The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
This reminds me that I haven't caught up on Katalepsis in a while. A couple of years, maybe even?
Top Level Canon Reviews - relaunched!
- Thread starter Leila Hann
- Start date
- Review
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's approaching the end of book 1, likely finishing before the end of the year or very early 2025.
- Location
- Patriarchova
How many words is it going to take her to rescue her damned sister holy shit.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
About Poorly Drawn Lines, I've only just remembered that I'm actually subscribed to them on Tumblr, somehow not recognising them here till now. Guess it's because I have a whole bunch of other subscriptions that they kinda got drowned out
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
Book One? Holy crap, it's how many millions of words long by now, and that's just Book One?
- Location
- Patriarchova
"Your sister is in another eyeball."
With or without the "in" on that.
Katalepsis III (part two)
- Location
- Patriarchova
Heather's initial attempts at communication with Slenderwoman go poorly, and it's entirely her own fault.
In fact, "Heather does a stupid" is really the byline for these next three chapters. On one hand, seeing her be this reckless and thoughtless this many times in a row is a bit frustrating, and feels out of character. On the other hand, we already know that Heather has just had her first taste of real power, her first perverse rush at exercising that power against weaker entities with no consequences, and also just started getting used to having an incredibly attractive girlfriend/bodyguard she can count on. Considering that she's a poorly socialized twenty-year-old under a lot of stress and coming out of a decade of repression, maybe acting out-of-character right now is actually in character. That doesn't make it any less frustrating, but it does make it make sense as part of her development and (hopefully) growth.
Well, first things first. Heather finds Slenderwoman sulking off across the street after being rebuked earlier, and tries to take to her. She's still fairly aggro in her approach though, speaking with a clear presumption of hostile intent despite being here to try and mend bridges. When Slenderwoman tries to extend a tentacle forward in something that appears to be a greeting or an attempt at sign language or something, Heather...well, she doesn't think her reaction through.
Heather. If it wanted to hurt you, and touching you was all it needed to do for that, then why wouldn't it just sneak up behind you and tap you with a tentacle?
The entity - which Heather comes to privately refer to as "Tenny," for "Tentacles" - keeps its distance henceforth, and doesn't react to any further communication attempts except by staring warily from across the street. Nice job breaking it.
Also there's some hilarious foreshadowing (or maybe just teasing, after the precedents the story has already set for the reader) when Raine comes over to ask Heather what she's doing out here.
Nothing to be jealous of, right. Once Heather eventually does regain this thing's trust Raine is going to need to either learn to share or grow a few more tongues to compete.
With Heather having just blown the possibility of miracle reinforcements (not that those weren't a serious longshot to begin with, given the cult's demonstrated ability to do as they will with at least most types of PSF), the three are back to trying to decide how to proceed. Evelyn still wants to keep summoning more demons to supplement Praem's meido-bots and send them on the offensive, despite the risks associated with having that many bound to service at once. Raine, despite her (over)confidence in Evelyn's abilities, thinks that this is a terrible idea and that they should try literally anything besides that. Including (unwisely, I think) holding down the fort and hoping that the enemy has already decided that they're too much trouble after those last couple of clashes.
I don't think Raine's optimistic suggestion there was a very smart one, but the sheer venom with which Evelyn shuts it down strongly implies that her opposition is deeper than just the wisdom of it. And, when Raine proposes maybe asking other wizards who she knows of for assistance, well.
It's starting to seem like Evelyn wouldn't even care if the Sharrowford Cult never attacked them at all. She'd attack them as soon as they demonstrated this level of power regardless of their intentions, just on principle.
Maybe that's an overly uncharitable reading of Evelyn here, but I do think that there's a *side* of her that hasn't shaken off its indoctrination of this nature. And that being in a wizard war is bringing that side of her out and potentially undoing progress away from her mother that she's been making.
And, on the topic of people showing more sides of themselves, I'm starting to think more and more that this isn't just power-drunkenness changing Heather. There's something changing in her head.
It's not just that Heather is acting like this. It's that the other two - including Evelyn in her own house, her own dumb little queendom - are actually lowering their heads and going along with it.
Heather has changed. And she seems to have picked up some kind of charisma power while she was at it.
Is it using the Eye's formulas so much, changing her brain to think more like the Eye itself does? Or is it proximity to Lozzie and/or Tenny that's doing it? Actually, considering the timing, this is around the point where I started to suspect that Lozzie and Tenny were connected.
In the end, they decide to re-enact a version of the earlier siege protocols. Raine temporarily moves back in with Evelyn, the revolution will have its greatest soldier back soon enough. Heather moves in as well, for the most part, spending only two of the next dozen-odd nights at the dorm. While Raine bodyguards and Evelyn summons (including a creature that sounded a lot like a gug hired thug and that the author congratulated me for spotting~), Heather practices the ability that Evelyn dubbed "self-implementing hyperdimensional mathematics." IE, her Edward Elric glyphless spellcasting powers. She has her own room to practice in. Near Raine's. Equipped with blankets, buckets, and tissues, where she can indulge in her eldritch knowledge for as long as she's willing to bleed out the nose and vomit up everything in her stomach for.
I really do worry about how many brain cells she's going through. Maybe there's a spell that can make those grow back.
Over the course of a week-and-change timeskip, Heather manages - with the help of some of Evelyn's book collection that gave her PTSD to look at before - to get to the point where she can send small objects to other dimensions with only moderate discomfort, send large ones with significantly more discomfort, and potentially even retrieve them back again by really frying her brain like an egg in a pan. It's baby steps, but it's steps. And she's getting slightly better at not bleeding and vomiting and losing consciousness when she does it.
She continues, through the timeskip, to dream of Lozzie. Unfortunately, her memories of these dreams aren't always easy to recall after she wakes up. Which is a problem, on account of one of the later updates Lozzie provides her with:
So yeah. Confirmation that Lozzie is a prisoner, perhaps even a prisoner in her own body. And also, more distressingly, that Evelyn and her pile of occult treasures are no longer the main target after Heather's display of dimension-warping power at the end of arc 2. Heather herself is the greater prize now.
Like I said. She can barely remember any of this after waking up.
Extrapolating a bit more, it sounds a lot like Lozzie and her brother only recently showed up in the area and took over the Sharrowford Cult. Would explain the sudden increase in their competence, boldness, and resources, if they were previously a bunch of blindly fumbling hedge-magicians and now they're being led by something closer to a proper wizard.
Alternatively, evil brother was always a member, but he just had a major breakthrough in his research (possibly by experimenting on his sister) and bootstrapped himself up into proper wizard territory.
Anyway. Abusive family situation like Evelyn's. Someone who wants to run away and be free like Raine. Inversion of Heather's own relationship with Maisie. Good disc 1 boss, foil to all of the main trio in some way.
On account of not being able to remember this dire warning, though, Heather eventually decides to do a little shopping trip downtown to take some time to herself. It's been a while since she's read any books just for herself, what with the classwork on one hand and the brain-melting tomes on the other, and she thinks that light reading might be almost as good at helping her body cope with these rigours as being energetically de-stressed every night by Raine is. Even so, I think this was pretty reckless of her.
Even more reckless, though, is her not calling Raine *immediately* when things start going wrong. I guess she just really didn't want to constantly need bailing out, but like...that's Evelyn logic there, Heather should know better lol.
While Heather is perusing the bookstore, Tenny the Tentacle Monster starts urgently trying to get her attention. And overcoming her post-threat caution to get in close and offer Heather a tentacle again. This time, Heather decides that she'd best accept it. Once again; Heather, if Tenny could hurt you with a touch, she'd have just snuck up behind you and done it. Ah well, better late than never.
Heather is annoyingly slow on the uptake. And annoyingly slow to send Raine a text. It's really only when Tenny's touch-telepathy informs Heather that Lozzie sent her that Heather starts taking shit seriously (her memories of who Lozzie is are foggy, but she recalls just enough with prompting). So, she tries to sneak out of the bookstore, only to stumble right into her pursuer...Twil.
Well, one of her pursuers. Twil happened to be in town buying textbooks for that degree she's starting, and caught Raine's sent on some of Heather's clothes that were technically Raine's. She followed it to be a needy ex at Raine, and then saw Heather and decided to be a creepy girlfriend's ex at her, and then noticed *someone else* already tailing Heather and decided to warn her. So, I guess that's nice of her at least.
When Twil describes the other pursuer to Heather, it sounds a lot like the cult sniper whose bullet Heather had to force-deflect in their last encounter. Heather's first thought is to flee, but then Twil abruptly makes a counterproposal. And...well, like I said, Heather has a lot going on right now effecting her judgement, but she still had me shaking my head at her with her answer.
So, off they go to ambush the sniper lady and whatever hidden backup she herself might have waiting in the wings. Tenny tailing miserably after Heather trying to communicate how bad an idea this is as best she can via tentacle-flailing.
Next time, Heather becomes acquainted with the consequences of her own actions and also with Lozzie's brother.
In fact, "Heather does a stupid" is really the byline for these next three chapters. On one hand, seeing her be this reckless and thoughtless this many times in a row is a bit frustrating, and feels out of character. On the other hand, we already know that Heather has just had her first taste of real power, her first perverse rush at exercising that power against weaker entities with no consequences, and also just started getting used to having an incredibly attractive girlfriend/bodyguard she can count on. Considering that she's a poorly socialized twenty-year-old under a lot of stress and coming out of a decade of repression, maybe acting out-of-character right now is actually in character. That doesn't make it any less frustrating, but it does make it make sense as part of her development and (hopefully) growth.
Well, first things first. Heather finds Slenderwoman sulking off across the street after being rebuked earlier, and tries to take to her. She's still fairly aggro in her approach though, speaking with a clear presumption of hostile intent despite being here to try and mend bridges. When Slenderwoman tries to extend a tentacle forward in something that appears to be a greeting or an attempt at sign language or something, Heather...well, she doesn't think her reaction through.
Heather. If it wanted to hurt you, and touching you was all it needed to do for that, then why wouldn't it just sneak up behind you and tap you with a tentacle?
The entity - which Heather comes to privately refer to as "Tenny," for "Tentacles" - keeps its distance henceforth, and doesn't react to any further communication attempts except by staring warily from across the street. Nice job breaking it.
Also there's some hilarious foreshadowing (or maybe just teasing, after the precedents the story has already set for the reader) when Raine comes over to ask Heather what she's doing out here.
Nothing to be jealous of, right. Once Heather eventually does regain this thing's trust Raine is going to need to either learn to share or grow a few more tongues to compete.
With Heather having just blown the possibility of miracle reinforcements (not that those weren't a serious longshot to begin with, given the cult's demonstrated ability to do as they will with at least most types of PSF), the three are back to trying to decide how to proceed. Evelyn still wants to keep summoning more demons to supplement Praem's meido-bots and send them on the offensive, despite the risks associated with having that many bound to service at once. Raine, despite her (over)confidence in Evelyn's abilities, thinks that this is a terrible idea and that they should try literally anything besides that. Including (unwisely, I think) holding down the fort and hoping that the enemy has already decided that they're too much trouble after those last couple of clashes.
I don't think Raine's optimistic suggestion there was a very smart one, but the sheer venom with which Evelyn shuts it down strongly implies that her opposition is deeper than just the wisdom of it. And, when Raine proposes maybe asking other wizards who she knows of for assistance, well.
It's starting to seem like Evelyn wouldn't even care if the Sharrowford Cult never attacked them at all. She'd attack them as soon as they demonstrated this level of power regardless of their intentions, just on principle.
Maybe that's an overly uncharitable reading of Evelyn here, but I do think that there's a *side* of her that hasn't shaken off its indoctrination of this nature. And that being in a wizard war is bringing that side of her out and potentially undoing progress away from her mother that she's been making.
And, on the topic of people showing more sides of themselves, I'm starting to think more and more that this isn't just power-drunkenness changing Heather. There's something changing in her head.
It's not just that Heather is acting like this. It's that the other two - including Evelyn in her own house, her own dumb little queendom - are actually lowering their heads and going along with it.
Heather has changed. And she seems to have picked up some kind of charisma power while she was at it.
Is it using the Eye's formulas so much, changing her brain to think more like the Eye itself does? Or is it proximity to Lozzie and/or Tenny that's doing it? Actually, considering the timing, this is around the point where I started to suspect that Lozzie and Tenny were connected.
In the end, they decide to re-enact a version of the earlier siege protocols. Raine temporarily moves back in with Evelyn, the revolution will have its greatest soldier back soon enough. Heather moves in as well, for the most part, spending only two of the next dozen-odd nights at the dorm. While Raine bodyguards and Evelyn summons (including a creature that sounded a lot like a gug hired thug and that the author congratulated me for spotting~), Heather practices the ability that Evelyn dubbed "self-implementing hyperdimensional mathematics." IE, her Edward Elric glyphless spellcasting powers. She has her own room to practice in. Near Raine's. Equipped with blankets, buckets, and tissues, where she can indulge in her eldritch knowledge for as long as she's willing to bleed out the nose and vomit up everything in her stomach for.
I really do worry about how many brain cells she's going through. Maybe there's a spell that can make those grow back.
Over the course of a week-and-change timeskip, Heather manages - with the help of some of Evelyn's book collection that gave her PTSD to look at before - to get to the point where she can send small objects to other dimensions with only moderate discomfort, send large ones with significantly more discomfort, and potentially even retrieve them back again by really frying her brain like an egg in a pan. It's baby steps, but it's steps. And she's getting slightly better at not bleeding and vomiting and losing consciousness when she does it.
She continues, through the timeskip, to dream of Lozzie. Unfortunately, her memories of these dreams aren't always easy to recall after she wakes up. Which is a problem, on account of one of the later updates Lozzie provides her with:
So yeah. Confirmation that Lozzie is a prisoner, perhaps even a prisoner in her own body. And also, more distressingly, that Evelyn and her pile of occult treasures are no longer the main target after Heather's display of dimension-warping power at the end of arc 2. Heather herself is the greater prize now.
Like I said. She can barely remember any of this after waking up.
Extrapolating a bit more, it sounds a lot like Lozzie and her brother only recently showed up in the area and took over the Sharrowford Cult. Would explain the sudden increase in their competence, boldness, and resources, if they were previously a bunch of blindly fumbling hedge-magicians and now they're being led by something closer to a proper wizard.
Alternatively, evil brother was always a member, but he just had a major breakthrough in his research (possibly by experimenting on his sister) and bootstrapped himself up into proper wizard territory.
Anyway. Abusive family situation like Evelyn's. Someone who wants to run away and be free like Raine. Inversion of Heather's own relationship with Maisie. Good disc 1 boss, foil to all of the main trio in some way.
On account of not being able to remember this dire warning, though, Heather eventually decides to do a little shopping trip downtown to take some time to herself. It's been a while since she's read any books just for herself, what with the classwork on one hand and the brain-melting tomes on the other, and she thinks that light reading might be almost as good at helping her body cope with these rigours as being energetically de-stressed every night by Raine is. Even so, I think this was pretty reckless of her.
Even more reckless, though, is her not calling Raine *immediately* when things start going wrong. I guess she just really didn't want to constantly need bailing out, but like...that's Evelyn logic there, Heather should know better lol.
While Heather is perusing the bookstore, Tenny the Tentacle Monster starts urgently trying to get her attention. And overcoming her post-threat caution to get in close and offer Heather a tentacle again. This time, Heather decides that she'd best accept it. Once again; Heather, if Tenny could hurt you with a touch, she'd have just snuck up behind you and done it. Ah well, better late than never.
Heather is annoyingly slow on the uptake. And annoyingly slow to send Raine a text. It's really only when Tenny's touch-telepathy informs Heather that Lozzie sent her that Heather starts taking shit seriously (her memories of who Lozzie is are foggy, but she recalls just enough with prompting). So, she tries to sneak out of the bookstore, only to stumble right into her pursuer...Twil.
Well, one of her pursuers. Twil happened to be in town buying textbooks for that degree she's starting, and caught Raine's sent on some of Heather's clothes that were technically Raine's. She followed it to be a needy ex at Raine, and then saw Heather and decided to be a creepy girlfriend's ex at her, and then noticed *someone else* already tailing Heather and decided to warn her. So, I guess that's nice of her at least.
When Twil describes the other pursuer to Heather, it sounds a lot like the cult sniper whose bullet Heather had to force-deflect in their last encounter. Heather's first thought is to flee, but then Twil abruptly makes a counterproposal. And...well, like I said, Heather has a lot going on right now effecting her judgement, but she still had me shaking my head at her with her answer.
So, off they go to ambush the sniper lady and whatever hidden backup she herself might have waiting in the wings. Tenny tailing miserably after Heather trying to communicate how bad an idea this is as best she can via tentacle-flailing.
Next time, Heather becomes acquainted with the consequences of her own actions and also with Lozzie's brother.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Right now the word count up to the current point in arc 24 is 2.26 million words. So looks like I'll be spending over 22,600 USD for Katalepsis reviews.
With regards to her story structure plans, Hungry has said Book 1 is very focused on Maisie's rescue, while Book 2 will take a broader scope and will have more POVs.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Right now the word count up to the current point in arc 24 is 2.26 million words. So looks like I'll be spending over 22,600 USD for Katalepsis reviews.
…And I was worried about possibly spending too much, given some of the stuff I wanted to commission
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
Not gonna lie, a couple weeks ago I was thinking about what it would cost to commission all of Andor at the $4/minute Ultra High Detail rate and then realized that it would be over $2,000 and that's really too much to spend but, like, I was tempted.
- Location
- Colorado
You could always do the first episode or two and hope they're enough for someone else to pick up #3, it's certainly got enough vocal fans.
- Location
- Patriarchova
I do like me some Andorians.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I was, among other things, planning to commission Angels in America, which is a whoppin' six hours long. Probably not ultra in-depth though. Problem is it certainly doesn't have the nerd cred Andor does
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
A surprising number of works of fiction have got something with the name "Andor" in them. I was watching the Wheel of Time TV series with some friends who are fans of the books, and had to explain why I kept chuckling at every mention of "the Kingdom of Andor" in the show.
Possibly all named after Andorra, a weird little principality between France and Spain.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
To digress, I stumbled on a video essay that claimed a story can't survive on symbolism alone. While I don't agree with this claim, I will agree that symbolism can't make a bad story good, and that a wholly symbolism-driven story can be very hard to pull off.
Not that the video was anti-symbolism, just anti-all symbolism all the time. Fittingly, it used Bakemonogatari as an example of a bad story using symbolism as a crutch.
The reason I bring this up here is that Leila's reviewed some very symbolism-heavy works in the past and has more of them coming up, so I was interested in her thoughts on this. Though I'd argue Lain and especially Utena, while heavy on symbolism, aren't solely symbolism
Not that the video was anti-symbolism, just anti-all symbolism all the time. Fittingly, it used Bakemonogatari as an example of a bad story using symbolism as a crutch.
The reason I bring this up here is that Leila's reviewed some very symbolism-heavy works in the past and has more of them coming up, so I was interested in her thoughts on this. Though I'd argue Lain and especially Utena, while heavy on symbolism, aren't solely symbolism
- Location
- Patriarchova
This is why I couldn't really get into (what I've seen of) Utena. I liked pretty much everything it had to say, but beneath the symbolism and philosophy it didn't have much of an internal world for me to invest in. Would still like to see the rest of it, but not because I care about the characters or plot.
With Lain, I'm not even sure what the symbolism was trying to mean in the first place. That could be a failure on my part or on the show's.
Last edited:
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
If Lozzie and her brother are even human. I don't trust anybody who appears only in dreams.
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
If that isn't fade-to-blacked I won't be reading this myself, alas.
Reference?
Or a classic webcomic. People have repeatedly pointed out the Ow, My Sanity parallels, right?
I'm wondering if they're alters, myself.
Last edited:
- Location
- Patriarchova
Lozzie was briefly seen in the flesh, poring over the stolen nightgaunt with some other cult members.
Granted, she had her face obscured, and there was enough PSF crawling all over her that Heather might not have been able to tell exactly how human she really looked.
Katalepsis III: "Conditions of Absolute Reality" (part three)
- Location
- Patriarchova
Heather tries to bait the skinheaded sniper lady out again for Twil to jump on. And it works, at first! But then they stupidly chase her into an alley that turns out to be near one of the cult's dimensional ratholes, where they get separated and Heather gets nabbed. Granted, even after sending Twil off in the wrong direction via whatever space-warping fuckery they use, bringing Heather in is a hell of a lot harder than it would have been a month ago.
The first cultist who corners Heather is a nervous boy, her own age or even younger, who doesn't seem to have ever done violent operations before and tries his hardest to convince her to come peacefully before nervously going for the grab. Seemingly having moral reservations as well as lack of confidence in his physical ability. Heather's small enough that he can outfight her, especially after she kicks him in the crotch just hard enough to remove his moral reservations without quite disabling him, and it seems like he's got her. But then Tenny does some kind of barely-tactile distraction thing, and...this happens:
Well. +10 style points for doing the face grab before casting it. Maybe we're moving away from lesbian Edward Elric and toward lesbian Scar just a tad.
Anyway, that boy seemed like he might be redeemable with an early enough intervention, and hopefully he'll receive that in the Fleaman Republic. He just needs to have better manners than Evelyn did, and they'll set him up with a quality de-programming counsellor as soon as he's a naturalized citizen.
Also, Tenny can distract meatspace people by waving enough appendages through their brains. I wonder if that's just her, or if all pneuma-somatic organisms can do that? Maybe that's supposed to be the explanation for the random chills and little spasms people sometimes get; a big creature just happened to intersect with their central nervous system at that moment.
Now, when Heather recovers, I expect to see some interesting moral thoughts about what she did here. See how much Raine really has rubbed off on her.
Unfortunately, Heather is left all seizure'd out by that volunteer work for the Fleaman Department of Immigration, and the much more experienced skinhead lady - named eventually as Amy Stack - finds her sprawled out over a pool of her own vomit, easily captured. Heather has to actually touch something to send it on an interdimensional adventure, and unlike the last poor schmuck Amy knows to keep her from doing that. Also, she has countermeasures for Tenny at the ready; as soon as she sees Heather staring at an ostensibly empty patch of alleyway, she pulls out a little metal runic thingy and releases a tougher version of those seaweed-drones from arc 1. Yeah, these are the guys who sent that spybot to follow Raine way back in 1.1, that's one mystery solved.
Tenny turns out to be capable of a bit more than mildly distracting opponents when they are on the pneuma-somatic plane with her, but unfortunately this combat specced seaweed-drone is put together much more sturdily than the spycam model, and its an even-ish match. Also, apart from being ethereal Tenny appears to be literally a shoggoth.
All the way down to the congeries of iridescent black spheres as a transitional form. If she were just material, it would be a 1:1.
Also, the specific combination of animal traits her battle form is described as having - goat, eagle, lion, and snake - make me think that this chimaera looks a lot like THE chimaera, from Greek mythology. Or, at a few more steps of removal, a Cherub from Biblical angelology. Cherubs are supposed to be the guardian-type angels, so that would make sense given Tenny's role. Though that would imply Lozzie is God, which...eh, you know what? Legit. I can see it.
Also also, despite her description being clear in the text, I can no now longer help but picture Amy as the pokemon trainer guy from Mob Psycho 100. Whatever his name is, the guy who tries to stuff Dimple into his little metal jar. Yeah, that's what she looks like now.
Seaweed Monster MK2 and Tenny keep fighting on the ethereal plane offscreen as Amy marches the limping, still-nauseous Heather to meet the boss. Careful to keep herself out of Heather's arm's reach and her hand near her pocket. Heather is promised that this will be a friendly meeting (lmao if that was true they'd have just sent her a letter or gotten her phone number or something), and that it will occur in a public place. The "public place," by the way, turns out to be a closed cafe that the boss and a couple of his other minions have broken into for this purpose.
And, oh man, the boss, Lozzie's brother. The youngish librarian-looking guy from the nightgaunt chop-shop scene. Alexander Lilburne.
This guy.
This fucking guy.
I'm going to have to do this scene in my old commentary style, because there is no doing justice to it otherwise.
1. "My minions should know better than to do X."
2. "My minions do not know better than to do X."
3. *nervous stammering*
No. No, she does not know his name. Why would she know his name?
More importantly though: why is he proud of her not knowing his name?
Oh you have no idea how right Heather is yet, just keep going for a bit.
Heather is still a little brain-frazzled from operating the Dogworld Express a few minutes ago, so I don't hold this against her. If she wasn't slightly brain-frazzled, she'd realize that he's said absolutely nothing that you couldn't learn with a name, a photo, and thirty minutes in front of a search engine.
The Google algorithm isn't what it used to be, I know.
WHAT "HAND" HAVE YOU EVEN MISPLAYED?
It's soooo obvious that he imagined doing this in a private room at a fancy steakhouse where he could be holding a goblet of red wine and listening to classical music for Heather's arrival, spent a frantic hour calling every fancy steakhouse in town trying to get a reservation, suddenly got the call from Amy, panicked, and broke into a random coffee shop thirty seconds ahead of them.
Also, he apparently has a minor mind control ability, but it's not super reliable. Good to know.
"We believe that a liberated brain is like a stone within a mighty river. Worn completely smooth."
This man thinks himself a veteran of the world of secrets and hidden things. One who walks in the shadows in which people disappear, and other people exist who were never known in the first place. A liberated mind.
And...he can't believe that the girl who he KNOWS has reality-warping powers might have a secret sibling.
He's been waiting for someone to tell him to go to hell for months.
Tsk tsk, Heather. He didn't "dredge" that out of you. You did that on your own.
Fortunately, it didn't stick.
oh my god he actually has no fucking idea what he's doing at all does he
HAH.
Now, you'd expect him to see that she's just trying to throw him off here and drop the pretense of friendliness (not that there was ever much of a shot with that, since, you know, if he ACTUALLY wanted to deal with her fairly he'd have just approached her like a normal person). But no. No, he takes her at face value, and oh my god...
She did. And apparently it was a really good deal for you. If it's such a bargain, why aren't you taking it, Alex?
Tell her without telling her that you don't really have a million pounds lmao.
A pity Heather still can't remember the dreams all that well. Speaking of which, I wonder if the reason Alex looks strangely familiar to Heather is because of a family resemblance, or if there's some other connection.
Anyway, it's pretty clear if you read between his lines here that the breakthrough that upped the cult's threat level was on Lozzie's end, not Alex's.
Going out on a little bit more of a conjecture, I suspect that however he ended up getting control of her was completely by accident.
And now I'm just reading him in Donald Trump's voice.
"Lovely woman, very nice to me. The Sayes were the best family - one of the bests, I think mine is a little better - they were one of the best families, now they're the worst."
Says the guy breaking into closed coffee shops to hold court in and who has like five people working for him.
YOU CAN'T EVEN COUGH UP A MILLION POUNDS, DIPSHIT!
HEATHER: "Do you know how many hookers I could get with a million pounds?"
That said, the fact that he knows about her sexual deviancy does suggest that he might have supernatural information sources after all. I doubt that google turned up anything about Heather's desire to fuck architecture.
ALEX: "Name your price"
HEATHER: "A million pounds."
ALEX: "No, but really. Name your price."
HEATHER: "I want my sister back."
ALEX: "No, but really. Name your price."
Please be civilized and just put a bullet through her head now, Alex. It's a kinder death than what the second-hand embarrassment must be doing.
"Amy, I will give you 500,000 of my million pounds if you kill your prick boss right now."
Ah. A real evil wizard's overambitious failnephew. That explains everything so, so perfectly.
...
Remember what I said about Superbia Dragon, in my "A Little Vice Review?" Magnify all of that by at least 3 or 4, and you've got Alexander Lilburne. I love him. I would read entire books about him. A+. He's like a sitcom villain, only he's managed to stumble into juuuust enough real power that the characters are forced to take him seriously. Even though he will never, ever deserve it.
Alexander could have been a character in "The Big Lebowsky" without sticking out whatsoever.
...
Fremdschamen aside, I like how we have some dark mirror (or at least, pathetic and annoying mirror) going on with this bunch and the protagonist team. Alexander idolizes his living wizard family member even as he chafes under his authority. He has a competent action-girl underling, but she can barely contain her contempt for him even during important diplomatic meetings. He has a reality-warping anomaly girl fuelling his new research, but rather than trying to rescue her sibling she is the sibling who needs to be rescued from him. And uh, I guess the big zombie lady who's been looming menacingly over his shoulder for this whole conversation is their Praem or something.
It's effective. I just hope that the gang gets a more intimidating dark mirror than the Brotherhood of the New Sun within a few arcs, because oh my god.
Anyway! Heather's remaining brain cells are spared a horrifying fate when a sudden rescue consisting of Twil, Tenny, and one of the Praem avatars breaks into the already-broken-into coffee shop. Don't think they arrived as a group; more likely they were all just trying to track down Heather independently after dealing with their respective obstacles and happened to reach her at the same time.
The rescue is as confused as you'd expect, given the lack of coordination between participants. Heather manages to get some good tactical moments herself, including a bit of feinting that I didn't think she had in her. The New Suns know she has a plane-shifting touch, but they don't know exactly how long she needs to wait to give her brain a rest after each use. She also knows that Alexander would rather take her alive if he can. Using this knowledge, she's able to do some nice crowd control and manoeuvre the enemies into the rescuers' line of fire just by moving herself around the room.
The best moment is on Praem, though. At least I hope it was Praem. We later learn that Evelyn can remotely perceive and command Praem's avatars and was doing so for some bits of this operation. But, when Alexander starts making a lot of noise trying to spur Zheng the Zombie into action and Amy tells him that he should probably try to avoid making so much noise when they're in a shopping mall during business hours, I like to think that it was Praem's own idea to pull the fire alarm.
The outcome, after all is said and done, is Alexander foiled but uninjured, Amy with a broken arm, Tenny all ripped up from fighting other pneuma-somatic constructs but still seemingly okay, and Twil bridal-carrying Heather to safety out of the stampeding crowd-filled mall. Not sure what happened to the Praem instance. Frankly, I'm not sure how she even got there without attracting attention in the first place, being blue and all. Maybe she can teleport or something.
Speaking of "teleport or something," Zheng the zombie is appearing and disappearing in various shady alleyways after them, trying to cut them off. Zheng is the one New Sun unit onsite that nobody was able to deal any visible damage to; at best, they just kept her distracted and confused while dealing with the others. So, she's still a problem.
...hmm. It was mentioned a few chapters ago that Gelus praeministra are most often given corpses to use as avatars. With Evelyn's mother having done exactly this on a regular basis. And it's now been implied (unless Alexander was just completely making that bit up) that the Lilburnes and Sayes have had some friendly interactions in the past. If Zheng has a weird transportation power, and Praem also has a weird transportation power, then yeah, overwhelmingly likely that Zheng is another G. praeministra.
...oh my god.
...
What if Praem's trolling runs deeper than anyone could have expected, and she and Zheng are actually *the same* G. praeministra? It's got its central brain floating around in the ethereal plane somewhere nearby and is making both groups feed it strawberries while its sock puppets "fight" each other?
I hope this is it. That would be perfect.
...
Long story short, they manage to repel Zhang long enough to meet up with Raine (Heather got her phone turned on again) and then make their way to the relative safety of Evelyn's house. Twil is reluctant to enter. Evelyn is reluctant to let Twil enter. But, at this point, they've got too many friends in common and too many enemies in common to not bite the bullet. The bullet called friendship.
Well, more like "passive-aggressive tolerance" than "friendship." Twil does talk shit about the interior decorating, and Evelyn does threaten to sic the robospiders on her, but nothing comes of it at least yet.
Interesting detail is that when the robospiders are slow to follow Evelyn's commands, she has to raise her voice at them. And then, after that, they act sort of...timid? browbeaten? Anyway, they were described as "pneuma-somatic robots" earlier, but they seem to have a lot more awareness and feeling to them than mindless automatons. Wonder what all went into their creation? And...if they perhaps used to be something different? Unpleasant thought, given what we know about Saye's ancestors and the kind of shit they got up to.
This segment is bookended by another Lozzie dream. She apologizes to Heather for not finding a way to make her warnings stick in the waking world, and for not finding a way to stop her brother from being cringe at her. And then, with this imminent threat dealt with, we get our attentions called riiiiiight back to a previous one that the story'd been hinting at. Remember how I said that Heather's personality is going through some changes that don't feel quite natural given the circumstances? Wellllll...
So. For those of you not familiar, Carcosa - domain of the King in Yellow - is an invention of Robert Chambers that was co-opted by Lovecraft and then expanded on by the later Cthulhu Mythos contributors. An alien realm accessible by imagination and sensory stimuli, inhabited by contagious, reality-warping infomorphs. Pretty much a genre byword for "cognitohazard." If Lozzie has at least one foot in the door of Carcosa, and Heather is sharing dreamtime with Lozzie without a top-shelf antivirus, then yeah. There's malware getting through.
I guess that'll be the next problem that needs dealing with after Alex and before the Eye.
The first cultist who corners Heather is a nervous boy, her own age or even younger, who doesn't seem to have ever done violent operations before and tries his hardest to convince her to come peacefully before nervously going for the grab. Seemingly having moral reservations as well as lack of confidence in his physical ability. Heather's small enough that he can outfight her, especially after she kicks him in the crotch just hard enough to remove his moral reservations without quite disabling him, and it seems like he's got her. But then Tenny does some kind of barely-tactile distraction thing, and...this happens:
Well. +10 style points for doing the face grab before casting it. Maybe we're moving away from lesbian Edward Elric and toward lesbian Scar just a tad.
Anyway, that boy seemed like he might be redeemable with an early enough intervention, and hopefully he'll receive that in the Fleaman Republic. He just needs to have better manners than Evelyn did, and they'll set him up with a quality de-programming counsellor as soon as he's a naturalized citizen.
Also, Tenny can distract meatspace people by waving enough appendages through their brains. I wonder if that's just her, or if all pneuma-somatic organisms can do that? Maybe that's supposed to be the explanation for the random chills and little spasms people sometimes get; a big creature just happened to intersect with their central nervous system at that moment.
Now, when Heather recovers, I expect to see some interesting moral thoughts about what she did here. See how much Raine really has rubbed off on her.
Unfortunately, Heather is left all seizure'd out by that volunteer work for the Fleaman Department of Immigration, and the much more experienced skinhead lady - named eventually as Amy Stack - finds her sprawled out over a pool of her own vomit, easily captured. Heather has to actually touch something to send it on an interdimensional adventure, and unlike the last poor schmuck Amy knows to keep her from doing that. Also, she has countermeasures for Tenny at the ready; as soon as she sees Heather staring at an ostensibly empty patch of alleyway, she pulls out a little metal runic thingy and releases a tougher version of those seaweed-drones from arc 1. Yeah, these are the guys who sent that spybot to follow Raine way back in 1.1, that's one mystery solved.
Tenny turns out to be capable of a bit more than mildly distracting opponents when they are on the pneuma-somatic plane with her, but unfortunately this combat specced seaweed-drone is put together much more sturdily than the spycam model, and its an even-ish match. Also, apart from being ethereal Tenny appears to be literally a shoggoth.
All the way down to the congeries of iridescent black spheres as a transitional form. If she were just material, it would be a 1:1.
Also, the specific combination of animal traits her battle form is described as having - goat, eagle, lion, and snake - make me think that this chimaera looks a lot like THE chimaera, from Greek mythology. Or, at a few more steps of removal, a Cherub from Biblical angelology. Cherubs are supposed to be the guardian-type angels, so that would make sense given Tenny's role. Though that would imply Lozzie is God, which...eh, you know what? Legit. I can see it.
Also also, despite her description being clear in the text, I can no now longer help but picture Amy as the pokemon trainer guy from Mob Psycho 100. Whatever his name is, the guy who tries to stuff Dimple into his little metal jar. Yeah, that's what she looks like now.
Seaweed Monster MK2 and Tenny keep fighting on the ethereal plane offscreen as Amy marches the limping, still-nauseous Heather to meet the boss. Careful to keep herself out of Heather's arm's reach and her hand near her pocket. Heather is promised that this will be a friendly meeting (lmao if that was true they'd have just sent her a letter or gotten her phone number or something), and that it will occur in a public place. The "public place," by the way, turns out to be a closed cafe that the boss and a couple of his other minions have broken into for this purpose.
And, oh man, the boss, Lozzie's brother. The youngish librarian-looking guy from the nightgaunt chop-shop scene. Alexander Lilburne.
This guy.
This fucking guy.
I'm going to have to do this scene in my old commentary style, because there is no doing justice to it otherwise.
1. "My minions should know better than to do X."
2. "My minions do not know better than to do X."
3. *nervous stammering*
No. No, she does not know his name. Why would she know his name?
More importantly though: why is he proud of her not knowing his name?
Oh you have no idea how right Heather is yet, just keep going for a bit.
Heather is still a little brain-frazzled from operating the Dogworld Express a few minutes ago, so I don't hold this against her. If she wasn't slightly brain-frazzled, she'd realize that he's said absolutely nothing that you couldn't learn with a name, a photo, and thirty minutes in front of a search engine.
The Google algorithm isn't what it used to be, I know.
WHAT "HAND" HAVE YOU EVEN MISPLAYED?
It's soooo obvious that he imagined doing this in a private room at a fancy steakhouse where he could be holding a goblet of red wine and listening to classical music for Heather's arrival, spent a frantic hour calling every fancy steakhouse in town trying to get a reservation, suddenly got the call from Amy, panicked, and broke into a random coffee shop thirty seconds ahead of them.
Also, he apparently has a minor mind control ability, but it's not super reliable. Good to know.
"We believe that a liberated brain is like a stone within a mighty river. Worn completely smooth."
This man thinks himself a veteran of the world of secrets and hidden things. One who walks in the shadows in which people disappear, and other people exist who were never known in the first place. A liberated mind.
And...he can't believe that the girl who he KNOWS has reality-warping powers might have a secret sibling.
He's been waiting for someone to tell him to go to hell for months.
Tsk tsk, Heather. He didn't "dredge" that out of you. You did that on your own.
Fortunately, it didn't stick.
oh my god he actually has no fucking idea what he's doing at all does he
HAH.
Now, you'd expect him to see that she's just trying to throw him off here and drop the pretense of friendliness (not that there was ever much of a shot with that, since, you know, if he ACTUALLY wanted to deal with her fairly he'd have just approached her like a normal person). But no. No, he takes her at face value, and oh my god...
She did. And apparently it was a really good deal for you. If it's such a bargain, why aren't you taking it, Alex?
Tell her without telling her that you don't really have a million pounds lmao.
A pity Heather still can't remember the dreams all that well. Speaking of which, I wonder if the reason Alex looks strangely familiar to Heather is because of a family resemblance, or if there's some other connection.
Anyway, it's pretty clear if you read between his lines here that the breakthrough that upped the cult's threat level was on Lozzie's end, not Alex's.
Going out on a little bit more of a conjecture, I suspect that however he ended up getting control of her was completely by accident.
And now I'm just reading him in Donald Trump's voice.
"Lovely woman, very nice to me. The Sayes were the best family - one of the bests, I think mine is a little better - they were one of the best families, now they're the worst."
Says the guy breaking into closed coffee shops to hold court in and who has like five people working for him.
YOU CAN'T EVEN COUGH UP A MILLION POUNDS, DIPSHIT!
HEATHER: "Do you know how many hookers I could get with a million pounds?"
That said, the fact that he knows about her sexual deviancy does suggest that he might have supernatural information sources after all. I doubt that google turned up anything about Heather's desire to fuck architecture.
ALEX: "Name your price"
HEATHER: "A million pounds."
ALEX: "No, but really. Name your price."
HEATHER: "I want my sister back."
ALEX: "No, but really. Name your price."
Please be civilized and just put a bullet through her head now, Alex. It's a kinder death than what the second-hand embarrassment must be doing.
"Amy, I will give you 500,000 of my million pounds if you kill your prick boss right now."
Ah. A real evil wizard's overambitious failnephew. That explains everything so, so perfectly.
...
Remember what I said about Superbia Dragon, in my "A Little Vice Review?" Magnify all of that by at least 3 or 4, and you've got Alexander Lilburne. I love him. I would read entire books about him. A+. He's like a sitcom villain, only he's managed to stumble into juuuust enough real power that the characters are forced to take him seriously. Even though he will never, ever deserve it.
Alexander could have been a character in "The Big Lebowsky" without sticking out whatsoever.
...
Fremdschamen aside, I like how we have some dark mirror (or at least, pathetic and annoying mirror) going on with this bunch and the protagonist team. Alexander idolizes his living wizard family member even as he chafes under his authority. He has a competent action-girl underling, but she can barely contain her contempt for him even during important diplomatic meetings. He has a reality-warping anomaly girl fuelling his new research, but rather than trying to rescue her sibling she is the sibling who needs to be rescued from him. And uh, I guess the big zombie lady who's been looming menacingly over his shoulder for this whole conversation is their Praem or something.
It's effective. I just hope that the gang gets a more intimidating dark mirror than the Brotherhood of the New Sun within a few arcs, because oh my god.
Anyway! Heather's remaining brain cells are spared a horrifying fate when a sudden rescue consisting of Twil, Tenny, and one of the Praem avatars breaks into the already-broken-into coffee shop. Don't think they arrived as a group; more likely they were all just trying to track down Heather independently after dealing with their respective obstacles and happened to reach her at the same time.
The rescue is as confused as you'd expect, given the lack of coordination between participants. Heather manages to get some good tactical moments herself, including a bit of feinting that I didn't think she had in her. The New Suns know she has a plane-shifting touch, but they don't know exactly how long she needs to wait to give her brain a rest after each use. She also knows that Alexander would rather take her alive if he can. Using this knowledge, she's able to do some nice crowd control and manoeuvre the enemies into the rescuers' line of fire just by moving herself around the room.
The best moment is on Praem, though. At least I hope it was Praem. We later learn that Evelyn can remotely perceive and command Praem's avatars and was doing so for some bits of this operation. But, when Alexander starts making a lot of noise trying to spur Zheng the Zombie into action and Amy tells him that he should probably try to avoid making so much noise when they're in a shopping mall during business hours, I like to think that it was Praem's own idea to pull the fire alarm.
The outcome, after all is said and done, is Alexander foiled but uninjured, Amy with a broken arm, Tenny all ripped up from fighting other pneuma-somatic constructs but still seemingly okay, and Twil bridal-carrying Heather to safety out of the stampeding crowd-filled mall. Not sure what happened to the Praem instance. Frankly, I'm not sure how she even got there without attracting attention in the first place, being blue and all. Maybe she can teleport or something.
Speaking of "teleport or something," Zheng the zombie is appearing and disappearing in various shady alleyways after them, trying to cut them off. Zheng is the one New Sun unit onsite that nobody was able to deal any visible damage to; at best, they just kept her distracted and confused while dealing with the others. So, she's still a problem.
...hmm. It was mentioned a few chapters ago that Gelus praeministra are most often given corpses to use as avatars. With Evelyn's mother having done exactly this on a regular basis. And it's now been implied (unless Alexander was just completely making that bit up) that the Lilburnes and Sayes have had some friendly interactions in the past. If Zheng has a weird transportation power, and Praem also has a weird transportation power, then yeah, overwhelmingly likely that Zheng is another G. praeministra.
...oh my god.
...
What if Praem's trolling runs deeper than anyone could have expected, and she and Zheng are actually *the same* G. praeministra? It's got its central brain floating around in the ethereal plane somewhere nearby and is making both groups feed it strawberries while its sock puppets "fight" each other?
I hope this is it. That would be perfect.
...
Long story short, they manage to repel Zhang long enough to meet up with Raine (Heather got her phone turned on again) and then make their way to the relative safety of Evelyn's house. Twil is reluctant to enter. Evelyn is reluctant to let Twil enter. But, at this point, they've got too many friends in common and too many enemies in common to not bite the bullet. The bullet called friendship.
Well, more like "passive-aggressive tolerance" than "friendship." Twil does talk shit about the interior decorating, and Evelyn does threaten to sic the robospiders on her, but nothing comes of it at least yet.
Interesting detail is that when the robospiders are slow to follow Evelyn's commands, she has to raise her voice at them. And then, after that, they act sort of...timid? browbeaten? Anyway, they were described as "pneuma-somatic robots" earlier, but they seem to have a lot more awareness and feeling to them than mindless automatons. Wonder what all went into their creation? And...if they perhaps used to be something different? Unpleasant thought, given what we know about Saye's ancestors and the kind of shit they got up to.
This segment is bookended by another Lozzie dream. She apologizes to Heather for not finding a way to make her warnings stick in the waking world, and for not finding a way to stop her brother from being cringe at her. And then, with this imminent threat dealt with, we get our attentions called riiiiiight back to a previous one that the story'd been hinting at. Remember how I said that Heather's personality is going through some changes that don't feel quite natural given the circumstances? Wellllll...
So. For those of you not familiar, Carcosa - domain of the King in Yellow - is an invention of Robert Chambers that was co-opted by Lovecraft and then expanded on by the later Cthulhu Mythos contributors. An alien realm accessible by imagination and sensory stimuli, inhabited by contagious, reality-warping infomorphs. Pretty much a genre byword for "cognitohazard." If Lozzie has at least one foot in the door of Carcosa, and Heather is sharing dreamtime with Lozzie without a top-shelf antivirus, then yeah. There's malware getting through.
I guess that'll be the next problem that needs dealing with after Alex and before the Eye.
Last edited:
- Location
- Patriarchova
Jack was competent though.
Granted, he was only that savvy because of his brainworm screenpeeking bullshit. But then, without that, he wouldn't be Jack Slash, so.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It would probably go faster if Heather didn't spend so much time evaluating the smoochability of shoggoths.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Bringing this back up, the reason Disney barely touched TV animation until the mid-80s was likely due to the stigma surrounding the limited animation required for TV. By the mid-80s, animation had advanced enough (...and outsourcing had gotten rampant enough) that the limited Hanna-Barbera/Filmation style was no longer a necessity to squeeze cartoon production into TV deadlines.
Not that Disney weren't above cost-cutting measures back then, like xerography, animation recycling, and notoriously not coloring in eyes in The Rescuers (one of the things that caused Don Bluth to leave). But going full Hanna-Barbera could've been seen as even lower than that, e.g. Chuck Jones (not Disney but still) once disparaged HB as 'illustrated radio'.
Edit: I'm told another reason for Disney moving into TV was due to Michael Eisner becoming CEO in 1984, having more interest in TV than his post-Walt predecessors
Last edited: