#oleg's lore

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We all love enemies to friends and enemies to lovers but:

The "nobody punches them but me" dynamic? When they have all kinds of nicknames for eachother that started as insults but are now more like second names? The moment when they're both just a bit too tired to kill eachother so they go get some pizza together instead and then fight over who pays for it?

Enemies to found family siblings. Please consider.

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… may I ask you about Nap?

// @cryptid-s-wips

OKAY this has been marinating in my askbox for too long sorry here is the lore-

Nap uses it/its pronouns, speaks in creature noises because its creator was busy learning how to die when making it so they kind of just. Forgot to add parts. Including a mouth, nose or any hair. Also it looks like it's made of patchwork for the aforementioned reason.

They're 6'5 (about 2 meters) tall, grey-ish, with multiple pinks wings and heart-shaped pupils. They love pastel colors and usually wear soft, fluffy things if possible. Very much autistic-coded.

They're an angel, no, I mean literally - a non-human being made by a god (there are many gods in this setting, which are giant primordial whales floating in space creating more space in the process. Also they're like super poisonous to humans. Don't worry about it) - but the problem is that the very unusual god that made Nap learned to die before they told Nap what they made it for, which is kind of the whole deal with angels, them being made for some purpose.

Also at this point in the Starcrumbs universe humans have been hunting angels for divinity (the stuff gods make angels out of) for over a century now because it can override laws of physics and can be used as oil++, but also extracting it from an angel requires making said angels very much not alive. And the god put all of their divinity into Nap, so now it's a walking oil deposit ready to be cut up and used, on top of having an ongoing existential crisis. I love this little guy I am putting it through all the trauma always-

Oh, and angels are poisonous, too. Less than gods but crude divinity either fucks up humans very badly or miracles them into other forms of existence, usually unorganic, so Nap is also always concerned with accidentally hurting/killing its human friends :))

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Oleg darling. I need to know about The Personsmith.

Hiiii Inara! Sorry I've been in exam hell and post-exam burnout purgatory, I am now back and ready to interact with people in a social manner!

1. What is The Personsmith?

The Personsmith is a story idea I had rotating in my head for a while. It's premise is "what if there was a magic guy who could tinker a person's body and a very desperate trans youth ready to embark on a magic quest just to get some HRT".

2. What happens in The Personsmith?

The premise stayed, while the details had quite a few changes since I began working on this project about half a year ago (I think?). Now what we have is:

Slavic folklore retelling but more "inspired by / using the tropes of" than a pure retelling, which involves a guy, Vasya, trying to save his friend the Firebird while his younger brother, Ivan, is trying to capture said firebird because dad said so (she stole some special apples, it's a whole thing).

Vasya is the trans guy who eventually goes on a quest to find the Personsmith (they're also inspired by a certain fairytale, one where a wolf asks a blacksmith to forge him a new voice to trick some kids into thinking he's their mom. If that's not queercoding I don't know what is).

Vasya has a thing with Firebird, Ivan gets sidetracked by a wolf shapeshifter, everyone is queer and dumb and fuck around and find out and grow as people.

3. Okay, but is there, like, actual plot?

We're working on that! For now this is more of a plot bunny with four semi-developed characters than an actual WIP, and so it remains in the general state of "they went there planning to do a thing, but messed up doing a thing so badly they now have to do another thing" plot clarity. I do know some thing about my children Vasya, Ivan, Firebird and Seriy (the wolf shapeshifter guy), so if anyone wants to hear about 'em, I'd be glad to tell more :]

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May I know more about Queen Victoria and this angel eating incident?

*breaks through the wall* WONDERFUL QUESTION! Now, for this to make sense, we have to establish some ~worldbuilding~

The end of Earth begins in 1862, as prophesied by a certain Irishman. It begins with the arrival of an angel.

An angel arriving is not, on its own, a big deal - happens all the time, people don't notice and carry on. Angels are rarely concerned with humans, their creator usually sending them to check up on a species of fungi or microbes or whatnot.

This angel, however, ends up in the middle of a human war (particular war to be decided, 1862 was a busy year) and gets immediately shot to death because an average angel's survival mechanisms are zip and nada

An angel getting shot to death means that divinity - an angel's sort-of-blood, the matter they're made of - leaks out, and that is Bad Bad Very Not Good because uncontrollable miracles going haywire

Once a few brave mad scientists studied what happened at the disaster scene, they found out that very diluted divinity can be used to perform more controllable miracles, de-aging and possible immortality included

Of course every rich person wants in on that

Something something avarice something something fatal flaw they all OD on angel blood and get uncontrollable-miracled out of existence (it basically means that the laws of physics stop applying to you. Everything impossible is now not only possible, but will happen. Queen Victoria turned into seven thousand potatoes with "I'm sorry" carved on each one)

Also! Divinity powered wars :D polluting rivers and occasionally oceans with divinity :D having to flee the unstable planet :D (that's why in current times everything is in space)

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*stands here like a kid holding out an empty candy basket* Trick or treat, hehehe!!

MIDNIGHT! Treat :]

Let's talk about Nap, Starcrumbs' protagonist. It looks kind of spooky and is somewhat dangerous to humans due to being very very poisonous, but it's an absolute darling who wants to explore the world and make friends and not hurt anyone ever. It looks like this:

It looks patchy because a dying god created it in a hurry. It tries to look less scary by dressing in soft pastel-colored clothing and communicating in soft, quiet noises - it cannot speak any human languages, although it does understand them. It likes communicating with plants and animals. Somebody please give it a hug.

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Oooooh, the whole concept of divinity being "pollution" is super fascinating. Is it like, actively harmful or is it just causing weirdness that then becomes harmful? (For example, does it kill people/animals that drink the water, or does it just make everything that drinks the water glow and turn in potatoes.)

How does it make the Earth unstable? What's the "last straw" that forces humanity to leave the planet? And since you said this all happened in the 1860's (or 1640's?), does space travel get invented earlier than in our universe (since technically we haven't perfected long-term space travel yet), or do things just not get Really Super Bad until ~200 years after that?

Also, is the Earth completely uninhabitable? Or are there still people and/or animals left down there? How far in the future does Starcrumbs take place? Is there a good record of how all of this happened, or is it mostly legends and guesswork?

Sorry for the massive question spam. I'm just absolutely fascinated by this WIP now!! Consider this a mega WBW ask, I guess!

~Morri🗡 (@memento-morri-writes)

HELLO Sorry it took a while to answer, I love long questions btw - you absolutely made my day!

1 - is divinity poisonous or does it just do weird stuff?

Yes and yes! To answer more coherently, it does weird stuff, but, above a certain concentration, the weird stuff becomes quite certainly deadly.

Divinity conducts 'miracles', or changes the properties of things in ways that should not be possible. Uncontrolled divinity usually tries to make all things equal, turning unusual instances, like living creatures, into the more 'natural' state of things, like mud or water. Fun fact - this is also how space is created! Ancient giant gods that look a lot like whales travel through space, and through their large concentration of divinity naturally create more of similar space around them.

Back to out question, if a human plummets into a liquid that's 30 or more percent divinity, they'll probably turn liquid. Is it's 10%, they might turn into a fish or another aquatic lifeform, and 1% would mean drastic changes to their physiology. 0.1% and under, however, would mean that the human would gain some water-related properties, from transparency to being able to breathe underwater, without changing their shape - pretty neat and kinda cool! A lot of research went into making those changes more controllable. The smaller the concentration, the more tame and favourable the results. Trace concentrations would still have noticeable effects.

2 - How do humans fuck up the earth? When do they abandon ship?

Earth gets seriously messed up during the 1860s-1870s because of

1) a select few countries trying to conduct experiments with divinity, which resulted in divinity contamination (areas where the local water and soil gained too high a level of divinity for it to not warp humans/animals/plants) and

2) divinity wars, which were caused by the other countries trying to get access to said divinity-containing material, aka a part of the angel's corpse (yes, they all fought over the corpse of one (1) angel.)

This resulted in most of North America and Europe being kind-of-not-habitable, and the rest of the world slowly experiencing the changes as small concentrations of divinity spread through the oceans, plus divinity powered weapons being... quite destructive.

The final drop that made people start leaving, however, was not necessarily a bad thing, and here we get to question no.3

3 - divinity, science and space travel

Having a gimmick that lets you bypass the laws of physics but comes with its own set of eldritch rules makes technology develop in bizarre patterns. For example, flight, including space flight, was exceedingly easy to master, seeing how the divinity stored in angel's wings already provides with flight capabilities, and things like pressure, heat, and atmosphere can be hand waved by infusing humans with tiny amounts of divinity until they adjust to their surroundings.

Telescopes, microscopes and all thing sight were also easy to make with angel's eyes, and the great migration began when someone spotted an angel in space - something of a second gold fever, the idea of space travel and angel poaching as the new course for humanity's development became the frenzy for the 1870s and early 1880s. There are, in fact, still humans on earth, some parts of it are in fact habitable, but the previous socio-economical and geopolitical environments are more or less nonexistent.

4 - how does the history look in-universe in Starcrumbs, and when does it take place?

Starcrumbs is technically set in the near past, the 2010s, although the alternative history splits quite far from the modern world for a number of obvious reasons.

There is no set history all people agree on - those that stay on earth mostly consider the angel's appearance a sort of test most of humanity failed but their ancestors didn't, a near-apocalyptic event to weed out the wrongs - the less religious ones consider it a sign of underlying tendencies of human nature. Still, the general earth-dweller consensus is "earth folk good, space folk not as good".

The beliefs of those that migrated to space and quite different, seeing for the solar system in an agglomeration of Holy Roman Empire-esque tiny state-settlements, but the general gist of it can be summed up to "earth-dwellers backwards and counter-progressive, space-dwelling and divinity gathering (not known as angel poaching because that sounds unseemly) good and progressive".

Sorry if I missed any points! This was super fun to think about, I have a better feel for the world now and would be glad to clarify on any points :-]

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Things that are now canon in the Starcrumbs universe:

1. Gay cowboys in space, Walt Whitman included

2. Space lesbians occupying the moon

3. Dostoevsky raises young Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker the found family (yes, you guessed, it, in space)

4. Queen Victoria and a bunch of other important world leaders poison themselves trying to eat an angel

Every day I love this WIP a little more, anyways please ask me about Starcrumbs,

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

Sometimes, a family is a mad scientist lesbian couple, their son which is also the result of a successful experiment and the god of death they keep in the basement for Reasons(TM)