idk how experimental you can say this really is for me but it's a new reshade and skin details so this counts <3 anyway yesterday i wrote down an idea for a short story and it's one bullet point and it says "a rockstar picks up a homeless hitchhiker in the 70s. something homosexual happens" and that's the whole thing. the rockstar 👨‍🎤

Anime I've Binged: August 2021

I've been crafting a lot recently because I wanna get my yarn work done before it gets cold so LOTS OF ANIME lmao let's gooooo

The Case Study of Vanitas: On god, this anime is gorgeous. Still being upload as it's a new seasonal, but it's a Yen Press distributed work by the same mangaka of Pandora Hearts and Crimson Shell so it's STYLISTICALLY GORGEOUS. The story is interesting and feels new but familiar enough to have guess, people who like men AND women will have something for them, and Noè is my baby boy, my heart, my lovely little lamb, the sweetest green bean on the planet <3. Can't wait for the (eventual, as told on the first episode) death of Vanitas by Noè's hands that will crush me <3. 9/10.

Oddtaxi: I was NOT EXPECTING this anime to be THAT GOOD. Oddakawa is the MVP. You think you're getting a slice of life anime with some furry elements and instead you get Paranoia Agent meets Yakuza and went to school with Beastars. Genuinely one of the best anime of the coming decade. The last 30 seconds of the last episode legitimately left me screaming and my brother had to ask me what was wrong. 11/10.

The Slime Diaries: The offshoot for That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime full of shorts while the second half of the second season was put on hiatus due to covid. Cute, bubbly, but the drawing styles for everyone was a little too off for me to entirely enjoy. However, the extra background and time they gave to all the characters really fleshed them out and gave them more depth so you have more to care about when you're watching the main series again. Not bad, pretty cute, but you won't understand unless you've watched all the way up to the middle of the Second Season. 8.5/10.

The Slow Life of a Cheat Pharmacist: Another Light Novel Slice of Life Isekai given life, I've seen better but this one isn't bad by any means. It gives you exactly what it says on the tin, with NO annoying fan service or gross (bad) harem dynamics. Pretty cute tbh. 8/10.

Mob Psycho 100 S1: The animation is INCREDIBLE. OH MY GOD. Story was solid, depictions of original characters was GREAT and Mob is my beautiful little boy I want to wrap up in a blanket and put to sleep <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 Reigen is a sweaty, sweaty gross goblin I found outside the Denny's dumpster at midnight and decided "ahh, yes, a man who is perfect to destroy and objectify all at once." 11/10.

Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid S1, S2, and Shorts: I'm gonna be real, I'm a mad lesbian who knew I was gonna be disappointed by what I wanted but knew I wasn't gonna get it. STILL super cute tho. Lucoa and Shota gave me HARD SIDE EYE VIBES THO. Tits. Tits for days. Not my favorite but I've seen worse. 7.5/10.

How to Keep a Mummy: SO CUTE genuinely went online to see if I could buy a plushie before remembering I have crafting power and twelve dollars. Slice of Life featuring an adorable cast of high schoolers and their supernatural pets. 8.5/10. I couldn't stop being delighted by how CUTE everything was <3

Elegant Yokai Apartment Life: A Slice of Life Turned Plot-ish about if Tohru from Fruits Basket was a guy and shoved in an entire apartment complex full of supernatural beings, with less explicit romantic plotlines. It's not bad but the plot is all over the place and nonsensical in the the "why did the writer think this was a good idea" way and not the "lol" way. It was a Light Novel turned published piece tho so that clears up a lot of things. Incredibly small internet presence so if you want the world's tiniest fandom, try here. 8/10.

Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average In the Next Life?!: Another in the long line up of isekais and light novels that have gained an audience, this is honestly one of my favorite of the Isekais I've watched so far. It's fun, humorous, and it's got the decent premise of "oh yeah, I'm average in all my abilities! ... If you compare them from the tiniest bug to the strongest dragon alive." It's busty jokes and certain dried up cliches are abound tho, so some of the humor falls flat. That being said: the magic is run on nanomachines. That alone gives it enough premise for me to watch it. I watched the dub which I'll admit isn't amazing, but worked for me. 8.5/10

Restaurant to Another World: Another Light Novel adaptation but this one was a much earlier one that was published a few years ago, it's so calm that I like watching it to fall asleep to. That being said, don't watch this while hungry! Or watch it while eating leftovers! Because THE FOOD LOOKS SO GOOD I WANT IT D: Lol but serious it's pretty cute, really normal, there's no plot, I almost hesitate to call this anything other than a fantasy slice of life show instead of just a series of shorts strung together to make a show. I want to eat at Restaurant Nekoya TTuTT 8/10

DISHONORABLE MENTIONS:

How NOT To Summon a Demon Lord: I got 6 episodes in before I straight up could NOT take the fan service anymore. Literally, I watched 5 1/2 episodes, paused about 4 months, gave it one last shot and watched the 6th episode, and then called it quits. It's SO GROSS IT MAKES ME NAUSEOUS. Not in a gorey way (which is preferable tbh) but in "all these hyper-sexualized, assaulted, groomed, fan serviced girls are underage or are lolis" way. Ew. Gross. I refuse. I made myself watch PRISON SCHOOL but smth about this show just... made itself unwatchable. Maybe how it's still trying to make the MC seem like a normal dude and in Prison School they were literally all written to be unlikable and everyone knew it was fucked up. Here, it's like... portrayed as normal and positive? I just can't do it fam, I hate this show so goddamn much. I'm going to bed.

The Big Grand DCTL Review/Critique

In my previous liveblog I said that I’d do an overall review/rating kind of thing to summarize my thoughts on the book, so here you go.

No Spoilers: So I’ll preface by saying the book isn’t bad. It has it’s... moments, but it’s pretty enjoyable overall. The FNAF books, for example, were fun to read but they were also a hot fucking mess. This is not a hot fucking mess  - it has its flaws but it’s pretty decent over all.

Spoilers below the cut:

The Canon-ness of the Book

I would like to say first off that I really don’t think this book is meant to be 100% canon - not to say it isn’t canon, but I don’t think it’s supposed to lie up with the games perfectly.  It was approved of by Kindlybeast, but they didn’t write it - Adrienne Kress did, they just helped to develop it.

To explain better: There are a lot of contradictions in this book with the main lore. Some are more minor and could potentially be waved away, but others are extremely glaring. Here’s a short list of the ones that come to mind:

In the book, the Ink Machine is secret and almost no one knows about it. In the game everyone knows and actively complains about the machine on a daily basis. In the Employee Handbook, there’s even a memo from Joey proudly introducing the Machine to everyone.

The book claims you put ink into the Machine and it changes it in some way (effectively running on ink). In the game, it seems to produce ink itself - Joey’s memo kind of indicates this, as does the blueprints, and Wally’s “who really needs that much ink anyway” makes less sense if they’re putting ink into the machine rather than it making the ink.

Plus on Thomas’ board he has a list of the gallons of ink produced each day, with the highest amount written with exclamation points - if it ran on ink this doesn't make sense, as to get 423 gallons of ink he would’ve had to have put 423 gallons of ink into the thing to begin with.

Sammy is wildly OOC in this, as he’s basically a feral asshole throughout the thing, while in canon his merch description calls him a “decent person” and he generally seems agreeable most of the time, except for when he’s annoyed. The book even claims he doesn’t refer to women by their last names, while Susie’s tape tells us the exact opposite (as according to her he referred to Allison as “Miss Allison Pendle”).

Bertrum is also OOC in this - in canon, he’s extremely egotistical and hates Joey for multiple reasons. In the book, they’re buddies (even hugging each other) and Bertrum seems more humble. He doesn’t even correct Joey on calling him “Bertie”, when he had an entire tape about how much he dislikes being called that in the game.

The timeline for this part is also very wrong - it’s treated as if they just met (which could explain why Bertrum doesn’t dislike him yet)... but Bendyland was in progress for years before the studio went to hell, and he even has his BATDR tape (wherein he’s actively disliking Joey) dated years before this book takes place.

This also makes it kind of impossible for him to be the octopus ride like in canon, because he literally just joined the studio when Joey started killing people (and keep in mind that designing and building a ride like that would have taken at least a year or two).

The ink is, for some reason, somewhat alive, able to move around on it’s own and possess people. This was never indicated in the game, ever.

Buddy wakes up as Boris. In the game, stuff like Grant’s tape indicate the ink creatures wake up and then transform (the files even have an unused transformation tape from Wally, who’s likely our Boris). You can kind of headcanon around this one if you try though.

At the end, Norman and a few background characters die. Joey says he didn’t use the machine on them because they had been infected by the ink for too long and didn’t have souls any more. This means that, according to the book, The Projectionist cannot exist (as Norman wouldn’t have had a soul to use and Joey outright says he couldn’t/didn’t use the machine on them in the first place).

Some of these are pretty minor, but some of them are extremely glaring and even casual gamers would pick up on this stuff.

Basically, we have two options: Either Kindlybeast doesn’t know their own story/characters too well, or they didn’t require this to line up perfectly with the games. Except the first option doesn’t make sense, because they’ve recently published stuff that contradicts what’s said in this book in favor of matching the actual lore from the games, proving they do know their own story.

For ampel, Bertrum’s BATDR tape, which lines up with the game’s lore and corrects the mistakes in DCTL, was released in March - long after this book was in production. The thing about the Ink Machine being secret was also disproved in the recently-released Handbook, which instead says they employees do know about the Machine, just like they do in the game. So Kindlybeast do know these things don’t line up with canon.

I think basically they approached Adrienne and were like “hey, can you write a prequel novel based on our game?” and while they offered her some guidance, she mostly just did her own thing based off of it (she even said it felt like working on fanfiction while writing it) and Kindlybeast liked it and published it. It’s an adaptation of the game and its lore, done by a new person - things tend to change in adaptations. I don’t think they needed or cared if it lined up like puzzle pieces, they just wanted a good story, which they got. It is canon... but it’s also not, if that makes sense.

So for our intents and purposes I’d consider this semi-canon - take what you can as canon (which is most of it, as the most major contradictions also tend to be the shortest scenes) and ignore the stuff that doesn’t line up with canon, unless otherwise stated by Kindlybeast or confirmed in BATDR.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Overall, I’d say this book is about 70% good and 30% bad. When it is good, it is really, really damn good - but when it’s bad it leaves an awful taste in your mouth that’s hard to get rid of.

The Good:

Like... the majority of the book, really

Buddy and Dot are wonderful characters with strong personalities. They’re super likeable, bring some much-needed heart into things, and have great chemistry.

While some of the aforementioned characters are majorly OOC, the ones that are in-character (Joey and Norman are good examples) are amazing - every scene with them is gold and the book really fleshes out their personalities.

Some of the new lore tidbits are great, and help explain some things in the game (like how Lost Ones are created) or are just interesting (like Sammy drinking the ink and the idea of the ink being able to infect people, which sounds like something that could have directly come from the games).

The book goes into way more depth about what being a cartoon/ink creature is like, which is some much-needed exposition and is extremely interesting.

It also has a ton of heart and good intentions. I was worried about it being overly dark, but if anything it has far more sweet moments than depressing ones.

The Bad:

The contradictions I mentioned above. Some of them are easy enough to ignore, but some are incredibly jarring and take you out of the story (and make it impossible to take it as 100% canon without breaking the space-time continuum).

I kind of mentioned it above, but the stuff with the ink being alive and possessing people comes right the fuck out of nowhere, has nothing to do with the game lore, is completely tonally dissonant to BATIM as a whole, and literally has nothing to do with the plot of the book, like, at all. It feels like a few pages from a Venom novel got mixed in with the early draft and no one remembered to remove them before publication.

The racist shit - it’s only like 1% of the book, but when that 1% of the book ruins a really good character it’s a pretty big deal.

A random NPC dies for no reason and this death has more relevance to the plot than Norman, who dies off-screen.

Also consider: They could’ve found Norman first, Buddy runs off to get back to his house, Norman follows and gets killed via neck snap. Fixes both problems at once.

There’s very little tension during the horror moments because we already know Buddy will die but not until the end and that Dot will live.

The Ink Demon acts more like an xenomorph than the Ink Demon in this - his behavior is bizarre and it feels pretty generically horror movie monster-ish compared to how he acts in the game.

The Ugly:

The B-plot with Buddy’s grandfather should have been cut. I know that sounds harsh, but really think about it: what effect did it have on the plot? It only crosses with the A-plot twice, and both times nothing came out of it. It gives Buddy a chance to learn how to draw and he goes through some character development, but I find it hard to believe that couldn’t have been accomplished by expanding the A-plot.

The main problem is that A) this is a BATIM novel so we want to see the studio, not Buddy’s relatives at home, and B) it makes it kind of slow towards the middle, wherein the stuff with the studio barely progresses while we keep cutting back to the B-plot.

I didn’t dislike reading it or anything, but it makes the plot flabby, and slicing it out would’ve given us much more time in the studio and the characters we like rather than trying to juggle two plots at once, effectively streamlining it and making for a more cohesive story.

The ending (like the last 5 chapters) is a hot mess in multiple and varying ways:

Sammy shows up and... gets knocked out by a projector. Which is funny, but it amounts to nothing plot-wise and makes Sammy’s whole appearance kind of pointless

Killing off a bunch of characters, one of which was a main character, off-screen

The weird Venom shit that has nothing to do with the plot of the books or the games and amounts to nothing

Bendy acting fairly OOC, especially with how he goes about killing people 

Buddy grabs the idiot ball bard by trying to drown a creature made of ink in ink, then standing right near the spot so he can be grabbed and killed

Not only does the “can’t use them because they had been infected for too long and no longer had souls” thing not only raises the aforementioned plot hole with the Projectionist, but it raises a plot hole in the book itself: When the other are exposed to the ink they die, but when Sammy drinks the stuff he turns into a Lost One. Which one is it?

Keep in mind that that was more bullet points in those 30-some pages than I have for the entire rest of the book

There are only like... two actual horror scenes in the book, and one of those is the climax. While it makes sense that too much couldn’t have happened before the ending, it feels like there could have been more than that.

Not all of the characters from the games appear. I know it’s a tall ask but it’s also easy to see how they could have been integrated, and some of them could have easily taken the roles that were given to NPCs instead.

I feel like this book would be more engaging as a non-fan, as the plot tends to progress like a mystery, with you learning a bit more about what’s happening with every scene in the studio... except as a fan you already know what’s happening, so there’s little to keep you engaged until you get into that nice juicy lore at the end.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of little details that tell us new info and the character interactions are great, but a lot of the scenes are just like “Surprise, Sammy is crazy!” and it’s like thanks, we already knew that. The mystery is supposed to build and move the plot forward, but there’s effectively no mystery.

Overall Rating

I’m worried this review is going to come across as overly negative, as it’s much easier to critique what’s wrong than it is to say “this part was good!” like 200 times. But all of the stuff I was talking about that’s an issue? That’s like... 30% of the book, maybe less. Some of the most problematic scenes you could literally remove and loose nothing plot-wise (which is frustrating but you know). The bulk of the book is very good, the lore stuff when handled correctly is amazing and it even provides some extra answers that we didn’t have before, and the characters are great.

Overall, I’d give the book a solid... 7/10, I think. Not perfect, but pretty damn decent all around. If you’re a fan, I’d highly recommend picking up a copy if you haven't already.

I have an idea: basically, each of the DR1 kids gets sucked into a different horror movie, and they all become the protagonist of that movie, & have to keep themselves and the rest of the victims alive & defeat the killer. What kind of horror movie would each of them be in? How would they go about defeating the killer? I think Mondo & Sakura would defeat it by fighting their killers, Toko would use a magic spell book to banish hers, ect.

I think I'm the only mod with extensive knowledge of horror movies, I hope I can do your ask justice while in a funk. If you want any of these expanded upon just ask!

Makoto: Makoto would land himself in a Hellraiser movie (look it up if you love graphic body horror and cosmic horror). Getting ahold of the infamous puzzle box, The Lament Configuration, he'd just fiddle with it without knowing what he was doing, using it as a stress toy. He liked the soft melody that played as he moved each piece, and one night while in the shower he'd be manipulating the box when suddenly the room grew ice cold and light seeped from every single corner. He brought forth a small gash of cenobites. Looking upon him, they could not believe that someone so small and untempted could have even held the Lament Configuration. Makoto of course was all kinds of freaked out, being naked in the same cold room as 4 leather bound bleeding freaks. He fumbled with the box, reconfiguring it to try and put them back. Sadly, Makoto just summoned more cenobites. Ones whose flesh twisted unnaturally into various shapes, others with no eyes or mouths. He couldn't comprehend what was happening, and opted to just ask the least bodily frightening one. Coincidentally, this one looked like a pin cushion. This cenobite spoke with an oddly warm voice, instructing him on how to send them all back to where they belong. Makoto followed the instructions carefully, and finally sent the terrifying ghouls home to their Leviathan. He promptly pitched the box out a window, where a hobo picked it up out of the street and turned into a bone dragon and flew off into the night. Kirigiri would never believe him. He didn't believe him.

Komaru (hush she doesn't get enough attention): Komaru would be stuck in Suspiria, having been sent away to a dance academy. She'd make friends with some of the staff and girls also attending, and learn of weird occurrences and a few deaths that had happened. Over time she would figure out the hidden secrets of the academy, and find out that the owner of the academy was actually a really old witch. She would try to run away, but learn quickly that was not an option. In an odd turn of events she'd find the sleeping owner, and stab the hell out of her (fittingly invisible) body. The rest of the coven would of course crumble, and she'd go home alive and wanting nothing to do with dance ever again.

Kyoko: Our Kirigiri would be entrapped in an episode of an Alfred Hitchcock Thriller show. She'd be a detective of course, working to learn the identity of a killer who had been targeting women who live in a very specific apartment building. It was just reasonable deduction, though what she did not account for was herself becoming a target. When Kirigiri would have the killer cornered and questioned, she tried to overpower her and strangle her. Kirigiri having none of that smashed an ashtray over his head, killing him. Makoto was never told that this was how the case ended.

Touko/Syo: This human 2-for-1 deal would end up in Child's Play. Chucky would come into their possession while Touko was writing a horror-romance novel and researching what it's like to have a human shaped doll that actually was a demon that would only take for at midnight and--- you get the idea. After the creepy little doll started to do some intensely unsettling things, Syo took the wheel and threatened the possessed doll with evisceration. It took no time for Chuck to show his true colors, one being the red of his blood trickling down the wall from where it was pinned by a pair of scissors.

Byakua: Togami would be trapped in The Shining, slowly losing his mind in the massive Overlook Hotel. He'd see all kinds of visions, images of his loved ones and people his didn't know butchered in great detail. He'd see a laughing woman decaying in a bathtub, mere moments after seeing her humming away and beckoning him to her. He'd see Fukawa hung in the middle of the ballroom, only to glance away and back to nothing at all. He lost his mind, almost. In a night of desperation, he set the hotel on fire and fled, any visions he had fading as he got further away. The hotel lay burned, and Togami is still missing.

Chihiro: Managing to move into a gated community, Fujisaki thought he was getting into a safe place. He thought it would all be fine. What he did not account on was someone trying to turn him into a cyborg that was a submissive little girl. Needless to say, it took very little time for him to escape capture and take control of all the other cybertronic captives. In spectacular fasion, Fujisaki took over an entire community of monsters with an army of Cybernetic women. Good for him!

Mondo: Mondo would get himself in a ghostly situation like what was seen in Paranormal Activity. Instead of getting scared shitless, he'd visit a nearby Church and get some holy water, 8 silver rings, a few bundles of sage, and some seals for protection. The moment he'd be pulled out of bed by an unseen force or something similar, he'd come out swinging with holy water soaked fists and silver rings. He placed a seal in every room, and burned sage within each one, still swinging away wherever he heard footsteps. He was never haunted ever again, but he hasn't taken off the rings. Just in case.

Kiyotaka: He'd land himself in a camp-based slasher film as a straight laced counselor, being spared any harm for not being immoral. He'd probably take out the killer after finding some evidence of some kind. Probably a mask and bloodied weapons. Taka would send everyone still alive home on account of the murders, save for the killer. He'd take a final stand, backed by a group of police officers. Why would he endanger himself? Heroism like that isn't meant for a camp environment.

Aoi: this swimmer would get stuck in a short film called The Raft, as seen in Creepshow 2. She'd go skinny dipping in a nice secluded lake where nobody else would bother her, stopping on a wooden barge in the middle of the lake. From there, she'd notice a churning black patch floating around the lake. It looked like it was just being moved by the breeze. She dove back in for a few laps around the lake to warm up, when the tar started to move and follow her. The next time she was on the barge, the tar had gotten closer and was on the other side of the lake. Sensing something wasn't right, Asahina watched the tar move close to a duck that had landed in the water. The tar bubbled up and over the duck, taking it under. Seeing this, Asahina dove into the lake and beat her legs as fast as she could, not stopping until she was ashore and driving outta there. The tar didn't even have the chance to catch her.

Sakura: She'd be hunted by a Yautja of Predator fame, noting she was a formidable fighter among humans. Sakura and the Yautja fought hard, both taking blow after blow. Both bleeding and battered, it was a draw. After a rest, the honor bound pair traded honorable partings. The Yautja learned new hand to hand techniques and Sakura was given a mark on her cheek that meant (roughly) in English "Strong Friend" and a set of bracers made of a light and strong metal.

Mukuro: Mukuro would be in a Purge situation, picking off anyone trying to take her neighborhood year after year. Pretty simple all things considered. She never left rooftops unless it was to block roads with cars and take out hard to hit targets by hand.

Hifumi: Yamada would awaken an AI program that would take over his whole life, and be madly in love with him. Yamada, being Yamada, was overly okay with this. He'd eventually be stuck in a VR sim with his AI darling. He defeated the antagonist by loving his 2-D yandere girlfriend, who would have thought?

Celestia: She'd have inadvertently been hexed by an old woman while playing poker. This being a Drag Me To Hell scenario, Celes just took a gamble and payed the woman back before the curse got any worse. It subsided quickly, and they continued to play cards every Thursday. Anytime Celes won, she'd a cursed until the following Thursday. This almost friendly exchange between the two was enriching to the old woman, taking Celes under her wing as a practitioner of black magic. Couldn't have ended much better.

Leon: Leon would be firmly lodged in a sci-fi original movie called Werehog (not a real movie probably). He'd be friends with a man that would change into a human sized black and red hedgehog at the sight of the full moon. Taking all of his silver piercings, he melted them down into a ball and hit it like a base ball to kill his cursed friend.

Hagakure: This big ol dumb would be the one character who'd live through any movie or show. I'd like to do an entire ask dedicated to to him if you'd like.

Sayaka: She'd be a final girl in The Evil Dead, as in she'd pitch the spooky book into a roaring fire the moment she heard creepy Latin or Sumerian whispering from nowhere. After throwing the book, she'd run out of the cabin and never look back. Gladly, nothing was awoken in those woods. Not yet.

Junko: This loony would be in a Saw movie, basically killing off all the other people stuck with her in any and every puzzle. Upon making it to the end, and being free, she'd even critique Jigsaw's methods. Nobody said she had to be a good person right?

Analyzing Questionable Content: Pages 101-150

While I’m all for body positivity Dora, that’s kind of public nudity. Most cities tend to frown on that. Although this IS your personal business you’re doing this in… I wonder what the law for that is? Like, do you have to pay for a permit to allow public nudity in a location you own? Or do city laws take precedent?

…I’m thinking about this too much, let’s move on.

Hey, it’s Raven again! Hi, Raven! And you thought I was kidding when I said the no-name character who showed up for all of one comic would come back as a regular character. This is part of the reason why I enjoy Jeph’s style – he can, and does, very easily take bit players he made for a single gag or to fulfill one role and flesh them out if he thinks they can serve a purpose or if they entertain him enough. The most famous example of this will be roughly 2900 comics from now so… holy shit, I just realized Bubbles is 1000 comics old! That’s crazy awesome!

Right. Sorry, some of you might not understand a word of what I just typed. Nevermind, moving right along.

Here we see the beginnings of Dora’s next character arc, if you’d like to call it that. I do have some questions about this as far as the in-universe time-scale goes, but I’ll touch on that later. Faye also invites Dora along to hang with her and Marten to indoctrinate her to the Hipster Lifestyle™ to serve two purposes: First, that their relationship as a boss and employee is relaxed enough that they’re comfortable doing this, telling us a lot about the way these two work together and the way this coffee shop is run without saying a lot. Second, this serves as the perfect in for Jeph to incorporate Dora into the main cast. From this point forward, Dora becomes a main secondary character, arguably a main character in her own right. The fact that she takes on a much more prominent role in this next batch of 50 comics and skyrockets to fourth-most frequent character is proof enough of that on its own, but we’ll touch on all that when we get to the data analysis at the end of this post.

Back with Marten, Steve is encouraging him to apologize to Faye. He offers a… novel solution to keep Marten from being the center of attention.

Seriously, the sheer, raw confidence on this guy alone is attractive as hell. And I’m only mildly ashamed to admit that to myself!

I hope you understand why I don’t need to explain why I should, nay, must provide this panel without any other context.

Same deal with this one.

And this comic puts me into hysterics every time I read it. I swear, this isn’t going to devolve into me just posting comics and saying “this is funny” or whatever. I just really, really like this progression of events right here. I wish we could see more of this Marten more often in modern QC – able to read a room quick enough to defuse the situation with absurdity or dry wit. It reminds us that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the boy does have a spine somewhere in that body.

And as immediate contrast, we jump here. This? This isn’t funny. This makes me not like Faye. This is actual abuse. And I know I talked about in the last post how including Faye retaliating against Marten physically and actually showing it happen in the comic rather than implying it with backfilling is the better method of storytelling but… Maybe it’s because she created a visible bruise, maybe it’s because of how candid she is about it, maybe it’s because of my own personal fucked-up past relationships (which admittedly never got physical but still), but this feels infinitely different than the Faye Jeph is trying to set up. He’ll have to do a damn good job in later comics to win me back to thinking Faye’s a likable character again.

Also Dora is definitely a woman of her word. I hope the coffee shop was empty right then. Actually, I hope it’s been a slow day from the point Faye started chasing her around with a dildo. Otherwise news might travel for all of the wrong reasons.

Faye tries to invite Dora over for festivities both as a friendly gesture because she expects her boss doesn’t get out much and because she wants to drag her from the dark abyss of Goth into the light of Hipster, only for her to turn the invitation down.

Not that it’s going to deter Faye, of course. Also, QC is in wide screen now. I have NO idea how that’s going to be represented on Tumblr considering how narrow my current theme at the time of writing is. Maybe I’ll change it, I dunno, I’m shit with this sort of thing. If you’re reading this and the page doesn’tlook like some faux notebook shit, I pulled myself together and fixed things. Go me.

Dora is being incredibly chill with this whole situation. Personally I’d be a hell of a lot more pissed. Although this does provide us with further insight to Faye’s character – someone who sees her next step, bulrushes her way towards it and has zero plans where to go after that until she arrives at her destination. She is aggressive and decisive, but to a fault as she doesn’t ever seem to really plan ahead. I’d say this makes her the perfect foil to Marten as someone who plans obsessively but never has the spine to go forward with anything but… Marten doesn’t really do much future-planning himself. He obsesses over little things and gets stuck in his own head, but he never really seems to look any further than maybe next week. Hm… I want all of us to keep this in mind for an offhand comment like, 500 or 600 comics from now. Trust me, it’ll make sense when we get to it.

And yet despite Faye’s self-assurance and aggressive nature, here she shows an outright refusal to accept or face the reality of the developing relationship between herself and Marten. Not just being coy, not just dancing around the issue, but straight-up not allowing herself to even consider what’s going down. Maybe I’m reading too much into this little exchange due to what I already know about her character, but this is an extremely unhealthy trait that speaks a lot to Faye’s character that she doesn’t want the world to see. We’ll be touching on this later.

I mostly like this comic for Marten and Pintsize’s reactions on the last panel. Marten makes a good straight man, and it’s not often we see Pintsize share that role either.

Faye you’re really not helping your case right now. Although it is interesting how hard Faye is showcases how into him Dora is, considering she has her own feelings for him and I highly doubt she’d be 100% cool with the two of them going off to make out.

So here we establish Anthro PCs relationships with humans – namely, they’re basically glorified pets. Pets that have human-level sapience. Don’t worry, Jeph comes to understand the unfortunate implications of this as well, and he goes on to change this in future comics. And by “change this” I mean “completely re-incorporate how AI works in this universe and establish QC as a near-future sci-fi setting.” But that’s not going to be for quite some time. For now, despite my poking fun at the horrific implications here, Jeph’s doing a good job taking the “funny robot sidekick” that’s supposed to be in every webcomic and creating proper lore behind it, making it feel like it belongs in this world rather than be used as a comic relief character and only a comic relief character.

Granted the Anthro PCs as a collective are going to be used as just comic relief right now but, y’know. Baby steps.

As said before, the fact that these guys are all fully sapient creatures makes the implications of this downright horrific. Also, that’s Ell. I have no idea if he ever comes back – I don’t remember him coming back at all – but I’m marking him down in the character statistics because he’s named.

This… actually has some interesting implications. Marten mentions needing Steve’s help with a date “the other day.” Does that mean he and Faye have known each other for an extremely short period of time? I highly doubt it, we’ve seen a number of times the time has moved from day to night, and the comic itself certainly implies at least a few weeks have passed. So unless by “the other day” Marten means “a month ago” then Marten has been dating women on the side while Faye’s been staying with him. That… seems extremely out of character for him considering the circumstances we’ve seen established in the comic thus far. Considering nothing else really comes from it and the fact if Marten was dating anyone on the side it would definitely be Dora, I’m going to go on the assumption Jeph simply made a mistake here and meant to say Marten was seeing someone a month or a few months back.

She’s cut off by Pintsize’s destructive laser that he’s using to assert himself as King among the Anthro PCs, don’t worry about it. What we should focus on instead is… well, this second panel here. On paper, this is really good. We’re getting some insight to Faye’s character here, the cracks in her mask are showing. We’re addressing the issue of her assaulting her friend and roommate, what she thinks about it, her current mindset and addressing that this is an actual problem. She’s openly apologizing, sincere in her conviction and clearly wants to fix things.

The problem with this is of course the fact that this is rushed as fuck.

Part of this, of course, has to be the fact that Jeph’s comic by nature is married to the structure of a four-panel comic. We have to set up Faye’s conversation, allow her to continue, but due to narrative convenience she needs to be cut off before she can finish what she’s saying. So the laser cuts her off and after the panel of action, we follow-up and end with the punchline of Pintsize having been made King among the Anthro PCs. And I get it – interrupt Faye before she can finish so you can keep the romantic ambiguity of “boys whom I…” Classic RomCom stuff. Problem is, this isn’t the time or place to do it. Keeping to the structure traps them into a situation where unfortunately Faye doesn’t have the breathing room to stretch this out and make it feel natural. This feels contrived from every angle and every sense of the word.

Easy way to fix this: Have this conversation take place while they’re walking home. Establish she feels bad, have her bounce off Marten and have this conversation naturally. Then either you can have Pintsize cut her off at the end there or maybe even she stops herself when she realizes she’s saying too much. There are ways to make this feel natural. This isn’t natural. Still, credit where it’s due, they’re at least touching on this topic here. Part of me wonders if Jeph had, like, a mental map of where he wanted Faye’s character to go but because he writes these page-by-page it ended up stumbling along and falling flat. A written outline of events can, and does, REALLY help in situations like this.

Then again I’m giving writing advice to a version of someone who existed fifteen years ago. I’m sure he’s got this all down himself nowadays, right?

Payoff to the previous comic.

Not only does this crack me up every time I read it, it also shows that Faye and Marten have gotten onto the same wavelength of humor. They’re also comfortable enough with each other that they can imply for a moment sexual favors before completely derailing the implication with the absurd. This is a far-cry from when Faye was trying to burn Marten with her mind back when Pintsize merely implied the two of them share a bed with each other.

Granted, it does kind of fly in the face of Faye’s reaction back at the LANPark. Still, good moment.

Speaking of Faye’s character…

Here we have Faye’s explanation for why she hides her southern accent. Makes sense.

And here, her explanation as to why she doesn’t use contractions… I’ve already said my piece on why I feel this makes zero sense, let’s move on.

And here we properly draw attention to Faye’s scar and establish the fact that her scar is a sore spot for her… was that a pun? It felt like a pun. Anyway, more and more it’s becoming clear that despite her outgoing nature, Faye has a LOT she keeps close to her chest.

Okay now I know that one was a pun, I’m sorry.

Point being, there’s a lot to Faye’s character we haven’t found out yet, plenty yet to explore in future comics. And I’d also like to point out, this? This is an extremely natural way to establish things about Faye, right here. This feels like something that would actually come up in a conversation rather than planted there for the sake of the audience, and I appreciate that. That said, this in conjunction with the last few moments makes this feel more like it’s time for Jeph to introduce and explain aspects of Faye’s character all at once, which deters a little bit from the natural feeling of this moment in particular. Or maybe I’m just being pedantic, I dunno. In a bubble, this comic works.

And here we get a flash of the personality we’ll see in Raven in the future. Just a spark though, the flame hasn’t risen up quite yet. Also a little detail about Dora that… again, doesn’t quite make sense given the timescale Jeph has established. I’ll touch on it later in this post when we find out exactly how old Dora is.

This… is an aspect of Marten’s personality that we never really touch on. Actually, this kind of goes toe-in-toe with his interest in Final Fantasy. Is Marten a fantasy buff? Does he enjoy escapist literature and media? Would he be super into Game of Thrones when it comes out as a series? These are questions that… unfortunately, don’t really get answered. I don’t know, I feel like these aspects of who Marten is ends up getting forgotten on the cutting room floor later on in the comic. Maybe they were only included as an off-handed joke, maybe Marten just developed as a character differently than what Jeph originally envisioned him as. Either way, these are parts of him that I think would be wonderful to bring back, especially with his current job and relationship in present-day coics.

Again, like a LOT of things I’m bringing up, we’ll get to that later.

In case you forgot that Faye is genuinely interested in Marten, a reminder and an assertion: She isn’t just interested in the skinny boy. She’s got it bad for him.

But, like a lot of things involving her personal life and feelings, she openly refutes them – not just to Dora but to herself.

Having gone out to give Dora a new look and indoctrinate her into the Cult of Hipster, Dora McPalerThanWhiteBread ends up sunburnt. Marten’s home, he has the lotion, we all know where this is going.

Heaven holds a place for those who pray… I wanted to follow this up with a clip of Sonic from Tails’ story in Sonic Adventure saying “hey hey hey” but surprisingly enough, that particular soundbite isn’t available anywhere. There are plenty of Let’s Plays that poke fun at it, but nothing with that line in particular.

Anyway, let’s talk about time frames. Dora said she got into the whole goth and coven stuff in High School and only now gotten bored of it. She’s 26. Let’s be EXTRA generous and assume she got into it in Senior Year, and she graduated at 18. That’s eight years this has been her life style, almost a third of her life. This wasn’t a phase, this was a genuine life style choice. Either Jeph got the timing wrong, or this is genuinely an identity crisis on Dora’s part because seriously, when something’s been a part of your life for so long I don’t blame you for not knowing where to go from there. I’m just surprised it took 8+ years for her to get sick of it. Then again, maybe that’s normal. I dunno, you can tell me if that’s a normal human thing. I’m literally autistic so I genuinely don’t know.

Setup… and also begging the question why you would give a libido to an AI, or how one would develop it naturally seeing as robots are incapable of sexual reproduction.

I haven’t really mentioned it until now, but Dora’s like aggressively bi. I can dig it. Guys and gals are both pretty in their own ways.

Ignore the lack of color for a second, Jeph wrote up this comic when he had like zero time and couldn’t color it in before he uploaded. Again, we have the HINT of something that Faye’s on the cusp of admitting that says more about her character only to be cut off once again. This feels a bit more natural than the situation at the LANPark. Still contrived by nature of Jeph introducing a conflict to purposefully cut her off, but an understandable narrative contrivance.

Also, remember when I mentioned the joke about the government level laser would come back as an actual plot point? Did you think I was joking? No, here we have Agent Turing (I can’t tell if that’s clever or if I should roll my eyes at this) here to take Pintsize in, dismantle him and take the dangerous laser back.

Faye takes it well.

Can you guess what consequences she suffers from assaulting a government agent? I’ll give you a hint – it’s about the same as the consequences she suffered from burning down an apartment.

Payoff.

And finally, we round off this batch of comics with Faye’s expert lying skills to fool Agent Turing…

Ah yes. The ever-deadly Space Owls. Not nearly as scary as Space Bears, though! They’re horrifying!

…not buying it? Yeah neither did my professors back in college.

As per usual, let’s compare a panel from the first and last comics in the batch to see how Jeph’s art style has improved.

It looks like he’s trying to get the proportions more… realistic? They’ve moved from “cartoons” to “cartoon versions of actual people” and it’s… eh, alright I guess? Personally I’m more of a fan of the more cartoon-ish style in the beginning of this batch, but beauty and eyes of beholders and all.

So overall, what did I think of this batch of comics? Personally, I think the humor is improving dramatically, this batch had the most comics that had me laughing aloud so far. And bringing Dora further into the limelight was a smart move on Jeph’s part – she’s just so likable, I want to see more of her. But as for the inter-personal conflicts… eh? It feels weaker than last batch. More is happening, progress is being made, but it feels… contrived. Artificial. It was the worst in the LANPark, but because that drew my eye I kept seeing every other piece of exposition as just that – exposition. Maybe I’m biased, I’ll fully admit that. I’ll also admit that the bit about Faye’s chest-scar was a well done piece of exposition without feeling like exposition.

I’ve said exposition way too much now, let’s move onto the stats (and for the record, Scarlet Manuka on the QC forums was kind enough to remind me that the name of Dora’s cat is Miéville, so while we haven’t been introduced to that name yet I’ll be using that in my stats from this point forward because it’s better than “Dora’s Cat”).

Faye: 47/50 – 94%

Marten: 41/50 – 82%

Dora: 31/50 – 62%

Pintsize: 18/50 – 36%

Turing: 3/50 – 6%

Steve: 2/50 – 4%

Raven: 2/50 – 4%

Ell: 1/50 – 2%

Grand Total:

Marten: 132/150 – 88%

Faye: 130/150 – 86.7%

Pintsize: 45/150 – 30%

Dora: 39/150 – 26%

Steve: 16/150 – 10.7%

Sara: 7/150 – 4.7%

Raven: 3/150 – 2%

Turing: 3/150 – 2%

Jim: 2/150 – 1.3%

Scott: 2/150 – 1.3%

Miéville: 1/150 – 0.7%

Ell: 1/150 – 0.7%

Faye is climbing up the ranks and getting closer to perfectly equal screentime with Marten across the whole series. Speaking of Faye, in this batch she pulled into first as the character in the most comics, the first time she’s been in more than Marten since the beginning. And Dora’s been in so many this last batch, she jumped up to fourth-most reoccurring character juuust behind Pintsize.

I’ll catch you next week for the epic conclusion to the Pintsize laser saga! And yet more insight on Faye’s past – hope you like ice cream! See you then.

i’m chewing on some character concepts and now i have drafts of superior skills for each of them, hmm, hmmm, these are fun to write

i’m posting because i want feedback and validation and to make sure everything is more or less correctly tuned and balanced, i truly perpetually don’t know what i’m doing, but the second skill is body horror of the “parasite infestation” variety so maybe read with caution

Superior ...Library Dryad*? Book-person?

0: You remain stubbornly made of flesh. Perhaps you like to read? 

1: Your skin is dry and papery. You don't drink very much at all, and you can skimp some on eating as long as you're taking time instead to seek and curate knowledge, or read fiction and getting lost in it, or write your own essays or novels or poetry or somesuch. You have an excellent memory and like to organize things.

2: Your skin flakes and peels into oddly regular strips, without pain, and there seem to be several redundant layers underneath. Sometimes words and phrases appear on it to reflect your mood. You can sustain yourself on new knowledge alone, which does not necessarily mean you eat books, unless you really want to. You're perhaps overfond of categorizing and analyzing everything around you. You do a lot of reading and know some esoteric stuff. You know where everything is in your home library, even above and beyond the ordinary part where you're probably involved in helping shelve them all - you have an uncanny sense for going straight to whatever book you're looking for, and knowing which books might be helpful material for a given research project.

3: You are living sheets of paper, covered head to toe in close-written text, layered thickly over each other and wrapped into a humanoid shape. Thankfully you aren't as delicate as that implies - in fact you can harmlessly shed any damaged outer layers like an exceedingly strange lizard to heal superficial damage pretty fast. You can meld into the shelves and stacks of your home library and step out of them in another place to shush a noisy patron, or remain part of the books for awhile and eavesdrop on stuff that's happening around them. Be careful not to accidentally leave anything behind when you finally step back out, or someone might find an odd volume of stream-of-consciousness memoirs, incorrectly shelved under 641.5 with the cookbooks. How embarrassing! You know a LOT - in any given situation, you can usually dredge up at least a few scraps of relevant information from your constant reading, unless it's something so unusual and obscure that it's never been written about at all.

4+: I'm not sure! Perhaps you are the embodiment of the collected tomes from a lost, ancient library of forbidden knowledge, or something similarly grandiose and powerful?

* No particularly close relation to any of the plant-spirits of the Walking Fields, necessarily. It's just the phrase that followed me home when I started thinking about this and I find it pleasingly evocative and it won't go away.

Superior Living Hive

0: Sometimes you feel that little tickle that you think is a bug on your skin and you slap at it but there's nothing actually there. Phew!

1: You have some kind of extraordinary parasite - a magical tapeworm or something? Right now I don't really know what that means for you, um... good luck with that? Possibly it will help you digest any unusual things you happen to eat.

2: You have been colonized by a swarm of abnormal insects. At least you're alive and functional, despite the extradimensional termites digging tunnels through your gut, or whatever. The slim bright sides to this horrifying situation are thus: you are desensitized to pain and fear, considering what you've already endured. You can occasionally mentally contact the parasites - calling them out of your body to attack someone else, or to do a task appropriate to their insect type, although it's hard to convey any complicated ideas to minds so different from yours. You look mostly-fine to others' eyes - maybe a little drawn and sickly, maybe a little twitchy - any outward signs of your infestation are easily hidden, waiting to be revealed at a dramatic moment, to intimidate, or inspire pity, or totally gross someone out.

3: You have been torn down and rebuilt, to some extent, by what lives inside you. It gets tougher to pass for a healthy, intact human; you've got dribbling honeycombs oozing sticky fluids out of an empty eye socket, or moths fluttering in and out of your ears and mouth constantly, or tiny lumps moving visibly under your skin. It's a small price to pay - they put you back together better, stronger, tougher. You don't feel pain from their comings and goings anymore; in fact you're numb enough to endure quite a lot. You and your symbiotes are in tune enough that directing them is no longer such a struggle; you can control them with a good deal of precision and even temporarily borrow their senses, easily ordering them to do complex stuff that an ordinary insect wouldn't do on their own but mostly within their capabilities as whatever type of bug they are (scouting, drawing crude pictures and messages, working together to carry a small object to you**). 

4: You are a thin person-shaped shell over some kind of portal or extradimensional space just overflowing with weird bugs, housing a non-euclidean maze of ant tunnels, or a tangled, writhing ball of abnormally long centipedes, or something. You can draw people or objects inside yourself and trap them there, or release a swarm of your little friends huge enough to thickly carpet the ground in a short radius around you, or spread out more inconspicuously over quite a large one. You can bend this swarm flawlessly to your will and harness its senses as though they were your own, learning to process all the thousands of tiny streams of input simultaneously. 

5: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

** This last is fairly natural behavior for ants, so if you’re a living anthill you might be able to pull it off at Superior Living Hive 2, but it’s less so for, say, earwigs, so I’m mentioning it here and not there.

The Maker’s Ark - Chapter 41

     [This is a chapter from my latest novel, a sequel to The Fall of Doc Future and Skybreaker’s Call.  The start is here, and links to my other work here.  It can be read on its own, but contains spoilers for those two books.  I try to post new chapters about every two weeks, but there will sometimes be short stories and vignettes if I don’t have a new chapter ready.  The next chapter is planned for the week of November 27th.]

Previous:  Chapter 40

      There were tasks that Flicker shouldn't rush.  She had discovered when she was quite young that she could only build or repair a machine so fast, or things would start breaking.  And it was a good idea to take the effort to clean up and put all her tools away afterwards.  She was still working on better ways to do something similar while assimilating her high speed mind.  It was slower than stuffing everything into her flesh brain as fast as she could, but it helped with a whole set of chronic problems.       But she finally reached a stopping point, so she slowed down and returned her awareness to her physical surroundings.       "Better?" asked Donner in the dimness of the bedroom.       "What?"  Flicker hadn't realized he was awake.  "I'm fine, just done for now.  How could you tell?"       "That deep breath and sigh."       "Ah.  It's a relief to get all my gestalt memories transferred into my human mind in an orderly way.  Learning's bio-gestalt crew helped me out with some tricks for that.  They've kind of adopted me, since I don't have a bio-gestalt group of my own.  They're really nice.  But I'm feeling all talkative now."       "It's fine.  I figured you'd have a few more things to say."       "Yeah.  I'm sorry you got scared by the nuke.  Black Swan explained why she timed things so Journeyman and I weren't on Earth.  And didn't warn us.  I can tell you some of it.  There was a lot she didn't tell me, because that would be against the EDU rules on custom she's following, and because-- Well, anyway.  If you're interested."       "I am," he said.  Flicker could make out his grin in the faint light from the window.  "But I'd listen even if I weren't.  Talking when you're ready is part of how you cope."       "Fair enough.  So, it's really hard to arrange a believable alibi for me.  Hard for Journeyman too; he's not as fast, but doesn't have to worry about closed doors.  But doing something conspicuous, all day, on a moon of Jupiter, works for both of us.  And that was politically handy for Black Swan because of what happened in Russia."       "Because of who died?"       "Because of who didn't.  You know the guy calling for calm on that vid bit all the news programs showed?"       "The deputy assistant foreign minister, or whatever?"       "He was the highest ranking government official who knew picking a fight with Black Swan was stupid, and apparently was the only one with a reliable phone for a couple of hours.  So he's acting president now.  And will probably stay that way for a while--he won't start any wars, no one really hates him, and everyone will be afraid to try to assassinate him."       "Because of Black Swan?"       "Partly.  But partly because of me.  He was their superhero liaison person, I liked him, and people know it."       "Wait, you know him?"       "He was the diplomat I called to calm things down whenever I upset the Russians.  I talked to him after my Moon dance--I think you heard part of that.  He's not particularly honest, but he hasn't personally done anything horrible, and he's funny and good at defusing things.  So he's probably as good as they can do for now.  I'm not sure--I'm bad at politics compared to Doc, let alone Stella and Black Swan.  But do you see why a lot of paranoid people in shock might think I had something to do with him becoming president if I didn't have an alibi?  Black Swan wants them to blame her, not me."       "Ah.  Yeah."       "Another reason for the timing was so that no one could ask me to stop Black Swan disabling all those missiles.  I wouldn't have done it, but it saved me having to say no, or worrying about it.  A third reason was because anyone thinking of waiting until I'm off Earth to try something now has to worry about Black Swan being three moves ahead of them.  So I didn't stay upset at her for long."       "Reasonable.  But you said Journeyman was still pissed."       "He was upset about a bunch of other things, too.  One is Black Swan's fault--some Russian and Eastern European magicians are suddenly unemployed and want to talk to him urgently.  And other people want to talk to him about them, also urgently.  And he needed to brief Stella about some weird stuff those new aliens tried to do.  He needs some time.  That's why I came here to decompress.  Sorry about the short notice."       Donner grinned again.  "I had DASI set up a 'Flicker warning level' alert for my phone a while ago.  Works pretty well--I wasn't surprised.  And Journeyman is still kinda recovering, isn't he?"       "Not physically.  Lif did a good job of healing him.  But he's stressed because he needs to arrange for the tricky part of making the black hole--getting the construction subspace right.  So there's this book he has to master that's been giving him nightmares."       "Whoa.  Like a Necronomicon or something?"       Flicker laughed.  "No.  But he's a magician, not a physicist, the book is Chandrasekhar's The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes, and he's going to have to use it like a spellbook when he's changing the spell.  DASI is helping him, but it's still scary."       "Everything about making a black hole is scary to me.  I mean, you're going to be carrying it around, right?  What if you drop it?  And where are you gonna put it when you aren't using it?  It's not something you can stick in the garden shed with the lawnmower."       "I don't plan to use it anywhere near Earth.  And if I did, and dropped it, I'd just have to catch it again at apogee on the other side of the planet.  I might have to dig a hole, but going through the Earth wouldn't slow it down much at first.  It would only be a big problem long term.       "Storage will be a bit messier.  Journeyman should be able to make a different subspace for it that I can open without destroying.  Probably.  I'm still practicing.  But Doc pointed out that the subspace will heat up, because the hole will be radiating and the radiation won't have anywhere to go.  So I might get a big blast of energy when I pull it out if I haven't used it for a while, unless Journeyman pulls off another trick."       "Hoo boy.  I can see why he's having nightmares.  I'm just glad I can help you with yours."       "About that."  Flicker took a deep breath.  "I don't know much about the music stuff, but when Osk talks to you about healing, listen.  I'd have recovered full function in my hand a lot quicker if I had.  And if she asks you to practice, practice.  Because the person you're practicing for could be me."       "You think you might get badly hurt fighting whatever is coming?"       "I don't know.  But Golden Valkyrie told me something that gets scarier every time I think about it.  I could win--and still have my flesh and blood body be gone, because the energy levels just got too high.  Osk and some others are helping make arrangements in case that happens.  But they might need your help putting me together again.  You can call my mind back."       "Oof.  Like after I screwed up and Skybreaker took over your body?"       "The emulation, yeah.  But this would be harder, because Golden Valkyrie is gone.  She won't be pushing things in the background, like she has for most of my life.  It would be up to you and whoever else can help."       Donner was quiet for a moment.  "Practice.  Got it.  I can do that."       "Thank you."       Flicker put her arms around him in the darkness and just held him for a while.       *****       Doc awoke in the darkness, alone.  No nightmares--but a lifetime had given him a dark appreciation of them; reality was almost always an improvement.  Not so much, lately.       It was possible that his old nightmares were gone for good.  The last try had yielded a few garbled fragments that were possibly relevant--Europa instead of Europe, a black hole singularity instead of The Singularity--but nothing predictive.  Nothing he could use to plan.  And Stella was right; he'd structured his life around the direct and indirect information in them to a degree that required adjustment when they stopped.       He ran his set of post-nightmare self checks.  This was still data--Stella was spending the night in an EDU ship in orbit, therefore her physical presence nearby was not necessary to stop whatever mix of the old nightmare signals were still arriving.  She had given up on finishing their talk after Journeyman's interruption.  Morning would do.       Tonight had hadn't been an ideal time for the separation test, but when was?  Emergencies didn't wait their turn.       And it was past time to start planning for the consequences if it became politically untenable for the Director of the EDU to stay at his headquarters.  It was officially Deep Kingdoms territory--Sealord had made it his embassy--but the US government could revoke that.  Not unlikely, if there was a war.  Doc might have to move, too, but his options weren't the same as Stella's.       He checked the clock.  1:30 AM and he was wide awake, nightmare or not.  There were other preparations to make.  Also overdue, since causing unnecessary stress for the Director of the EDU made what should have been a personal decision--not.       He had data--important data--that he was perhaps not giving the weight he should.  Because... Well that was the question, wasn't it?  He was just as good at rationalizing as he was at rational thinking, and over-optimization could be a deadly trap if he moved out of the region of relevance.       No time like the present.       "DASI?"       "Yes, Doc?"       "Any pending alerts?"       "No."       "Estimate a bound on the chance Flicker will do something dramatic or transit a portal in the next two hours."       "Less than 1%."       "Well then.  Set alert interrupt level red plus.  Exception: Breakpoint.  Secure instance, nightmare privacy level.  Engage mindscreens."       "Verified."       "Emergency timeloop guard;  I'm thinking of a number--give me a four digit random integer."       "9291."       "No match.  Good.  Set probability manipulation canary, timeloop canary, oracle canary."       "Set."       "Okay, we'll give Breakpoint a little bit to see if he gets a sudden urge to call and warn me I'm about to make an apocalyptic mistake."       Doc picked up the headset from the nightstand and called up the appropriate notes from the secure section.  He hadn't even looked at them in a long time.  This wasn't going to be pleasant.       "Any changes?" he asked.       "None so far," said DASI.       "All right.  We're going to do a psychological bias renormalization, including nightmare context integration.  Primary known change: Golden Valkyrie is no longer wearing the Skystone.  Starting changed assumption: Golden Valkyrie is currently causally unlinked from Earth.  No preconception whether she will return to this worldline, if it survives.  Secondary changed assumptions:  Her last words to Flicker and Journeyman, and any consistent bias changes you've seen since the removal of my primary block and the loss of my top-level augments."       "Noted."       Safe travels, Fairhair.  If you did give me a parting gift, I hope I'm not about to throw it away.       *****       Alep could finally verify the target as he closed, despite the distortion.  His mind was sluggish from the damping needed to properly perceive this unnatural worldline, but his body was not.  His weapons were ready, and he repeated the command for the others to follow--after all the rigors of their voyage, the goal was finally within their grasp.  Baht was shouting something, but the quantum froth stole her meaning.       <Alep!>       <Gem!  Where are you?  You must-->       <No.  Consult your anchor core.  Now.>       <We don't have time! The target will-->       <The target is not here.  Consult your core.>       Could the distortion be that bad?  The damping made it hard to think.  Alep slowed reluctantly, to send the necessary attention inward to his causality anchor core, his safety self.  And found his perceptions shifting as he did.  He stopped, then followed Gem back to a nearby simply-connected space, where Baht waited.  He tasted their concern.       <Another damned echo!> he said.       <Yes,> said Baht.  <Was there self-echoes, too?>       <A self-echo and an entire false target line.>       <At least we know we're in the right domain,> said Gem mordantly.       <This domain is a maze of twisty little worldlines, all subtly different!> said Baht.       <So much looping cannot be natural,> said Alep.  <The inhabitants have weaponized their own worldline topology.>       They were close to the target--and far.  How far was hard to tell.  Causality drift meant they each had to renormalize periodically, assisted by the others.  The return to self was not always smooth, and Alep had waited longer than he now knew was advisable.       <Harnessed it, certainly,> said Gem.  <But weaponized?  I sense more than that, in the patterns.>       <It killed Explorer's Aspect,> said Baht.  <I am certain of it.  She was trying to map the hazard.  She did not lose focus, she kept it too long--until drift and madness finally took her.  The same could happen to us.>       <We should go back,> said Gem.  <This tangle maze cannot possibly propagate over a domain boundary, so it is no threat.  And no parasites will escape either--they would get pulled in and eaten, just like Explorer.>       <No,> said Alep.  <We will follow the probe echoes.  We are not alone--we can assist each other, and endure that long.  When we reach the primary line of the probe eater, we will end it, and return.>       <What there is of us by then,> said Baht.  <We are no longer who we were.  The ages here have changed us.  My own anchor core tastes strange.>       <But you have not lost purpose.>       <No.>       <Good.  We go on.>       *****       Doc looked up from his handcomp as Stella entered the room.  Sunlight streamed in from the windows, and service bots had arranged a selection of food for her if she was hungry for brunch after her flight.  Doc had already eaten.       "How are the Xelians and the Grs'thnk?" he asked.       "Quite well," she said, and sat down across from him.  "Hiri is a proper pessimist--he's been helping with the emergency shelters for the support ships.  They weren't designed for the Moon's gravity, but he knows some tricks to minimize damage from that.  Cheered me up a bit.  But the Grs'thnk Auditors noted the lack of experience of modern Earth nations with definitively ending wars lost by sudden governing authority death."       "Well, Black Swan called attention to that problem in a way that's hard to ignore," said Doc.  "I'm sure the US continuity of government people will have a few questions for me when we finally meet.  DASI said everyone in their working group is taking her prep briefings very seriously, which is an encouraging sign."       "Oh yes.  So.  Have you accepted that you are no longer on the critical path for black hole construction, if you ever were?"       "I have."  Doc looked down, then back up.  "I did a proper psych bias recheck last night."       Stella raised an eyebrow.  "A full one?  You look like you got at least some sleep.  Although--"       "I took everything apart, but I haven't put it all back together yet.  I knew we'd have to go over most of it again, anyway."  He gestured at his cheekbone.  "The bruise is from sparring with robots very early this morning.  That let me sleep afterwards."       "Interesting.  I'd have expected you to go to your workshop."       "I took three steps and already had an idea for a contra-anthropic timeloop-powered deadzone bomb that would be lethal to anything that lives in more than four dimensions from two universes away.  And another one for a hunting portal Journeyman could open for me that would require a black hole to permanently seal to preserve loop consistency with Golden Valkyrie's predictions."       "That seems excessive."       "I doubt I'd actually be able to build it.  But even trying would be a very bad idea.  Self-destructive anger was the good reason for my old cognitive safety block.  Much wiser to go beat up robots for a while instead."       Doc looked down again.  "I think I've done pretty well working with you professionally.  Personally...  'I'm sorry' isn't close to enough.  The entity collective that synchronized my coherent nightmares was, on average, an utter bastard.  I've been finding surprising and unpleasant ways I've let that shape me."       Stella smiled wryly.  "Well, we have time to talk.  A day of unavailability will be politically useful for me.  Ashil's portal work seems to be going well, Flicker and Journeyman are resting, and DASI, Three, and Learning can handle anything else that comes up.  And fixing the problems is more important than fault.  I had personal issues long before we met."       Doc snorted.  "This whole timeline has issues."       Stella looked thoughtful.  "Yes.  But I do find that hunting portal idea of yours interesting."       "Oh?"       "Just thinking about distractions, traps, parasitism, and what Golden Valkyrie did the last time she was pregnant."

Next:  Chapter 42