Antarctic Termite

Movie-ticket-stub-tearer theory

I have trouble believing this because saying no to people takes a lot of confidence. If you're disabled, it's more likely that people have spent most of your life telling you no, saying that there are things you can't do, and that you're reliant on able-bodied people. In some people, sure, that might breed an incredibly resistant personality, but in most, I feel like it's more likely to lower their self-esteem and deprive them of agency in dealing with other people, especially in such a frustrating job as customer service. Which might making it harder to deny people things rather than easier.

Transfer

Divinus planning/spoilers

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

-Words found carven into waveworn lagoon stone, on the coast of the Fractal Sea.

Day sinks, and I am roused.

The light of the heavenly eyesores shatters upon the surface of my lagoon and the night is quiet. Dark. Becalmed. Below faint ripples the water is black and lifeless, shrunken upon itself, and it is time for me to bring it to life.

I swing my arm heavily over the sandbed, and the first real wave of tonight stretches from the beach and claps down upon the wet, firm shore, east to north. The sound rings far and true into the lagoon, stirring my seven sons from their frenetic games in the sargassum.

I swirl around them as they come, knowing them by number alone, for they are yet too small to have earned face or name. But loyal cadets they are, and they assemble beneath my wing in the tumbling organic formation in which we are so practiced. Together, we draw breath...

I surge forth!

...And I draw back, my underlings in tow, as the wave spreads out gently onto the sand. Thus is the law of our crescendo; Rise slowly. Be strong in flow and gracious in ebb. Build tension, and flex, back and forth, back and forth, until the whole lagoon crashes upon the arc of my back and I feel its weight like a muscle in dance.

As the stars rise on, so I push, and pull, without heave or strain. I throw myself onto the sand and flow back, seizing up the dry salt and twigs and bones of the day, casting them to the fish and the currents. With my every churning sweep I brush clean the beach, leaving only the purest white swathes.

Midnight approaches and the work grows loud and broad. Deep notes of my laughter boom out over the spiny grass of the shore-lands, greeting the fickle windlings above as they idle and scatter. Make no mistake! They are not simply rumbles of amusement but grunts of effort. My task is much, and sacred.

I take hold of the stagnant pools and consume them; I reach into the burrowed tunnels and fill them. I mill shells, carve stones into anemone gardens. Where the sand-ledges advance too far and weigh down the grasses below, mine is the hand that loosens it and calls it back. To me and my sons, even the heaviest driftwood is as a twig, and we haul it to the land from which it came that it may conclude its path into the earth. For the morning foragers, be their beaks those of bird or hain, we leave gifts of shellfish and green-weed. The footprints of today we wipe clean, that tomorrow may start new.

My cleansing toil rises to its peak, and the little plain of the beach is submerged entirely by my every stroke.
As it recedes, the entire lagoon is white, smooth, and flawless.

I draw the water back, gathering it all up in my arms, bunching it together, as much as I can hold, and lo! it is tiring. Then, when the tension is at its greatest, when my sons strain bitterly, I release.

The wave bursts and slams into the sand, and I with it, rebounding from the ground in a great leap of spray as the water charges on with a foamy hiss.

And for a moment, I stand in that explosion of water with my arms to the heavens, one knee to the ground in the surge, my head held high for any mortal to see, and in that moment I can all but reach the celestial citadel where my father dwells, far beyond the eyes of man or Djinn.

A tumble, a fall, a flurry of foam, my belly to the sand as I sink back, and the crescendo is over. The lagoon is clean, to begin anew.

Tomorrow, when the sun is as high as the bitter white orbs are now, we will start again.

For I am Flux, the Even-Tide, Baron of this expanse of sand, custodian of the beach, and I shall pursue my duty to my final breath!

* * * * *

Early morning is a tired time. My waves make their final recession before the equilibrium at dawn and the swell that comes with the day. The moons may tug at the lagoon with their panicked passes, but their eccentricity cannot waver my perfectly arranged cycle. I have refreshed this shore a million times over and shall do so a million more; Let them keep to themselves in the cold heights, by Change!

Yet even I know that, in the eyes of the mighty Tidelords to which I owe fealty, I am young. Tonight, something crosses my path that reminds me of this.

They are called Mockdjinn, to most, False Stonelords, to some, and Urtelem to a few. I have seen their herds pass this beach many times and I have watched generations of them pass on. No stone can outlast the ageless tide, not even the true Stonelords that cower in their mountains, and these shambling beings are no exception. But this herd carries someone with them.

It is a thing like a scorpion and yet like a hain. Flexible, thin, and yet strong and elegant; Curved and pointed, like fish bones. It lags behind as the Mockdjinn shuffle on and leave deep tracks in the sand. A moment comes when it clicks a low note, and the matriarch turns. They share a moment of signing, and herd and creature part ways, with waves from both sides. They are used to leaving their strange follower behind in some place or other.

The matriarch locks eyes with it a moment longer than the rest, knowing that something now is different. The two salute, and turn aside.

Submerged, I am alone with the creature. Curled upon the shore, it moves only to lift an arm.

It beckons me.

Only after a few moments do I realise the truth of this. Impossible!, so I think to myself. Am I not well concealed within my own waters? Ah, but surely beauty such as mine cannot be concealed forever. Very well! I shall display myself. I lift my handsome form from the water. It flows and swirls upon itself, streaked with foam, a green-white frame of muscular curves that towers over the silent being below me.

"Hile, Creature! I bid you welcome into this, most pristine realm of mine. Pray, tell me, are you ill?"

It gazes back, not quite with the adulation I deserve, but with an interest I find unsettling.

Close up, I can finally determine its nature. It is one of the fair folken, so named for the fae that circle its winged skull in a loose halo. Servitors of the Grey Flesh. Standing, it is maybe the height of a man, and its neck is hung with the weight of a dozen tightly-beaded necklaces. There is a distant rattle to its breath.

He is ancient beyond words.

My eyes glance away from his stare momentarily, but I force them to stay. The Sculptor's eyes are marred with an architect's keenness. Not the fascination of finding something new, for his gaze is old as the mountains and knows all in their shade. He watches me with the curiousity of the transcendent, who looks upon a familiar world yet sees it as if for the first time.

With only the faintest shiver, his spired hands lift up a heavy rope of ornaments from his chest. The heaviest, I think, and the most elaborate. I take it, transfixed, in my hands. A smile alights on those ancient eyes.

Then, it is over.

The fae-blades clink as they begin to fight one another. The Sculptor's heavy head tilts backwards, turning his gaze to the stars, and his pincers are limp. I look to the chain in my palms. Its pendants are many, carved of semiprecious stone, of chalcedony, rose quartz, jade. A pictography. Mockdjinn in all stages of life. Symbols and shapes, and carvings of insects. Pawprints pressed into ochre clay. There is a pattern to it, a record of a journey, and the closer I look, the more I can discern. There are open plains treaded by deer and spider-oxen, forests ringing with birbsong. Records of birth, the aging face of a matriarch. Tools that can only belong to hain, modelled human handprints...

When the morning comes I will give the ancient being a natural funeral beneath a flow of dune-sand, as I have many cadavers before, and let the burrowing crabs go their way with him until fresh grass sprouts above. For now, in this quiet moment, I hold the looping history in my palms, and keep it until a rising dawn calls me to surrender its stones to the slow grind into dust, as is the natural way.

* * * * *

Nice music in the last place you'd expect to find it

From the soundtrack of The Big Lez Show, of all things.

The combination is a little unsettling.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

Uh, I don't mean to be a philistine here, but...how does one farm rocks?

@Muttonhawk

Ed: By all means, get the jump on it if you see fit, though; I won't rush to race you guys to the agricultural revolution. It'll probably be all over the place soon anyway.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

Edit 2: Well actually, Teknall will probably want to bring in metallurgy. I should be more worried about Vulamera or Logos getting in first to agriculture.

@Muttonhawk

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

The only reason I haven't given agriculture to the Urtelem yet is because the ones with Tira and Dancer have a war to fight first.

Even then, they are currently encamped just outside the Valley of Peace, and in much larger numbers than the usual herd, so they might run out of decent rocks if they wait too long without being able to farm some more.

...On your marks.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

P.P.P.S. @Antarctic Termite Your new holy site mentioned something about an umbilical cord? Is that connected through a Gap portal, or is its connection to Jvan through physical space? The latter would be rather impractical.

@BBeast

It runs from the embryo-machine to the internal lining of the uterus, same as a normal umbilical cord. The 'placenta' on the interior of the uterus is living matter transplanted from Jvan, it just happens to be separate from the rest of her body.

Not that it wouldn't be hilarious for Galbar's first space elevator to be an umbilicus stretched out like a reverse bungee cord.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

After re-reading the creation of Ovaedis, I hope dearly that someone writes a slice-of-life post where a sentient female on Galbar has a sex-ed class supplemented by looking through a telescope.

@Muttonhawk

Done.

One bored Thursday morning

Janelle finished doodling the cute angel who sat two rows to her left and dropped her pencil, resting her head on her arm. She drummed her fingers on the decade-old desk, cheap then, decrepit now. Another glance won’t hurt. Yep, there she was. Two weeks in and still completely oblivious to the fact that Janelle was flirting with her. The fuck did I get transferred to an Orthodox school for?

Clueless religious nuts, all of them. Janelle had tuned out of the lecture as soon as Mr. Hopston had mentioned the word ‘abstinence’ and was yet to listen back in. Don’t swear. Don’t get laid. Don’t be gay. And no sex ed until senior year? Her eyelids drooped. I could’ve gone to Vulamera Protestant High or something and learned all this by the time I was done being a freshman, but I guess physics classes and pottery club are ok too. Thanks a lot, Logos. Toun. The Gods of Order were boring as shit.

At least it was marginally better than going to a Reformed Zephyrionic school and attending a four-hour mass on how great the Primordial Being was every Friday.

Hopston was going into how the mortal body was an engine of sin and should be kept private, and Janelle dozed complacently for a while, the words glancing off her limply. Until.

“Wait, what?”

The students around her tittered, and conservative professor Hops froze before the blackboard as if the idea of being interrupted was completely new to him. “Janelle? Raise your hand, for goodness sake!”

A palm shot up.

“Yes, Janelle?”

“What th-” She bit her tongue. “Can you please repeat that last bit?”

“Why, of course, you little heathen.” He shook his head slowly, infuriatingly, and gestured broadly to the black cylinder on the windowsill. “I said that to demonstrate the evils of the flesh, we’ll be taking a look through the telescope today.”

“Oh bullshit!” Janelle’s hands slammed down on her desk so hard that the old screws rattled and she had to clasp her reddened palms. The class recoiled, stunned. This was the kind of drama only transfer students brought with them from the schools of sin. A rare novelty.

“What the sweet hell do you mean, ‘demonstrate the evils of the flesh’? What are we gonna be looking at, our star signs? Trying to spot some dirty messages written on the surface of Periditus? Did the Gods of Order write their moral law based on a horoscope they tore out of the daily paper? Is that it? No? Can you please start making some bloody sense for once, then?”

Janelle knew she was doomed as soon as the words started to spill from her lips.

And yet, in an uncharacteristically worldly gesture, the venerable Professor only smiled. “Well, girl, the matter of your impending detention aside, why not take a look for yourself? Maybe that’ll help you get over your little… Lapse of faith. Go on. It’s the right time of year, and I’ve already focused the lens. It’s tinted to highlight Jvanic powers, but I’m sure you of all people won’t have any trouble recognising those carnal products of perversion and sin.”

Recognising that, whatever configuration of stars she was supposed to see, she’d only set herself up for embarrassment in front of her crush, Janelle lifted herself out of her chair and decided to get this over with. Hissing something vile, she lowered her face to the eyepiece.

Her breath caught.

“What the fuck,” she whispered.

As she returned to her seat and Hopston interrupted his own condescending remark to try and get the giggling class to pipe down, Janelle could only sit mutely before her desk and wonder what kind of fucking crazy gods must have gotten together to make such a fucking crazy world.

Thanks for the prompt. This was a fun little scribble, if not quite true to some of the character's respective ideologies.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

Reasons not to read a Jvan post directly after a pubcrawl: Interpreting the holy sight as an orbiting testicle-space-foetus. At least the music was cool.

I may edit this when I sober up. Please do not judge too harshly.

I think I'll sleep now.

@Muttonhawk

Nah, mate, it's cool, that's bang on the money. She built a castle in space purely so that she had a place to store her massive dong. This is 100% canon.

Not even half-joking.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

Well... Last minute before the turn ends, but Jvan finally has an appropriately weird Holy Site. To be fair, this isn't entirely shameless Might-grubbery, since I've been planning to make this big space castle for like two months now and kept delaying it for one or other reason.

Now that it's finally out of the way I'll be tossing weird little life-forms left and right. I'll get to work on catching up on the recent posts I've missed too in my rush to finish this between assessments.

Mid/High Casual - Divinus: The Deity Roleplay Mk.II

Diaphane was ended, crushed out of existence much as she had been wrought into it- In a flow of blood. Of her eggs, Jvan knew, some had survived to scatter over the surface of Galbar, where she hoped that the Elementals would be surprised to find her children tenacious, and eager to cast their spawn to the winds. Luckiest was the one whose plight she had heard and soothed and borne into the fragments of Galbar's ring. There it may stay, and proliferate in peace.

The first, perhaps, of much migration into this world from Other flesh.

Vestec's glittery doing in the skies beckoned for further touches. Too long I have relegated my art to mundanity. Grounded things, derivative of the works of others. Galbar was beautiful but there were places beyond. Diaphane may have been wrought of necessity, but she was nonetheless the final cue, upon which Jvan would wait no longer. Zephyrion's castle of the air had its place, his children theirs. For the system they had established to become broader, more dynamic, it had to expand.

Perfectus had disappeared into the errorsome Gap. Now it was time to reverse the loss.

The Horrorsome Engineer curled into herself, folding the tidy flesh of her form until splinters of underlying frameworks pierced the distorted surface. Burrowing into her own fog, groping in the ever-churning chambers for traces of that which she had secreted away long ago, Jvan forced her awareness into the Gap, ballooning her flesh into the overstretched bottleneck. The Other had waited for her since the time of the pre-world and it waited still, a hot, glorious mess of shudders in the shadows.

Oh... How you've grown.

Other-forms slithered between minuscule vacuoles of not-space, the scattered nature of their forms no detraction from their magnitude. Jvan felt their weightless clinging, spreading like mould into every inch of her body. It stung her. Like mire-sludge itches upon skin as it dries, it stung her.

Gods had built the universe to accommodate them. This place was their amalgamated failure, their conflict, mistakes and flaws that all attempts to heal had only scarred over. Divine trash shunted aside by all but the fool, the Child God who had blessed it with life and stability and now stood under the reckoning of her choices.

Yield!

It did not.

The Other stung her, and it fed. Jvan bloated further and further into the silent hybrid of Vowzra's sabotage and her own words, but the living being took after its illegitimate father and its emaciating bite became a tear. Layer by layer of manifold flesh shrivelled and peeled away into the lightlessness, ravenous in isolation of aeons. She pushed on, constructing greater and greater swathes of her body into the fractured crevice but her spawn only consumed. A shivering warmth seized the goddess and the edge of her perception became a nauseous blur.

I am... Losing myself. My child, my child, what has the Viceregent done to you? Why must you slay your own?

Beneath the waters of the Fractal Sea, a convulsive wave spread, as Jvan's cathedral body began to sag over disappearing foundations. Push became a pull, and then a tug of war.

No!

But the fever-dream was far from breaking.

Other-flora seethed over her, into her, and only the heat of her whirring core scorched the tip of its advancement enough to hold it from leeching into Galbar. The corpulent God sagged on the horizon like a spilled bladder, consuming itself, sacrificing its exterior to fuel the engines that stood bastion to the parasite growing within. Flesh ate flesh ate flesh, as is its way.

No resistance could hold back the encroaching sprawl, until, deep within Jvan's cavity, the creeping Other found something hard amidst the softness. Old, buried under the new.

White, within the grey.

Clink.

As its enclosing scar toppled and fell away into Jvan's ardent resistance, a delicately balanced shard of perfection was flung free into the violence. Uncompromising. The porcelain shrapnel cut and sliced through god and anomaly alike, annihilating the Other and searing the Jvan's vaulted shape until it sloughed and rose anew. Fresh, and perfect.

Order seized Jvan, purging its bile and snapping its body into sleek concentric spirals that stood immovable and jagged against the waltz of error. From the wounds of the shard, symmetry spread in a single pulse that left the arches of Jvan's body quivering with tension and the Other seared away into the impermeable grey fog; And the wave of order swept on, echoing deep into the Gap, shining a carmine glow that carried a hale voice.

"E N O U G H !"

The familiar, dim red light of Jvan's control resonated deep into the fracture, wresting the Other back on its own spine until it cracked and splintered and collapsed, mangled, before her.

"I am All-Beauty! Artist of the every seam from which you spilled! Engineer of the flesh with which you breathe! I am the Key, who opened this gate, and I am the Bastion that shall hold it closed! I alone am the Other God, and none shall deny me my domain!"

And the fracture yielded before her.

* * * * *

RED.M- 07SELFIMMOLATION

From a million negligible vacuoles, from false starts and erroneous calculations, did the will of Jvan coalesce. She whirled into the fragmented space and buttressed it with her bones, supported it on pillars of her back, drawing together a great swathe of what had been splintered since the dawn of time. The bubbles and cracks of the Gap balanced against one another at her command, clearing a great cavity around which she and the Other curled in a symbiosis only the Horrorsome Engineer could design.

From her firstborn's body she began to weave a new structure, and she did it thus.

Starting at a single point, Jvan created two materials in the darkness. One supple, and translucent, a near-white pink, and the other flexible but firm, pale beige, like faintly yellowed porcelain. The latter material she extended into a long, segmented cord, and, twisting gravity, caused it to curve in a half-circle. She wrapped this in the soft material as her awareness moved from the first point along the curled shape, enclosing the narrow tube for maybe a quarter of its length.

There she extended two spines of the harder substance into the arc formed by the narrow tunnel, side by side, and from each one another such rod at a tight angle from the end of the first, facing towards the starting-point. These too she enclosed in the soft fabric. Thus Jvan propped up the thing against the external gravity holding it in place.

She then created the core of the thing, and for this purpose she created a third material, a dark carmine substance the colour of her own voice. Jvan formed it into an orb and implanted it, too, upon the inner arc of the thing, where it swelled and collapsed rhythmically. This core she protected with two inwards-curving fences of parallel spines, extending from opposite sides of the thin tunnel and composed of the same hard, pale material. Each fence guarded one side of the orb, and she enclosed all this in the translucent substance, covering the rigid tube to a two-thirds of its length. And from the layer of softness encasing the fences and their precious cargo, she extended a long, long tube of the same material, and implanted it into herself, so that she would always draw energy from this Other-machine, and it from her.

Three-quarters of the way up the arc, she extended two more struts, this time bent towards supporting the furthermost end of the arc, opposite the first pair. Enclosing this in soft material, Jvan finally produced a hollow orb of the hard material, into which the segmented tube lead. In this space she allowed unadulterated Other-flesh to curl up and rest, and left in the ball two portals through which it would be eternally connected to the Gap. This far end of the segmented tunnel she clothed in supple material, completing the thing.

It needs protection.

Taking the entire, fused Gap cavity, and her own flesh that was within it, and the divine construct that was attached to it, Jvan excised this entire assembly from the rest of the Gap and held it within her physical body. Here she built around it a cocoon of kilometres-thick grey bone, in the simplest and strongest shape- A triangle, curved into a sleek three-dimensional fortress. At its two upwards points, she extended vast, curved horns, each several miles long, that did not taper into points but split into frayed, circular organs with which she could listen to the transmissions of all of her Sculptors, and sense the sounds of stirring from within the Gap.

From its sides leading towards the third, downwards point, Jvan extended two rigid, thin stalks, and budded on each of them a living, growing battery of her Eyes. And at the third corner of the triangle she built a grey gate, a circular portal into the Gap-cavity within the fortress, wherein her living flesh received inspiration from the Other. When this great door opened, it opened only slightly, and with great strain, for this smoothly bulbous structure was the only entrance to the cavity and its fragile contents.

* * * * *

The Ovaedis being done, Jvan migrated it slowly from within her to her uppermost surface. Slowly, moment by moment, its great horns rose into the sky, and the whole structure hovered slowly into orbit, joining the meteoroids of Galbar's ring.

And as it rose, a strange thing can, perhaps, be marked. Though the Gods of Galbar are weird and many, they are of one kind, arising from the word of one being. Certain traits resonate within them, and have been present since before they were conceived. Even All-Beauty, who rejects the shape and ways of her siblings, is not apart from the Divine Caste. Disguised as it is, in size and purpose, the Ovaedis follows a familiar form.

Indeed, it takes the shape of an embryo in utero. From its curved spine with extruding tailbone, to the thin bends of two arms and two legs, to the rounded skull and two small perforations that might be eyes; From the heart within two sets of ribs and the umbilicus coupling it to its mother; From the uterus holding it, complete with fallopial tubes, extruding ovaries, and single cervix, the Ovaedis of Jvan is, at once, divine and mortal.

what's a 'relevance'?

Jvan attempts to build herself into the Gap and finds that, thanks to Vowzra, the Other is more powerful than she expected. She falls deeply ill in her attempts to fight its influence.

One of the shards of Toun that was lost inside her in the beginning is knocked loose and becomes active, allowing her to force the Other into an orderly, perfect shape, using 1 Might and unlocking the portfolio of Geometry, which she'll later claim.

She builds a Holy Site using a conglomeration of pockets of anomalous space using 10 might, and sends it into orbit as part of Galbar's ring for another 1 Might.

The Holy Site is called the Ovaedis. You're gonna have to read the post for details on what it looks like. Its construction is set up to be a bit of a mystery with a twist at the end.

Then she takes a well-earned break.

0 Might Remaining
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Level Four

3/3 Might used to unlock Beauty (Geometry)