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comunidadarcsystemworks · 1 year

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Interview with Arc System Works (2023) - Part 1

Today, we are glad to communicate that Comunidad Arc System Works and Anime Fighting Game Community teamed up once again to bring a new exclusive interview to our followers! Since this interview has too many questions, we will publish it in two different parts so we can share it with all of you sooner. We hope that you enjoy Reading all of the new info that we have to share today, Let’s Rock!

Questions by AFGC:

1. Recently, various fighting games have added new controls and mechanics to not only make each game unique, but to also ease new players into the fighting game genre. However, some of these mechanics disinterest a few fighting game players who wish for more freeform gameplay. What is it like to strike that balance?

Guilty Gear -Strive- Producer: Ken Miyauchi

Our objective here has been to create a new form of "free style" play-feel experience for the players.

One major problem of a running series title is that players of previous titles are able to bring over their experiences directly without need of much adaptation, and that poses as a huge entry barrier for new players who want to join in the scene. With that, our ideal situation would be to create a new, challenging and fair environment for both new and old players, while also keeping the freedom of expression.

We retain the view of simply making the game "simple" or "toned down" would generally make the fighting game lose its appeal over other genres.

2. This year for Arc System Works has been a huge boon for rollback netcode, with the implementation of it being added to Blazblue Cross Tag Battle, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, and with it releasing soon for Guilty Gear Xrd and Dragon Ball FighterZ. How was the process to add rollback to all these games?

Guilty Gear -Strive- Producer: Ken Miyauchi

We cannot speak on behalf of non-Arc System Works published titles, but at least for in-house titles, the process varies between each project and there are no 2 same projects. Ultimately, it is the positive feedback from players which are definitely motivating us to support rollback netcode, especially after the implementation on Guilty Gear -Strive-.

3. For the past two years Arc System Works has been developing the Arc World Tour and Arc Revo. How has it been to develop these tours for an international audience?

Global Marketing Dept. User Community Team Manager: Riku Ozawa

For the past couple of years it has been a tremendously challenging period for events due to COVID-19. We had to factor in the risk of events needing to stop or cancel abruptly, and that greatly hinders our efforts to push for bigger promotions. The other common alternative of doing online events also has its drawback; more often than not, we find it difficult to convey the passion of the competitors to the online audience via streaming.

4. One of the biggest challenges of the Arc World Tour is trying to get a representation of Arc System Work Communities from around the world. In particular, South America and Africa have always asked for a place on the world stage. Is this something we can see going into future tours?

Global Marketing Dept. User Community Team Manager: Riku Ozawa

Ideally we do wish to have a grand event one day where we can include as many countries as possible, like the World Cup that just ended not too long ago. Moving forward we will be incorporating more regions into the AWT wherever possible.

5. Previous in 2020, there was a going to be a new type of event during the Arc World Tour being the daredevil events, events where people from all over the world can submit their events to be added to the circuit. However, due to the pandemic this and the entire tour had to be changed. Given how offline events are returning is there any hope for daredevil events to return?

Global Marketing Dept. User Community Team Manager: Riku Ozawa

We observed that there are many community-driven tournaments out there despite being a 18-months old game, and we are keen to revive the daredevil campaign too. Stay tuned for more details.

6. Final question about the tours, in the past we had games such as Blazblue Central Fiction, Guilty Gear Xrd, and Granblue Fantasy Versus all featured on the world tour stage. Is there any chance for these or other previous Arc System Work titles to be included in the tours in the future?

Global Marketing Dept. User Community Team Manager: Riku Ozawa

It is hard for us to incorporate games with less active users into the tour, but for future Arc-organized tournaments such as ARCREVO, perhaps we can have it in the form of a side tournament, where fans can gather and compete together.

7. To many, Guilty Gear Strive, is one of the best rollback fighting games to date. With the inclusion of that and crossplay coming to the game, can we expect that level of treatment to come to all future ASW games?

Guilty Gear -Strive- Producer: Ken Miyauchi

We hope to maintain (if not better) the quality of the rollback netcode implementation for future ASW fighting games. However, it is much more difficult to say for crossplay, as it heavily depends on the nature and the size of the game.

At the very least, as the producer of GGST, I can safely say if the new project is to be on the same level as "Guilty Gear", then I would certainly like to give it the equal treatment as well.

8. As much as we know about Arc System Works, the fighting game company, we know a bit about Arc System Works, the publishing company, can you tell us what is in the works outside the world of Fighting Games?

Global Marketing Dept. Biz Dev / Producer: Zack Tan

We publish many other games besides just fighting games, such as "River City" series (or alternatively known as either "Renegade" or "Kunio-kun"), the "Double Dragon" series and more. Recently we have also released hit-titles "River City Girls" "River City Saga: Three Kingdoms" as well.

Additionally, we have partnered up with other companies to publish several titles locally as a regional project. Some examples include "Aragami 2", "Kitaria Fables", "Fallen Legion" series and many more. The most recent one we have here is "RWBY: Arrowfell", thanks to the great guys over at Rooster Teeth and WayForward for making it possible.

As a development studio, we also have some smaller scale projects around. Our latest game, albeit limited to PS4/5 and Japan only, the "Two-Jong Cell!!", a game where the player plays mahjong with cute anime girls or against online players, with a twist of special skills. We also have "Ground Divers" released on Nintendo Switch within the year too.

CASW’s note: As a fan of Resonance of Fate and Ys as well, I will add that Arc System Works also published the Asian version for Resonance of Fate 4k/HD Edition and Ys Origin in the past (we can find that version in webs like Play Asia). Kitaria Fables, for example, it’s a PQube title that I had the pleasure to translate into Spanish so I wanted to publicy show my hapyness for that chance and seeing that ASW published it in another region is incredible.

9. One of the biggest challenges of this year was trying to qualify for the Arc World Tour finals you would have to win one of the few qualifiers spots. Is there any consideration for a longer tour with more spots for players to qualify?

Global Marketing Dept. User Community Team Manager: Riku Ozawa

For this year's format, we had hoped to achieve a more exciting feel and raise the tension for each of the qualifier tournaments, where we have limited slots. However, we came to realise that there are many more players around the world with great potential than we had initially expected, over the course of the current tour. For future qualifying tournaments, we do hope to expand the scale.

Note: This questions have been asked last year (11/27/2022), that means that some of them might be outdated.

¡We will publish Part 2 during next week!

#AFGC #CASW #Comunidad Arc System Works #Anime Fighting Game Community #Arc System Works #ASW #Interview #Blazblue #Guilty Gear Strive #GGST

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goodbyenorthernlights · 8 months

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So fun fact: I read Rezo's fanwiki page before I properly watched the series for the first time, and as a result was thoroughly spoiled on a lot of things. And there's one particular sentence that piqued my curiosity, especially after I finished the first season.

"He [Rezo] also transferred the prince of Taforashia and his good friend Duclis' souls to their current beast forms..."

'Huh,' I thought to myself, 'So Rezo's friends with some guy called Duclis? Doesn't seem to be a big plot point since the various wiki pages don't talk about it much outside of this brief mention, but still neat, especially considering how few relationships Rezo seems to have in the show.'

So I was looking forward to REVO/EVO-R for a while and seeing a potential glimpse into Rezo having a social life of some sort and whatever further insight that might give me into his character.

And then Duclis's arc came and went in Revolution and nobody ever mentioned if Duclis and Rezo ever so much as knew each other before the Durum disease thing happened and I was 'Huh. Maybe it'll come up later, when we get to jar!Rezo.'

And then there was still no mention of Rezo and Duclis being friends and the series ended and I

Brilliant and insightful master of reading comprehension that I am

Concluded 'Damn, I can't believe someone went and edited their weird headcanon into Rezo's fanwiki page. That's annoying.'

And it took me like several months to put together what was actually meant.

(Duclis is a good friend of the prince of Taforashia. Not Rezo. Rezo has no friends.)

#rezo posting

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thschei · 3 months

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Having a lot of Realizations today and I'd like my 3rd eye to close.

#erin talks #text #nothing serious like . fandom-related sad things #my fav sh album (which is about death) came out the year my dad died.......... at least not the same month I guess #I guess that's relatively serious but I'm just saying like this isn't a vague post I'm not mad at anyone #I'd joke that I'm mad at revo for it but like it's my fav album it improved my life I would pay over $600 for a legit copy of the cd

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alliebirb · 18 hours

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revo bby anon, it have been like a month and a half but i stg i am going to answer your ask, i starting bounding off the walls when i got it!!!!! !! School just hasn’t given me time to draw and i NEED to draw updated senbi and chiyoko designs

#i have not forgotten you i adore your ask #i want to answer it so fckin bad but I NEED TO INCLUDE ART OF THEM AND ALL MY ART IS OLD #DONT GIVE UP ON ME #ramblings #asks

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tseneipgam · 1 year

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“one tenth of the earth's surface has been constantly on fire, through no fault of human beings, for more than two hundred years. A look at a dynamic map of all the fires currently raging on the planet would reveal a multitude of these expanding red zones being carried forth by surface winds, in Africa es- pecially, the continent referred to by experts in the field as the Heart of the Inferno. I found it startling to consid- er that our human modernity had developed side by side with this incandescent presence. Some years ago, a musician friend told me about a long stint he'd once spent in an African jungle. Wanting to make recordings of instances of silence in nature, he had travelled to Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, the second largest and second deepest lake on the planet. 'So deep, he said, 'that there's no oxygen in the waters at the very bottom. They're fossil waters: A helicopter had dropped him off in a clearing in the surrounding jungle with nothing but a tent, a change of clothes and some survival snacks, plus the necessary gamut of recording equip- ment, all manner of tapes and ambient microphones. He saw no fires burning, or if he did, he didn't mention them to me, but he did say that, after a month and more of wandering those jungles, what struck him most was the utter absence of silence.”

“historically, we only ever keep a record of evil deeds. In fact, we only legislate for that which we consider to be pernicious; it never occurs to anyone to legislate for good or happi- ness. It was as though evil was actually held in higher regard than what's good. By this same logic, what's good, with no one keeping an account of it or checking it in any way, is a kind of echo that resounds to the ends of what is known, and its expansion, like that of the uni- verse, will know no limits. And another consequence to this: it makes it pointless, utterly redundant, to ever dis- cuss good, and that has the effect of making it even more invisible. Hence why, contrary to popular belief, it’s revo lutionary to speak of good things.”

“I picked up the book, Physics at the Residencia de Estudiantes. I tried to read the rest of the 'Stellar Universe' chapter, the talk by Sir Arthur Eddington on the Belgian priest Lemaitre who, as I've said, discovered the fact of the universe's expansion, but I found I couldn't get beyond the phrase, 'There are some stars so dense that a tonne of their mat- ter would fit inside a matchbox.”

“Back in bed again, I watched the snowflakes falling on the palm tree, and thought how no two snowflakes are the same, but all, without exception, have six points distributed symmetrically around a single centre point. I know that in any place where symmetry is lacking, it's because, in that portion of planet Earth, the forces of nature are in conflict; eddying river water and human migration flows are such sites of conflict. Thus a snow- flake can be called an isolated point, a place in which the forces keeping the crystals from flying apart are not in competition with anything. Snowflakes are bunkers, isolation chambers, unreachable bubbles; these were my thoughts as I lay in the bed, staring blankly out at the precipitate of each and every one of those snowflakes. And this thought concerning bunkers and points of isolation brought with it another in turn: the possibil- ily of the existence of a place where, densely packed together, all the memories of a person are contained: a neighbourhood, a city, a room or street bevond which a person would relinquish their memories, and thereby all awareness, of what had gone before; they'd only need to go back across the threshold of that street for all the instability and turbulence that is memory to be activat ed once more.”

“It's like when you gather a group together, saying you want a photo, but then press the button to record video instead - they're expecting a photo, but you press record. Then you watch it back and you fall over laughing, and the people you tricked also find it the funniest thing. An unimaginable number of strange contortions pass over a person's face in the moments before thev're frozen in a photo. I thought I'd have liked to perform that same trick with the photos in Aillados, to have witnessed what the people in them were saying immediately prior to the capture of those images, the looks they gave one another and the tiny fluctuations of expression just before their portrais were taken; that surely wouldn't have been funny.”

“it all boils down to trash, blessed trash. He was a man of about seventy, dressed in an ash-grey suit pinstriped like a diplomat's, with a white shirt and cuff links, brogues, blue eyes, hair to match the suit and a moustache with tips waxed to point straight upwards, a detail that made him look astonishingly like Salvador Dali. He sat down on the bench beside us. I was about to say something, but he started talking before I could: My good men, trash is not a thing that should be re- cycled, the best thing is to leave it where it falls, one day we'll be buried by all the trash, it'll be the end of us, but not because of an excess of it, rather by default, and if we recycle it all, what will become of memory? How will we recognize our past selves if everything's already been radically transformed? Future archaeologists wont have any objects to work with, only files, computer files; oh, you'll have objects, yes, but only the ones we place in museums and other sites intended to transmit the most curated samples of our world to generations to come, and all of this, my good men, will be completely worth- less; bear in mind that everything useful we know about former civilizations is that which they left behind unin- tentionally, that which was accidentally dropped and forgotten about, the things they threw away and never bothered to gather or recycle, that's to say, their trash, it's this kind of random thing that truly tells us what past civilizations were like, and these things, the constants of the universe, are what join us to our forebears, because in the time to come there will be objects that neither change nor are capable of change, or, more precisely, and as paradoxical as it might seem, for a transformation to take place something has to remain the same, for example, in a chemical reaction everything changes, but the overall mass remains constant, and if it doesn't, the change can't take place, or, for example, consider the well-known story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where the main character's personality changes, but his social en- vironment, his home and the city he lives in go virtually unaltered, because if that weren't so, if in that story ev- erything changed completely, there couldn't be a story, the narration would simply fizzle out, do you under- stand? Well, the same goes for trash, if we eliminate it or transform it into another thing altogether, recycle it in a Wholesale way, we'll be disconnecting ourselves from history, our history, and that would mean ending up in a kind of reality parallel to the civilizations that went before us, while, paradoxically, remaining linked to them, and I really mean this, my good men, this isn't sci-fi l'm talking about, this is real life”

“Neil Armstrong goes to the moon and takes twenty photographs, the most import- ant event of the twentieth century and there's only twenty photographs of it, but any teenage birthday party in this city, or any other city on the planet, will generate two hundred photographs-plus, is that not grotesque? Where's the sense in it? Where are we going to put all these images? In fact, by transforming them into digital files, files nobody will be able to read in a few years' time, since the programs needed to open them won't exist any more, what we'll actually be doing is obliterat- ing those moments, they'll disappear and never come back, and what this amounts to is a slow but certain ne- gation of material itself, nothing short of a disaster, but that's not even the worst of it, my good men, now we get to the nub, by which I mean the recycling of bodies, how we hate the body, with what furious intensity do we seek to do away with it”

“Come night. I'd get up from my desk and see a man in the building across from mine who, standing there in his underpants, would heat up frozen beans in a pan. America is a very sad place. All there is there is sadness.” “Cities that experience very hot summers and very cold winters seem to me like bags of frozen food, frozen and defrosted over and over again: you need only tear open the plastic to see how inedible the contents have become. And that's precisely what I think my walks amounted to: a way of wearing down the outermost layer of the pave- ments, the skin, eventually to have it rip open of its own accord, so that I could then take a look inside.”

“have you noticed the way people always talk about large numbers of people migrating in terms of migration "flows", them "flooding" an area, "stream" of immigrants, that kind of thing?' 'Pardon?' just mean, the language always tends to be liquit-t lated - "Flows", "streams", "floods" - like it was water light or wind being talked about. I sometimes woris What would happen if we referred to movements of par Ble in terms of what they are, which is to say a sucesil aireal, solid bodies, the sum of a whole lot of parild all independent of one another 'don't you think that would change everything?”

“a few days earlier on the plane from New York City to Montevideo, when I'd sat looking at the emergency instructions they put in the seatbacks. These had a picture of a woman looking out at you from the sea with a flotation device in her hands after an apparent crash-landing. She reminded me of Venus in Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. Maybe it was the look in her eyes, or the way the wind tossed her hair, or her facial features, which were surprisingly similar, or her unsettling calm. As though, instead of having just been in plane crash, she'd that very moment been born out of the waters.”

“January 1889, Nietzsche is known to have left his Turin residence on Via Carlo Alberto, intending to walk into the city centre. He'd gone barely two hundred metres when, coming onto the Piazza Carignano, he pulled up at the sight of a recalcitrant horse being flogged by its driver. Nietzsche approached and, throwing his arms around the beast's neck, whispered something in its ear that to this day remains a conundrum: 'Mother, I am stu- pid.' He immediately went back home, where he lost the power of speech and soon passed out, not coming round until a decade later, a few days before his death in 1900. A period Nietzsche would have no memory of whatsoever.”

“The darkness in that moment was total, the car headlights sweeping across expanses of yellow grass which, with the wind blowing through it, looked like liquid gold. We passed a cowshed, one wall of which was covered in a confused mass of graffiti; I just had time to read a part that said: 'God doesn't fear the news. God is the News. We saw a chapel a little further on with a cemetery: didn't know if the creature lying outside the entrance was a dog or coyote. Driving at night is a question of try- ing to see things before you reach them; by the time you do, the headlights have moved on to something else. This same anticipation, I said to myself, applies in life gener- ally given that life is a journey through darkness at the end of which, in dying, you emerge into the light of day.”

“some years later the city would be filled with the mixed smell of burnt plastic and roast chicken, a smell that lingered for a couple of years in the south of the island. 200,000 tonnes of steel, 325,000 m2 of concrete, 55,000 m2 of glass from 43,600 blown-out windows, 198 elevators, each of which had an average capacity of 55 people, 71 escalators, 930,000 m2 of office interiors, 3,000 hu- mans, all reduced to dust. I was installed in the Home by then, but people say that particles, both organic and inorganic, got into every single corner of the city, into people's lungs and homes, into their food and their mat- tresses. It must be pretty strange knowing you've got particles of people's spleens inside you, particles of pens and hair, of Turkish rugs and asbestos, of the glasses for merly worn by young graduates, of silicon from people's breast implants, of adipose tissue, cockroaches, mosqui los, rats, sirloin steaks and trout from the Great Lakes. Preity strange, truly, to go around in the knowledge that This entire superstore of destruction is inside you, and always will be.”

“To clarify: it's tradition in my father's family for the oldest son in each genera- tion, in the presence of all available adults on the day, to extract a portion of wood from his father's coffin, only a small portion so as not to break the coffin, and then to carve it into a fob, in any shape or motif that should oc- cur to him. The keys to all the houses and properties he went on to own were supposed to be attached to it for the rest of his days. The tradition dates back farther than l know for certain, but I do know it started before the days of political parties as we now think of them. We are our dead past, all the coffins that go before us: so my father said to me one spring afternoon when I was nine years old, as we stood in the kitchen at the ranch, him jangling the keys on his familial fob - a pinewood rectangle the same size and shape as a dollar bill. I remember a cow outside the window stooping to drink from a meltwater stream - the winter ice was melting - and how it licked its lips and lowed as if to make light of my father's words.”

“he sat flicking his cell phone on and off. He wanted, he said, to try to get one over on the phone makers by turn- ing it on and off, and on and off, quicker than the light from the screen could keep up. I told him to quit it, he was going break the thing. 'Did you know that as foetuses we're 72 per cent heart,' Semicolon said, 'and at that point the heart's out- side the actual body?' To which I said: 'Did you know that the brain itself doesn't experience pain, so if someone shoots a bullet into your brain, you feel nothing? You just wind up a dumbass, like you. Know the only creature on earth that never gets can- cer is a shark?' *Know some planets have two suns, meaning it never gets dark there?'”

“I saw the vast and endemic tiredness of a mother”

“we saw some men in uniform pulling a dead body out of the water, somebody said it was an illegal immi- grant, we looked at the body and said nothing, made no comment except to say 'Time to go', and the next day she told me that the thought had occurred to her that the clothes of people who drown are more durable than the flesh of people who drown, this seemed an incredible thought to me, but it left her feeling extremely low, she said, because she was studying textile design, or possi- bly it was dressmaking, I never did get my head around the name of the course, and from that day on every time she went to cut the shoulder section of a jacket or part of a trouser leg the thought would come to her that she was really making a fabric coffin for someone who had drowned, isn't this an incredible thought?”

“we're so proud and arrogant, nothing's ever good enough, and now the cruise ship is so far out I can only just see it, those on board will be sipping martinis on the loungers by the covered pool, gazing up at the sky through the transparent roof cover, fixing their sight on the night clouds in an attempt to find answers to the questions they've been pondering their entire lives, questions they hope to solve in this voyage, and here I am, taking it all in with a single sweeping glance, I am a lasso, I snare objects and then bring them inside myself in miniature, the human gaze is capable of such things, shrinking the entire world so that it fits onto your retina, the sparks flying, pouring now from the let- ter'e, if somebody doesn't unplug that neon sign, I'll say it again, we're going to have us one chargrilled man, maybe even a building fire, but all of this is yet to hap- pen, sometimes nothing happens at all, we always want something to happen, we wait and hope, we don't know what for, only that we've waited in vain. The cruise ship is nothing but a speck in the far distance now, a boat for- merly moored on land, it was built on land and will never reach land again, isn't this the most terrible thing? Like a bird that took to the air and had to stay up there forever, forever beating its wings, never allowed to land. I shut my eyes.”

“Cigarette #18 There's a moment in the day when he's lying in bed and the clocks on display in the homeware section synchro- nize for a second - all the second hands align - and the entire mall shakes, as though the nervous system of the world were making its presence known. And there are moments when he and the birds are awoken by the sound of food cans expanding in the heat, bulging like footballs, or by the bicycles suddenly falling from their complex system of wall mounts, or a huge bang made by a box of snacks, all having rotted and fermented inside their bags and all passing their expiration date and ex- ploding at once. A feeling comes over him as though he's the guardian of a kind of Noah's Ark, like this is a spiritual reservation. a museum for an extinct mode of being. Previously, he thinks, the frenetic consumption of products meant they had to re-fill the shelves constant- ly. Nobody ever got to see what would happen in a mall if you just left it to evolve with no human intervention, like a nervous system unto itself. This is a kind of destruction nobody was ever taught about.”

“it's no coincidence that a mentally deranged animal is inconceivable, as is the idea of the planet ever malfunctioning. Any time we refer to a certain stone as beautiful or ugly, or see a bee buzzing around a flower and say it's working to make honey for our consumption, and even when we speak tenderly to a domestic pet, we're being completely ignorant, given that these flowers and rivers, these auto- mobiles and bees, these books and animals have never needed us and never will; they have their own social structures, so infinitely separate from our own as to be forever invisible to us. Which means there's no way for us to converse with an ant or an automobile, a book or a nation, a river or a pet, and not because they don't un derstand us, but because we don't understand them. All of this I thought on arriving in Honfleur and seeing thal woman petting her small dog. I wished he were with me to share this discovery. He, who was not a bee, or river. automobile, nation or pet, but a man - a male of the spe cies, I mean.”

“it was dawn and the summer's day already warm, but a layer of dew, dazzling white, still covered the grass. Taking two glass jars out of his rucksack and handing me a pipette, he asked me to help him collect drops of the dew one by one, Not that it's medicinal or anything like that.' he said, 'rather it's that our immediate future is concentrated in these drops, each and every one is something akin to the essence of the day to come. And we gathered the dewdrops from the blades of at least a metre-square of grass, which as I found out for myself is a lot of dewdrops. I spent the rest of the day peering into my jar to see if I could discern something in the crystal- line dew, though in reality I didn't even know what I was looking at, whereas he, sitting down to breakfast at the hotel when we got back, took his and simply drank it in one, before closing his eyes and spending the duration of the morning as if asleep - 'as if because, though he kept his eyes shut, he'd still answer when spoken to.”

“as we continued along the Normandy coast, convinced as we were that it's only from the peri- pheries of things, only from their farthest shores, that we have any chance of comprehending their true nature. And this is a universal principle for each and every one of us, such that we have to distance ourselves from our own lives if we want to get a view of its contours and its outline, to work out what kind of beast this life of ours really is, and then, only then, is it possible to call a life 'entire’ “

“The thought I finally fell asleep with was how little interest I had in what the D-Day landings sur- vivors saw, compared to what the dead saw; this, the story of the dead, would be the True Story of the D-Day landings, information we have no access to and that must nonetheless be somewhere, hidden information, the unknown B-side to the fabric of our reality, so un- known that we spend our time creating substitutes for it: the story of the dead is substituted by the story we the living make up about them, and the unfolding of civil- izations is that of an infinite chain of substitutions. Indeed, a painting of a landscape makes no attempt to know what might be hidden in that landscape, rather it seeks to substitute it, and a fire doesn't seek to know what is hidden in a forest fire, it just wants substitute it, and the lift has no interest in trying to understand what the hell these things we call stairs are, it just tries to sub- stitute them, and saccharin doesn't try to find what's hidden in sugar, only to substitute it, and sugar in turn doesn't try to uncover whatever's hidden in other food- stuffs, it just substitutes their calorific potential with a single teaspoon, and, in turn, sugar was invented during the industrial revolution to get more out of the workers, the children who worked in mines especially, a dessert spoon of sugar was as good as two plates heaped full of beans and bacon, which means that the white of sugar is littered with the corpses of children. Yes, coal - not by coincidence black like coffee - and the industrial revo- lution it fired cannot be understood without its opposite, sugar so white.”

“the tide was out, it had left an assortment of different seaweeds, oyster and clam shells on display, as well as these objects that, after you throw them away, you don't know how or why they come back, bottle tops, for instance, bleached and slightly malformed, they seemed almost like pebbles, almost, I would say, no longer arti- licial. Why was it, I wondered, that nature caused things we call 'artificial' to bleach to such an extent, to the point that a bottle top becomes indistinguishable from a peb- ble, and at the same time creates things as colourful and dearly distinguished as flowers, insects and rocks; I couldn't come up with an answer, but I did suppose that it was because of this that houses periodically need re- painting but cliffs and flowers don't.”

“I remember a set of footprints across a snow-covered ath- letics track, a single set of footsteps but, like everything in Switzerland, not in the slightest bit dramatic, and ac- companied by the tyre tracks from a bicycle; it could legitimately have passed for a musical score.”

“I thought of a very black Earth, the planet burned to a crisp, and though it obviously meant losing some time I decided to go down the recently asphalted section of road that led to it, which gave off that smell of fossils brought back to life common in all petrol derivatives, always particularly strong at petrol stations - any time I stop to fill up, I pause and breathe it in, this being the yearning for fire we all of have inside ourselves: a match in my mouth at that moment and the whole place would have gone up in flames.”

“A little while earlier, other, more commonplace layers of geology had started to emerge: granite mainly, seamed with quartz, which would have made life hard for the German sappers tasked with cre- ating bunkers like the ones I soon started to see. These had the air of half-finished Easter Island effigies. The buildings in our cities are supported by a skeleton of pil- lars, vectors plunging vertically into the ground, reaching towards the centre of the earth, while bunkers are a compact, unitary mass, like a loaf of concrete bread baked just once and in a single mould, and, more signif- icant than that, they go in no particular direction, and are apparently unaffected by the earth's movements, if an earthquake hit they'd simply roll over on themselves until they came into a new stability, a new equilibrium: they could soon be re-inhabited again. Bunkers are more like a cork bobbing around on water than some- thing actually built on the ground.”

“I thought how unnecessary we are to flies, rats, scrub and stones, and to the dead as well - none of these things need us, we simply invent connections to them. like or dislike, where no connections in fact exist. Thad seen a few months earlier that 2016 was the year of Aristotle, since it was the 2,400th anniversary of his birth, but is it really possible to talk about the anniversa- ry of a birth that happened so archaeologically long ago? How can the exact year of Aristotle's birth be known? It can't. We make it up. That birth happened so long ago that it now exists outside of time. We're forever anthropologizing. It's a little like the quotations attribut- ed to famous people on the internet: ninety-eight per cent of these are incorrect, and it makes as much sense to attribute them to those women and men as it does to the corpses populating these bunkers or the flies that come buzzing off them and land next to our feet, made-up quotations that only succeed in creating a somewhat co- herent representation of the past, which is the same as saying they project a convincing hologram of the future; we look for certainty, we die in fear, that's all there is. It then seemed very clear to me that war filters through ev- erything, not just through geological layers but botanical, biological and even informational layers; a veritable network of war is spread out below the ground on which we stand.”

“Mount Ararat, the highest peak in Turkev, lies near the borders with Iran and Armenia, and is a dormant volcano whose perpetually snow- capped peaks stand more than 5,000 metres above sea level. It is the symbol of the Armenian people. As Wikipedia puts it: 'It is claimed that a large "anomalous" shape at the summit could be Noah's Ark, according to research carried out by Porcher Taylor on satellite im- ages taken in 1955. The "anomaly" (a structural abnormality not common to a mountain) shown in these images is 309 metres long, which would tally with the 300 x50 cubits the Ark is described as measuring in the Book of Genesis.' Astronauts also claim to have seen these shapes. This kind of thing may be satellites' and astronauts' best-kept secrets, and by this I mean not what they see when they are up in space and look into outer space - the contents of which has no importance except for in novels, films and comics - but what they see when they look down at Earth, at our home, the only thing that actually has any impact on us. The day they feel compelled to say what the Earth is truly like from so far away, we won't even be able to believe it, we'll go higher and higher but only in order to look back down. down into the centre of ourselves.”

“After an update on the Brexit referendum, which was due to take place immi- nently, a live football match came on, one being played on the other side of the planet. The ball went from one end of the pitch to the other and I thought what a terrify- ing and at the same time irremediably magical thing it is for 300 million people to be turning their heads to the left in unison; this perhaps is the last truly communal action left on the face of the Earth.”

“One of those boats was shipwrecked off the coast, it quickly became legend not because of what it was transporting, which in the end was just ground-up bones, bone-dust that's sunk to the bottom of the estuaries around here and nobody's ever going to get out, but because people said the boat was made from these Asian trees inside which diamonds grow; bizarre as it sounds, you get dia- monds spontaneously appearing inside one in ten thousand of that kind of tree; it's generated by an imper- fection in the carbon inside the trunk itself, a little bit like the way pearls are generated inside oysters. People around here have burned every single plank or scrap of wood that's washed up on the shores ever since, hoping to come up with one of those diamonds.”

#book

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deejadabbles · 2 years

Text

Shadows of Devotion

For @week-of-revo Day 6: Shadowplay

Im super upset that I'm late with this one!!! I couldn't help it, I had to write it whenever I had a free second during one of my long shifts 😭

Anyway, this idea was something I've had in mind for awhile and twisted it around a bit to fit this prompt. But I still love it because season 0 Yami is always so delicious to write! I hope you guys like it! (Also I can't take credit for the dying flower lines towards the end, that was taken straight out of the Cold, Cold Heart story from DC comics, as this was partly inspired by Mr Freeze)

Warnings ahead for mentions of death/illness and blood, as well as some general mild horror themes in the second half.

The light in the study was so dim that he might have been working by candle light. Atem couldn't be bothered to change the bulb as it had begun to dim last week, no matter how it made his eyes strain as he read.

His desk, which was once filled with collectibles and objects of whatever recent hobby his insatiable mind latched on to, was now filled with leather bound tomes and dusty scrolls. They had been collected from all over the world; words that, supposedly held magic, ancient magic.

Since the fields of modern science couldn't seem to bring them salvation, Atem had turned to more esoteric means months ago.

He had to find something- anything that could help, he had to.

His eyes crossed over the words as they droned on about reanimating dead rodents, and a frustrated growl ripped through his throat. A swipe of his hand had the book slamming shut, and another sent it flying across the room. Atem didn't need reanimation! He didn't need a twitching shell of something that was once living, unthinking and unfeeling! He needed to heal, needed to mend what was broken!

The door to his study opened behind him, filling the room with such bright light that he winced at the intrusion.

"Atem?"

He winced again at the sheer tiredness of her voice, the frustration that was thinly veiled by the question of his name.

"You should be asleep, my love," he answered, running a hand over his face, "you need rest."

He heard her footsteps just before he felt the hands on his shoulders. They gave some gentle rubs, soothed the aches that his stiff posture had caused, before they trailer down over his chest.

"You know I can't sleep when you refuse to come to bed. And you know I don't like you staying knee deep in these...weird, depressing books for so long." Anzu kneeled down, resting her cheek against his.

Her skin was cold, too cold, but Atem let out a sigh of relief, leaning into her touch; let her presence chase away the darkness in his mind.

Then he felt disgusted with himself, here his wife was, sick to the point that standing was a hard feat most days- and he had the audacity to be the one comforted by her.

"Come to bed," she whispered in his ear.

Atem put on a smile for her, turned so she could see it. "I have too much on my mind to sleep, but I'll gladly come hold you while you drift off, my love."

He brushed some stay hairs from her face, it's texture dry, brittle, the opposite of the soft glow she used to have. He took the moment to study her face too. She had always been much paler than him, but once rosey cheeks were now pallid, gray, even. Full, pink lips turned cracked and colorless.

Even in this state, he still felt that swell of affection every time he looked at her. She was his everything.

"Well, I guess we'll just have to wear out that mind of yours," she said, and he felt a weak pull on his arms. "Dance with me."

He rose at her insistent tugs, but gave her a grave stare, "Anzu, I-"

"Please," she whispered, eyes locked on his, and he felt his resolve crumpling under her will, just as it had always been. "I miss you, Atem. Just dance with me, like we used to."

The smile she topped it off with sealed him in, and he was pulling her close, resting his hands on her hips, laying his head on her shoulder.

Then they moved, feet gliding in sync, to a melody only they could hear. The silk of her nightdress was smooth under his hands, and a year ago he would have taken the chance to push it aside and feel her even softer skin.

"I miss you, Atem," she repeated after while.

"I'm here, Anzu," he leaned up and kissed her hair, "I'm always here, always."

"You know what I mean. I don't want you pouring over these books anymore. They're consuming you, Atem."

"I have to find a way. I know I can if I just-"

"And You know I've come to terms with this," she pulled away from him, just enough to look him in the face. "I've made my peace with this, Atem, I'm not afraid to die! I'm ready-"

"I'm Not!" His voice was as harsh as a whip, but it softened the moment the snap was out. Tears caught in his throat as he cupped her face in his hands. "Please, Anzu, let me find a way. I can save you, I will save you."

She opened her mouth to respond, but reared back a second later. Then the coughs came. They were harsh and violent, tore at her throat with every wretch.

His mind went into a frenzy as he held her, began guiding her out of the study and down the hall. Her muscles spasmed under his hand as he tried to soothe with gentle rubs. She couldn't stop coughing and soon her hands her speckled in red.

Atem whispered assurances to her, as he fumbled with her medication bottle beside their bed. After too much struggling to keep her body still enough to take it, they finally managed full dose.

From there it took a good twenty minutes of focused breathing and waiting for things to even out.

They were running out of time, these attacks were coming on more and more frequently.

Atem wiped her hands clean and tucked her into bed, saying sweet nothings as calmly as he could while she drifted back to sleep. Those horrendous fits always left her so tired.

And he waited there, at her bedside, long after she fell asleep, just to make sure the rise and fall of her chest continued.

Then he rose, and ventered back to his study.

Behind the closed door no one could hear his rage. The desk being tossed over, the bookshelves being toppled, the cries of anguish and desperation.

Atem sat in the wake of it all, dim lamp laying helpless on the ground to cast his shadow against the wall now bearing a hole from his fist. His throat was raw, eyes bloodshot. What good did all this ancient magic do, if it couldn't save his beloved? His everything.

That's when his eyes caught it.

A book, spine bend and pages tattered from his anger, lay open to him. And a title that read "Shadow Tamer" spoke to him.

He vaguely remembered reading it weeks ago, something about being able to seek revenge on ones enemies through the manipulation of shadow creatures.

Atem picked up the tome and began reading the introduction to the brand of magic. Then he looked up at his own shadow, so lifelike and imposing against the wall. And an idea came to him.

Yes. Yes that just might work.

***

Doctor Whitmire hated working late, usually he was well into a relaxing night of entertainment and his favorite wines by now, but when your clients paid as much as his, sacrifices had to be made upon occasion. Besides, the treatment was over now and after a short drive, he'd be soaking in a nice hot bath. He also hated the parking garage, in all it's bleak darkness, but he managed by the buzzing lights overhead.

He was just thinking of the vintage moscato that would be perfect with his bath when he made it to his car.

The good doctor had just pulled out his keys, when he noticed that he couldn't see his car anymore.

Confused, he looked up, and realized that the lights overhead had just went out. No, no that wasn't quite right. They hadn't gone out, something was shifting over them, something hazy and dark.

Something was blotting them out.

A thud, a vibration of movement, and the man stumbled back on instinct. He stared into the dark, sure that something must have hit his car. Whitmire stared, until he realized that something was starting back.

He gasped as something blinked at him and a scream died in his throat as the shadowed creature opened its mouth to reveal a row of sharp teeth. It lunged before he could scream and it clamped those fangs down hard in his arm.

That time he did manage a scream, even as it released him and he was sent tumbling- scraping to the concrete.

Another thud on the car and another as two more identical things joined the first, all snapping and snarling now

The man clutched his arm as he started to crawl away from the creatures. Face coated in a cold sweat and another scream ripping from his throat, the man scrambled to his feet and bolted into the darkness, thinking that maybe he could be lucky and find the door in the shadows.

Those things were nipping at his heels, though, and he screamed again as he felt one nearly clamp it's jagged fangs around his achilles tendon. He swept his hand through the dark, panting, crying, begging to find his way out, his salvation.

Then, some deep and rumbling- a voice as icy as a winter morning, called out from the endless black.

"Have you ever seen a flower die, doctor?"

A shape emerged from the dark, it was towering as a shadow in dusk, and the only signs that it was a man at all, we're pricing pool of gold boring into him with the hungry stare of a demon. It crept closer to him without a sound, rolling through the shadows as if it were a part of them.

And he let out another hideous cry as he turned and ran.

"Have you ever watched, while something once so beautiful and full of life decayed and rotted from within?"

Whitmire hit something hard, a wall and was sent falling into the darkness, until he hit the floor again.

"You had a chance to help her," the shadow man continued, ignoring the older man's sobs. "You had an treatment that might have cured her, but you turned her away!"

The doctor had no more screams left as one of the creatures pounced in him, heavy paws pinning him to the jagged concrete as it's hot breath tickled his neck.

"You we're going to let my wife die! Do you even remember her?! Do you remember my Anzu!?"

Another shuddering sob as the beast snapped it's jaw. "Ah- Anzu! Yes! The Mazaki girl! I remember! She was too far gone- her case was too advanced! The chances of success were low- I- AH!!" a fang nicked his throat and he scrambled for the words, "Please! I had my reputation to consider! If she died in spite of the treatment my success rate would be ruined!"

He knew he had said the wrong words the moment they were out and he started crying as he waited for the beast to devour him.

But the teeth never came.

Instead that cold deep voice spoke to him again, calm, collected.

"Well, doctor, now you have to choose what you value more: your reputation, or your life. Because I can have my pets here make a splendid meal out of you."

Whitmire was trembling, head to toe as Atem's shadow closed in on him.

"But we both know you're smarter than that. You, doctor, you are going to help me save my wife."

#revolutionshipping #weekofrevo #atem #anzu #anzu mazaki #yami yugi #deeja writes

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