a little longer before it grows dull in essentially the same way.

Yes, she sees you shuffling, she knows you would like to leave now. She is sure you think she has been talking long enough, and she is sure she doesn't care. Off with you now. Don't forget that lab assistant applications are still open.

What?

Apply

Back away slowly

Voting ended onDec 16, 2025

[peliginspeaks]

You know that effect where the more hyper-wealthy a person is, the more off-the-charts strange and often distasteful the things they do to feel like it's still worth something get? The Frostbitten Tomb-Colonist is like that but with life experiences. She's flung herself through so many highs and lows in the effort to make the very most of her functional immortality that it's all mundane now. Heartbreak? Grief? Terror? Elation? Boring. She can barely find anything that makes her even feel those things anymore, and every time she does, it's just about like every time before it. She needs more. She needs stranger. And if she's well and truly come to the end of those options, like she thinks she has, then she needs something that will wipe away all other points of reference. Something that will invert or obliterate every other feeling she has known, pushing the dial into new territory entirely. Something that defies every law she has spent two thousand years learning the feel of.

The Discordance is harder to learn if you go in with structured expectations. It is the art of seeing the blank space around the shape, the art of reading between the lines of reality's laws. The Frostbitten Tomb-Colonist has accumulated so many laws, so much reality, so many expectations over her long life, that to learn this language should be near impossible. It should kill her - violently, repeatedly, and thoroughly. It should deflect her utterly, unless she devotes a truly staggering amount of time and effort to subverting every expectation she has for life and language.

And that is why she wants to learn it. Because it should be almost, barely, not-quite impossible - and because it will make her feel types and levels of pain that no other experience in life has conceived of yet, in exchange for a type of power-between-powers that she has never before held. It is so tantalizing an offer. When everything has lost its novelty, "nothing" is the final delicacy.