#magic cords

[magiccords]

one more silly non-"canon" concept i had to get out of my head (i'm sorry)

[magiccords]

Was thinking a lot yesterday about how frustrating it would be for Rafi to make himself heard/understood after his throat injury... He doesn't fully lose the ability to speak, but it takes him a long time to figure out that it's location-dependent (and related to the magic cords that Simone used to stitch him up)—he finds that if he tries to travel too far from where he (almost) died, it starts to feel like there's fish-hooks pulling at his throat, and it's hard to breathe, let alone talk. At Simone's place, where he spends most of his time post-injury, he can just barely manage a whisper.

I think, after they've known each other long enough, sometimes Simone & Rafi will curl up on Simone's bed at the end of the day, and she will listen to him talk & talk into her ear (in his raspy whisper) about a strange bug he found in the desert, or a cool back flip he did off the roof of her trailer earlier, and it keeps him from going crazy with loneliness.

Button boards, which are electronic boards rigged up with buttons that play different words & phrases, have gotten attention recently for allowing dogs to communicate with people (they can hit a series of buttons with their nose or paw to say something like "I'd like food" or "let's go outside", etc.). But early versions of them were used & developed by cetacean, bird, and primate researchers as well, and Athena's mom (Dr. Durand's sister) is an animal cognition researcher who would be familiar with them. A TTS is text-to-speech device, but unfortunately Rafi is a slow hunt & peck typist, so probably that assistive device would not be as useful for him as it is for others (his handwriting is pretty hard to parse too, though...)

If Simone knew Felix's role in Rafi's whole situation, she would not be asking for permission to kill, she would just go for it lol. But that is a special secret that is shared between Felix & Dolores, and by the time Dolores gets out from under the influence of the necromantic entity possessing her, she is so wracked with guilt herself that she does not want to talk about it, luckily for Felix.

In some ways, post-possession Dolores is more unfortunate than Rafi because a) she could hear every single wretched thought/desire/secret in Felix's heart at one point thanks to her brain-parasite, and that experience has got to be a bit like wading through a cesspool, and b) she has to live with the memories of what she did while possessed, which aren't pretty either. And now she has a neurotransmitter hangover AND her empathy is back online, so her guilt over trying to vivisect Rafi (and maiming Felix) is there. And she can't even hate Felix for volunteering to be her assistant, because she knows what it's like to be as ruthless as him.

For a while, both Dolores and Rafi are living with Simone, and she feels like she's trying to rehabilitate two traumatized feral animals that are terrified of each other. Dolores is constantly creeping around from room to room looking like she's going through drug withdrawal, and Rafi is constantly bolting out of rooms like he's just seen a ghost.

Thinking about Mia seeing Rafi again just makes me sad. That's her puppy! Who the fuck did that to him? Why can't he remember her? Who will sing karaoke with her now?

[magiccords]

gathering my collected headcanons/notes so far about the entities that borrow Dolores & Rafi's brains for a while (this is mostly me thinking out loud for my own personal reference, and rather long-winded 😅)

Calling them "entities" makes me feel like they belong in a database table, but I don't know what else to call them right now lol.

Dolores thinks of hers as her "creative muse", and Rafi calls his own his "higher power" (from the Alcoholics Anonymous term).

Simone takes to calling them "earworms" after she learns about the auditory nature of their infectiousness, and Dr. Knox, who is trying to study them, uses the term "angels*", since they seem to have descended from the heavens on sound waves made by celestial bodies†.

In order to get one of these things into your head, you would have to have a near death experience inside of a canyon with exactly the right acoustics (and one of those conveniently exists near where Simone lives, out in the middle of the desert), and you'd have to be underwater. This happens to Dolores after her tour bus crashes and she wanders into the canyon to find water & shelter. I'm not yet sure when it happens to Rafi (it's not when his throat is cut, before Simone finds him, but later on, maybe after Dolores comes back to herself).

The canyon also has a reality-warping quality to it, and any life on the brink of death can be preserved there eternally without decay. Sounds also echo much longer in that place than you would expect, so it seems like there are always nearly sub-audible voices murmuring in there.

These beings/intelligences/whatever are like Clive Barker's cenobites in that pain & pleasure do not seem like very different sensations to them, but unlike the jaded cenobites, living bodies are totally novel to them, like humans are very much exciting raw materials for creative expression.

The entities think of themselves as artists and creative innovators, first and foremost. Dolores' harp-playing and Simone's taxidermy are no different to them than their desire to make musical instruments out of bones and guts (and weren't harp strings historically made out of cattle gut anyway?)

The entities can't just yank people around like puppets, but they have the ability to make their hosts feel like everything they're doing is their own choice. But the kind of choice you would make under the influence of the most fucked up chemicals, I suppose.

To Dolores, having one in her head is like experiencing the most intense manic episode and drug trip rolled into one. It feels like something numbed the empathy center in her brain and turned her fascination with sound up to eleven (especially human-produced sound). No decency guardrails, no need for sleep, everything is beautiful and intense and needs to be explored to its full extent. She also claims she can "hear the songs that are being sung in a person's secret heart", and she surprises Felix by telling him his own most private memory.

To Rafi, the possession feels more like living in a state of perpetual "subspace" (without the sexual connotations lol). He has no sense of personal responsibility or guilt or anxiety (these feelings are usually hanging around in the back of his head on a daily basis otherwise), just blissful acceptance and surrender. Life feels like walking through a dream where everything is happening exactly as it ought to. Interactions with people are colored by the sensation of déjà vu. Everyone is his best friend, even if they don't know it yet. His oxytocin levels are probably off the charts.

I think both Dolores and Rafi have a couple of hard limits that their brain-passengers would not be able to override, even with all of their neurochemical tweaking and coaxing. Rafi's is disappointed to find, for instance, that he will not lay a finger on Simone, and Dolores' has to hire a third party to half-murder Rafi and deliver him to the canyon (and to her great annoyance, he is gone by the time she comes to collect him there).

Those two are going to have the worst come-downs ever when they snap out of it.

*There is a new age book I remember reading decades ago (you know the kind you find in the "metaphysics" section of a used bookstore?) that posited that angels used to live in heaven, but they came down to earth to play in the bodies of living things, and when their god became angered at how flippantly they treated the sanctity of life, he trapped them in those bodies, and they were forced to undergo cycles of death and rebirth over and over again, to teach them a lesson.

†This is very much inspired by the sounds planets make (my dog started barking when I played the video in this article haha).

[magiccords]

Some side characters (Simone's neighbors)! Dr. Durand and Dr. Knox are researchers who live out in the desert, and sometimes Dr. Durand's niece Athena stays with them while her parents travel for work.

Dr. Durand studies the acoustics of space and Dr. Knox studies the symbiosis between desert plants and bacteria. Athena thinks their research is pretty cool because she's obsessed with aliens. She's also an artist, so she will sometimes drop by Simone's place for the day to draw while Simone does her embroidery or taxidermy.

[magiccords]

Some different Rafis throughout the story, because I wanted to explore some different looks for him (like Mia, I enjoy dressing him up).

Baby-faced 20-something Rafi when his life was awesome and his star was rising as a parkour-type trick athlete and death-defying stuntman (I think he had his own minor reality TV show, or a recurring part on one). Of course he had that floppy-bangs 90s-boy-band haircut. At this time he was living somewhere between San Diego and Los Angeles, after moving from Brazil as a young teen.

A decade and a half later (and a career-ending event later, and many many drinking binges later) — Rafi all dressed up for his performance of The Weighing of the Heart as imagined by his co-star Mia, after being hired by Felix for the part. The pre-show pep talk is Felix's version of "break a leg", I guess.

On the Halloween when Mia dressed up as Rafi and Rafi dressed up as Mia (Mia's idea) and they went bar-hopping (Felix's idea). (Rafi's makeover is much inspired by this album cover featuring the musician I based Rafi's general appearance on.) Rafi would remember this as one of his favourite nights out with Mia & Felix, if he could remember anything after his near-death experience.

After Rafi's mind is hijacked by an entity similar to the one piloting Dolores (I don't know if these beings have names yet, so I've been thinking of them as "Dolores's Creative Muse" and "Rafael's Higher Power"). This would be the first time Simone has ever heard the sound of Rafi's voice (if you can even say it's his at this point), because his Higher Power has a way of overriding the thing that makes him mute.

[magiccords]

try to extract as many body parts from the patient as possible without killing him—whoever manages to collect the most valuable pieces wins the game :)

(if you've never played Operation, I swear it's a real game)

[magiccords]

Some asks about your OCs!

Felix First :

What is your general favourite thing about the character? What is your least favourite?

Bonus question: share any additional thoughts, art, favourite scenes, anything you've been waiting for a chance to ramble about

Simone (I find her design very intriguing):

What is an aspect of their appearance that you like the most?

What is the origin of their personality? And let's be honest - how much of it is projecting?

Finally for any/all of your OCs that you've figured this out for:

• Do you have a voice claim for the character? What do you imagine the character sounds like?

Thank you for these fun questions!

What is your general favourite thing about [Felix]? What is your least favourite?

Ooh, excellent question for Felix especially! I think one of his key traits is that he’s paternalistic, and the things I like & dislike about him both stem from that.

On the one hand, his affection for Mia & Rafi is heartfelt—when he takes time out of his day to clean Mia’s laundry and cook her fancy meals, or when he nurses Rafi through a bad hangover and drives him to the grocery store so he doesn’t have to take the bus, it’s out of a genuine desire to take care of them. He’s a real acts-of-service kind of guy.

On the other hand, he thinks he knows what people need better than they do, and he can easily hurt the ones he loves without remorse and then justify it by claiming that he’s helping them or teaching them a lesson. And I think he likes others to be so dependent on him that simply withholding his care would be a punishment.

Bonus question: share any additional thoughts, art, favourite scenes, anything you've been waiting for a chance to ramble about

Felix’s last name "Papadakis" is a Greek family name that indicates the descendants of priests, but it can also mean "father". On a related note & in retrospect, I feel so evil for giving his (much younger than him) girlfriend Mia her (loathed) first name Elettra (the Italian form of Electra). I swear it was not intentional 😭 If Felix was aware of the Jungian implications of their names, he'd find the whole thing hilarious though.

He owns a few guitars and a drum kit, but like the fancy alcohols he collects, they're more "cool entertainment biz guy" props or status symbols than things he actually uses. He is the only character in this story who doesn't really have a creative outlet/practice/hobby.

What is an aspect of [Simone's] appearance that you like the most?

Simone used to be a totally different character, but I kept the round rose-colored glasses and nose ring through two different redesigns, so I guess I’m pretty attached to them 😂

What is the origin of [Simone's] personality? And let's be honest - how much of it is projecting?

I would say she is an amalgam of a few cherished people in my own life. Like them, she is kind of "online" in terms of pop culture knowledge & hobbies (she definitely reads fanfiction). She likes people, but she gets socially drained fast & keeps a lot of her secret self hidden or at arm’s length from others. She likes to listen to/read gossip, she has a sharp/sarcastic sense of humor, and she’s a bit of a snob.

I don't think I project much on her, but she is the one I would want to be friends with the most if these characters were real people haha.

Do you have a voice claim for [any/all of] the characters? What do you imagine the character sounds like?

I do! I was literally just talking about this with a friend on Discord, and I’m so glad for this excuse to share here 🙂 I will put this answer in a separate post, since this one is already so long hehe

[magiccords]

Part 5 of drawing my OCs as tarot cards—Dolores Shen-Sandoval as the Judgement card.

(Or maybe more accurately: the body that once belonged to Dolores Shen-Sandoval, and which is now hosting the nameless echo of a song transmitted from the heavens, conducted by the invisible cords that connect all things in the universe.)

Card meaning: Rebirth/renewal, a message from the heavens, a life-changing event, transformation by a higher power, end of days.

Before she became a vessel for an otherworldly consciousness, Dolores was a harp player and singer. Her band was touring the American southwest when their bus crashed in the middle of the desert, an accident that spared only her. Wandering through the desert alone, she finds herself delirious, dehydrated, and in the bottom of a deep gulch, but after spending the night there, she emerges a changed woman.

Like the old Dolores, she is still a passionate and dedicated artist. Unlike the old Dolores, her art involves taking people apart & putting them back together in interesting ways in the hopes of building the perfect musical instrument.

+ Some bonus expressions

+ Some songs for her:

Pet Body by Miya Folick

In Boxes by Aurora

SCREAM by Grimes & 潘PAN