look I ain’t here to say whether #hiddleswift is real or if it ain’t

all I am saying is that if two beautiful celebs for real decided to make out in public, meet each other’s parents, cuddle at parties and wear cutsie shirts just to make an elaborate point about slut shaming and celebrity culture

I ain’t never gonna need a new au idea ever again

Writing Fanfic: Another Weird Trick

Now let’s talk about the neatness of very different cultures or groups running into each other. This is far easier to pull off in original fiction than the AU Villain. Entire books and even series can be made out of cultural clashes; Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold is one stunning example, and C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series is one of my personal favorites to read and re-read.

The thing is, it usually takes a whole book - or series! - to set up a proper cultural clash. If all you want is to write a relatively short, fun story exploring the concept, you may not have the energy for that. So how to do it in a short piece for fun?

Trick #2: Crossover Cultural Clash.

Every show, and group of heroes, has its own “culture” and standards as to what are the proper ways to do things. How do you defeat an enemy - by beating them in a card game, or beheading? How do you treat a friend; candy and hugs, or a rough pep talk when the chips are down? What are the limits when you’re defending people you care about? What’s the worst thing that could happen to you on any given day?

If you find two shows that you think you can make fit together for a story, you have a built-in culture clash.

Three authors on Archive of Our Own I’m particularly going to recc’ for this: Kryal,Ellen Brand, and Jedi Buttercup. I’m sure there’s plenty more, but I’ve been following these three for a long time.

For Kryal, two that are particularly good are The Dragon-King’s Temple (Stargate/AtLA) and What the Cat Dragged In (MCU/Miraculous Ladybug). The usual levels of violence are higher in Stargate and the MCU, so there are some interesting ways things either get toned down (ML) or we see more real-life consequences than usual (AtLA).

Ellen Brand has plenty, but I really like Unprofessional Opinion (outsider take on Detective Conan) and Loose Ends (Tony Hicks of Godzilla: the Series poking Sunnydale). An outsider’s look at how really weird a canon situation is brings the wonder of the original canon right back again.

Jedi Buttercup… wow, so many awesome crossovers. Pausing to Wonder (CSI/Dragonriders of Pern), imagine the delinquency (Sleepy Hollow/Guardians of the Galaxy) and Of Iron and Fire (Fast and Furious/The Last Witch-Hunter) are three in particular you would never think work… and they do.

In case anyone’s wondering, there is one particular culture clash I’d like to see in a fic, but I’m not sure I can write it myself. That would be Shen Yuan (Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System) as Shen Qingqiu suffering reverse culture shock by getting dumped back into the modern world still as a xianxia cultivator… and still up against monsters that need his level of skills and power to take down. Say, if he ended up in the Chitauri invasion of NYC, or something….

(Which a friend pointed out is actually three culture clashes in one neat package. 1) Reverse culture shock of coming back to the modern world. 2) NYC is definitely not China. 3) Aliens WTH.

Bonus: I’m a scholar and geek, not a fighter, why does everyone expect me to use this sword, I’m not Liu Qingge-!)

Free to good home!

A bunch of different dialogue prompts #59

1. “I know you don’t mean to, but sometimes you come across as very villainous.”
2. “Do I regret it? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Without a doubt.”
3. “You’ve got a real attitude problem, kid.” “That’s just his personality, sir.”
4. “This isn’t a competition, dude.” “You’re right, it’s not even close!” “That’s not what I meant.”
5. “I want to go home…” “I know, I know. We will, soon, okay?”
6. “I’ve decided to be nice.” “… Why?”
7. “Could you please shut up and stop being so annoying?” “Sorry, you’re gonna have to pick one, I can’t do both.”
8. “Do you recognize this?” “Where did you find that?”
9. “Here, you’re gonna need this.” “Is that a machine gun? Who brings a machine gun to lunch??”
10. “And when I rule the world,-” “Don’t you mean ‘if’?” “… As I was saying, when I rule the world,”

So I have this kakayama AU in my head that manifests when I’m driving and listening to music all the time and I’m not a good enough writer to flesh out an actual fanfic but I just feel like throwing it out there. it’s silly but just bare with me lol

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Anyway so I imagine that as an anbu, Yamato had an undercover mission assigned by tsunade (before joining team 7) where he kept tabs on a small developing country, where arts and technology kinda flourished as opposed to being centered around shinobi lifestyle and Somewhere along his mission, while trying to get close to the higher ups, he actually becomes somewhat of a model/idol while embracing his secret passion for dance and music. Soon After deeming the country a non threat or worry, he finishes his mission and returns to konoha.

Many Years later, after the fourth shinobi war, as technology and media had progressed that country becomes a socially progressive and expressive technological hub. Since Becoming such a big influence right now to many of the great nations, kakashi (as the 6th hokage) believes it might be worth reinforcing relations with and arranges a visit to the country, taking with him well named shinobi from konaha (such as members of team 7), ino,and of course his anbu guard - the shinobi with the most knowledge about the land - Yamato. Yamato is hesitant to go but isn’t too worried about being recognized because it’s been years since he’s been there. Come to find out, Yamato was a bigger deal than he thought. that in his absence his popularity only grew. Kakashi is surprised but asks Yamato to go back and continue this secret career in order to help their mission. kakashi (and the team) witnesses the unseen talent that is (insert:Yamato’s alias). He’s more expressive, confident, sexy, and kakashi slowly finds it becoming harder to keep his feelings for Yamato professional. Even though he performs with confidence and can exude sex appeal a lot more than anyone thought, Yamato still shies away from complements because to him it doesn’t matter how sexy he is to everyone just how he’s scene through kakashi’s eyes, making him rather nervous before he dances or performs but still gives his all telling himself “it’s for the mission”.

Basically an AU where everyone (especially kakashi) realize how hot Yamato is

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Ill probably make some art surrounding this but idk I just thinks it’s funny and I think about it when I’m bored.

I’ve had this idea for a long, long time. I can’t seem to get it out of my head; it just seems impossible. I’d like to see it turn into a multi-chapter story, but I don’t know if anyone would be interested. So I’m just going to write a little summary down below, and if you like it, just give me a heads up, hmm? Thx ;)

Summary:

A long time ago, when God first created the archangels, he gave them a mate. Her name was Hadraniel, and she was the angel of love, created differently from the archangels and the younger seraphs. God forged her out of the fire from his own palm, nurtured her essence, and gave her wings the like no other angel possessed.

Hadraniel adored her mates, but her spirit existed only because of the love the archangels had for each other. So when God created the humans and Lucifer refused to bow down to them, a rift was created, with Raphael taking Michael’s side and Gabriel hightailing it out of Heaven, having no wish to interfere with what would definitely be a deadly fight. Gradually, as the fighting progressed, the love the archangels had for each other waned. Hadraniel was miserable, suffering. Her essence ached, her flame diminished; but no one truly saw her suffering until they felt her grace retreat from Heaven.

As it turned out, Hadraniel had chosen to Fall, ripping out her grace from her body and plummeting from the celestial city. Much as they searched, the angels couldn’t find her potential vessel, they could no longer feel her spirit. Grief-stricken by this, Michael threw Lucifer into the Pit, blaming him for what had happened to Hadraniel. With that happenstance, the angels retreated into Heaven and locked the pearly gates, failing to realize the new emotion that was taking place within mankind.

Undeveloped as they were, the humans had learned how to love, a bit of Hadraniel’s essence taking root in each of them. And that was how they began to improve, and started the ascent to greatness.

Look, I know it’s terrible, but a little bit of feedback would be great, nonetheless. This idea has been my baby for the past few months, and I’m eager to hear what you think of it.

Hanahaki disease au where Person A keeps getting the disease for Person B and receives the treatment of removing their memories of Person B but they just keep falling in love with Person B no matter how many times they lose their memories

muffinlance:

queenofthursday6599-blog:

A story where Azulon is so pissed by Ozai asking for Iroh’s birthright that he goes out of his way to make Ozai and Ozai alone miserable.

Like I have seen stories where he gives Zuko to Iroh to raise and make his heir, it’s how most of them go, with the rest of Zuko’s non-Iroh and Azulon family members on the chopping block to various degrees.

But those stories don’t take it far enough in my opinion. I want Ozai to be truly miserable at his own father’s behest, like how Zuko was in canon.

I want Azulon to annul Ozai’s marriage to Ursa. I want him to put both Zuko and Azula into Iroh’s custody (or Azula into Li and Lo’s custody if they’re royal family in the story, either as Azulon’s sisters or nieces). I want him to send Ozai off on a tiny no-name ship with a bare bones crew to search for the Avatar.For the glory of the Fire Nation.

People go hard in the stories where Azulon gives Zuko to Iroh, but in my opinion they go hard in the wrong way. They kill off Ursa and Azula along with Ozai, even though even in most of these stories Ursa is also an abuse victim and Azula is a literal 9 year old.

I want a story where good granddad Azulon mourning the loss of his oldest grandchild hones in on Ozai like heat seeking missile for having the audacity to try and overtake his own brother in the race for the throne when they’d just lost a family member. Like one part is genuine anger that Ozai would dare attempt to steal Iroh’s birthright at all, but another is just grief fueled rage that Ozai would have the guts to do it when Iroh (and Azulon even if he doesn’t show it as much) are still actively mourning Lu Ten.

Also I know canon!Azulon is a bastard, don’t bother putting any comments/replies about that. I’m not talking about him. I just want a story where Ozai is put into canon!Zuko’s position of a hopeless quest in the hopes of someday going home and becoming Fire Lord.

Yesssss

Not to mention that then you have Ozai, banished for somewhere around half a decade, finding the Avatar. The DESPERATION of that hunt.

And sixteen-year-old second-in-line (after his father, Iroh) Zuko, with actual political clout and uninterrupted palace training but NO conception of the truths of the war that his banishment would have taught him, ready to be loosed upon the Gaang in any number of scenarios. Sent out to talk to the Avatar, with trusty newly promoted Commander Zhao at his side, while Ozai scrambles and claws for glory? Sent as a competing hunter? Overseeing the invasion of the North? Met for the very first time sitting on the throne when they bust in on the Day of Black Sun, sorry-not-sorry but their princess Fire Lord is in another castle? In a polluted village he’s touring the military factory in?

Delicious potential, A+ idea.

Does anyone have any White Collar requests? Please send me a msg, ask or comment!! I’m thinking of writing something short (under 3k) for the Caffery-Burke Day on Oct 23rd.

My current idea is a White Collar & Percy Jackson Crossover, where Neal is a son of Hermes that sided with Luke Castellan in the first series. I don’t think we’ve seen any POV on the characters on Luke’s side before in the PJO fandom (I could be wrong tho) but I think it would be interesting. So he’d either be a spy with Silena, or he would’ve left camp half blood and stayed on the Andromeda with Luke and the others. I’d probably write it as a reflection, maybe a spin as to why Neal knows how to use so many weapons but has a strong moral code against using them on other people.

My other idea is a White Collar & Supernatural Crossover, where one of the Winchesters, Adam Milligan or Michael (archangel) steals a piece of art. Neal and Peter follow the case and eventually tie to the Winchesters, at which point all hell breaks loose because the Winchesters are probably The Most Infamous Case the FBI has ever dealt with. (Suspected murders in nearly every state, been pronounced dead multiple times only to show up a few months/years later, almost everyone they talk to mysterious forgets everything about them/suddenly becomes very unhelpful etc). I don’t know how I’d finish this fic tho, or how I’d keep it under 3k.

When I was active in the fandom, I remember getting frustrated because I couldn’t find a single fic where Peter and Neal’s close relationship made El get insecure. Or maybe I was looking for ot3 Peter, Neal & El with insecure El? Idk. Either way, that’s a third option.

Please let me know what you think, by comments or ask (anon is on if you want)!! :)

cerusee:

New SangCheng (sorta) fake dating romcom farce idea: at some point post-Guanyin Temple, after Jiang Cheng has had some time to cool down and think, he figures out Nie Huaisang’s role in the whole Undoing of Jin Guangyao and he’s like “huh. Not so useless after all!” The next time they meet at a cultivation conference, he goes over to him and drops a bunch of loaded comments on him, while NHS flutters his fan and insists he has no idea what JC is talking about. They end up going off in a corner to drink and continue to exchange veiled remarks, which somehow turns into reminiscing about carefree days in the Cloud Recesses etc etc, and NHS is like “it’s really been too long, I should come and spend some time in Lotus Pier so we can catch up properly!” This is fine with JC, who’s been trying to pin NHS down on the specifics of a trade agreement between Yunmeng and Qinghe for eighteen months now, and he’s not gonna let this opportunity fly! Wei Wuxian, in the mean time, is across the room, standing next to Lan Wangji, hissing things like “Why is Nie-xiong leaning over at Jiang Cheng like that? Did he just bat his eyelashes at him? What’s going on over there?”

A couple of weeks later, news that Nie-zongzhu is making an extended visit to Lotus Pier comes to the Cloud Recesses, and WWX starts getting very suspicious. Is NHS COURTING his DIDI. WWX is nothing but full of admiration for the deviousness of NHS’s mind, really, it was quite the revenge plot, very impressive, but he draws the line at letting him marry into the family! Precious baby brother deserves the best, and the best is not the person who killed a bunch of cats as bait and whose MAN-EATING SABER TOMB nearly did it for Shijie’s son! This requires attention. He and JC exchange a bunch of snippy letters (“why is Nie Huaisang in Lotus Pier?” “None of your business.” “He is a VIPER, Jiang Cheng! Don’t let him anywhere near your bosom!” “First of all, what the fuck are you talking about. Second of all, you lost any right to tell me who I can or cannot have as a houseguest in my own home when you fucked off to Gusu with your precious Hanguang-jun! If you send me any more letters about this I’m going to drop them into the lake without reading them.”) and then WWX shows up in Lotus Pier unannounced with six suitcases. When JC bitches at him for swanning in without warning, he just says “well, you said you were going to throw my letters into the lake so I didn’t see the point—”

Var. amusing misunderstandings ensue in the following days, before Jiang Cheng, supremely irritated that WWX keeps sticking his nose (and face, and entire body) into the room every time he and NHS are making progress on this trade agreement (“my, my, don’t you two have your heads together! Anything interesting?” NHS, sighing: no), finally twigs to the fact that WWX thinks NHS is here to court him, and is determined to play Houseguest Chicken with NHS as long as necessary to cockblock him. JC: oh my god he’s an idiot. What a dumb, overbearing, overprotective, interfering idiot—on the other hand it GOT him here, didn’t it? Instead of correcting the misapprehension, JC just goes to NHS and says hey, want to pretend to be courting me to mess with Wei Wuxian? NHS: be delighted, that sounds so much more agreeable than work. JC stops trying to foist WWX off when he follows them around, only puts up a token protest when WWX insists on joining them for a moonlit evening swim, just rolls his eyes, when NHS asks if he can paint JC and JC adopts a languid pose that WWX spoils by glomping on to JC and tries to put him in a headlock, all Nie-xiong, don’t you think this is a more dynamic composition? This is the most time JC’s gotten with his brother in like eighteen years and he doesn’t even have to put up with his stupid husband!

This is, of course, about the point when Lan Wangji gets tired of waiting for Wei Ying to be finished with whatever this is and come back home, and he shows up in Lotus Pier himself. Not unannounced; he’s a civilized person, but his letter gets there exactly two hours before he does and he wasn’t asking permission. Now Jiang Cheng has three houseguests, and if he kicks Lan Wangji out, odds are that Wei Wuxian will, in fact, go with him. Which he doesn’t want, because he really has been having a lot of fun with shixiong! I’m not entirely sure what happens next, but it probably involves Jin Ling showing up with Ouyang Zizhen (they were on a night hunt or smth) and more comical misunderstandings. Maybe Jin Ling is attempting his own teenage sexual experimentation and brought Zizhen to Lotus Pier for the romantic moonlight swimming, and he’s embarrassed and annoyed when all his attempts to be alone with his uh you know, his friend, keep being interrupted by a bunch of adults—please picture NHS gaily wandering around Lotus Pier as he pleases, Jiang-zongzhu did tell him he could have the run of the place—followed, of course, by JC, who is his host, with Wei Wuxian following HIM because he’s still not going to let them be alone, especially not when JC seems so receptive to NHS’s advances (“viper! Bosom!” He continues to mutter), followed of course by Lan Wangji, who has no interest in any of this, but he just wants to be with Wei Ying. Ouyang Zizhen has been unduly distracted from Jin Ling by the swooning romantic realization that Nie-zongzhu and Jiang-zongzhu are in love— Jin Ling, probably: that’s disgusting, that’s my Jiujiu! Also if Wei Wuxian ruins the mood one more time I am actually going to send Fairy to chase him off.

Please don’t ask me how this ends, I have no idea. (Except that Jiang Cheng DOES get his trade agreement ratified.)

Some Desmond centric AC fic ideas again…

1 Desmond is a muggleborn wizard and doesn’t know it. His parents figured the letter to wizard school was a hoax, so it never came up. At the age of 24, he’s still suffering from accidental magic, which he can dismiss as weird coincidences - until Bleeding Effect + Accidental Magic leads into him having some really dangerous, completely autonomous patronuses just wandering around him doing whatever they please.

2 Sugar daddy Desmond. He’s in the past, he’s using his future knowledge shamelessly to his advantage, he’s collecting priceless art - he’s funding Leonardo’s every whim monetarily, like, “Here’s a bag of florins for you, why don’t you build yourself something nice :)”. (Ezio, on other hand, gets armour and weapons and poisons and sexy lingerie and bombs and)

3 Desmond breaks time, and is desperately trying to unbreak it. Somehow, this is Malik Al-Sayf’s problem, and now this damn copy of Altaïr with terrifying insight (and maybe powers but Malik refuses to believe in them) keeps popping in and out of his bureau, spouting ludicrous nonsense and probably stealing all his cushions.

4 Desmond wakes up in an alternate universe where the Isu Trinity’s world saving, self building machine went into overdrive. Now the whole planet has been turned into a megastructure and no one has control over it. Aka, I read Blame! again and want to do a crossover. (Behind the scenes, this world’s Minerva has been for centuries trying to bring Desmond into existence to stop the megastructure’s expansion. There are now versions of his ancestors all over the City earth has been turned into.)

5 Desmond gets summoned to alternate realities, like Harry Potter in all those “summoned saviour” fics. Sometimes it’s by his team, sometimes it’s by Minerva, sometimes it’s by his ancestors. And sometimes it’s by Templars. And usually it’s for the same purpose. Activate the grand temple and save the world from the solar flare.

I have so many feelings and I want to write something so bad When will my writing mojo come back to me…

Some more time travelly AC fanfic ideas…

1 Desmond and Leonardo from Live a Life or Die Trying figure out a way to travel to alternate realities and Desmond wants to show Leonardo what his alternate artist self is like. Ezio isn’t sure what the hell is going on and who the other Assassin is, but he has to save Leonardo from his evil wiles, clearly. Leonardo, both of them, is just thrilled to be involved. 

2 Desmond traveled back in time to save the Auditore family (and hopefully erase Templars from history entirely). By the time Ezio meets him, it’s already done, the Pazzi are dead and the conspiracy has been dealt with. Now there’s this strange man who’s apparently “joining their family” except it’s not by marriage? Not unless Uncle Mario married a man. So what on earth…

3 Leonardo starts getting very strange, very lucrative commissions from a very strange patron that wants him to build very, very odd little gadgets - parts of a bigger machine, he suspects, though he can’t quite figure out what it is for. Desmond and his team just want to fix their time machine before they really mess up the timeline.

4 Suspecting that Leonardo learned something special from the Apple but unable to steal the information by usual means (because Leonardo didn’t have any kids to carry his memories) Abstergo sends an operative to seduce/kidnap/interrogate him in order to get their hands on the info. 

5 Desmond figured out that Reality is a Simulation back when he was seventeen and things back at the Farm stopped making sense. He’s been coasting on that realisation ever since, putting only about 10% effort into his own survival because, hey, when nothing is real, you don’t actually need to eat, or sleep or… actually do anything. It’s just mind over matter. Then Abstergo kidnaps him in order to read his ancestral memories and it turns out pain is in the mind too, sorta. Well, no matter, he’s got an easy way out, right there, in the Animus. It’s just another layer of the simulation, right? Yeah. Altaïr is really not happy about having his likeness stolen by a damn sorcerer.

6 Alternatively, Desmond is an actual wizard but doesn’t realise it because he thinks reality is a simulation and it just bends to your will when you think about it hard enough.

Some time travelly Desmond centric AC fanfic ideas…

1 The super solar flare hit and the planet was toast. The only ones to survive are some budding AI in apocalypse-proof computers in doomsday bunkers, still churning out calculations about how to save humanity. Few hundred years of iterations and improvements later, AI number 16 has the solution and proceeds to implement AI number 17 to put it into action. Aka, Android Desmond travels back in time to renaissance times in order to save the human race… of which he has no experience whatsoever. Though he’s eager for new data, he very quickly figures that Ezio Auditore and Leonardo da Vinci are not average examples of their species.

2 On his way to deliver the proof of his family’s innocence to Uberto Alberti, Ezio gets snatched from the street by another Assassin, who stops him at the last moment and who helps him stage a prison breakout. The Auditore family is very thankful but also very confused. So is Desmond, who has no idea what he’s doing.

3 Abstergo saved Desmond at the Grand Temple and then brainwashed him to work for them. Few years later, no longer satisfied with just learning from the past, Abstergo is moving onto tampering with it. First, though, they need to figure out how paradoxes might affect things. So, to test this out, they send Desmond back in time to kill his own ancestors.

4 During his time working for the Borgia, Leonardo gets the chance to delve really deeply into the Apple. Within it, he meets Reader Desmond. Having heard about Desmond from Ezio, Leonardo immediately starts trying to talk Desmond to their side - in so doing talking Desmond back into being a human… more or less.

5 Desmond is and always has been the Human Personification of the Calculations. After all, what is probability other than, “Well, this might as well happen”?

Some au hikago fanfic ideas to commemorate the day.

1 Hikaru the twitch streamer. During some bad connection shenanigans, he gets caught playing NetGo on one monitor while playing some video game on the stream. His fans turn a bit feral, trying to figure out What the Heck, starting at many different conspiracies until it bleeds into the professional Go world where everyone couldn’t care less, not until someone actually sees a screenshot and - is that sai’sgame?Shenanigans happen and eventually Hikaru makes a V-tuber avatar for Sai. (Akira obsesses about them a totally normal amount.)

2 Hikaru couldn’t quite hide Sai and his parents ended up with the conclusion that he’s suffering from very vivid hallucinations. Ten years and a lot of not very successful therapy later, Hikaru gets a new shrink who suggests that try a new approach with Sai the Hallucination, and see what happens if Hikaru humours him. A very over it and kind of just winging it Hikaru enters Go world and Go world has to deal with this hot mess that’s somehow a stronger player than even their title holders.

3 Stargate crossover where the goban Hikaru found hid a stasis jar and of course Hikaru cracked it open. Sai was only ever a very minor Goa'uld, a bit of a wimp really, who didn’t like fighting and just wanted to play games, falling in love with one game in particular - and even in Yu’s empire almost no one played it. On Earth, though…

4 On a stormy night, up-to-no-good Hikaru sneaks into a shed, finds Sai’s goban and releases him from it to return to the path of go. There’s just one problem. Hikaru is Akari’s cat. He’s a smart cat that can obviously see ghosts as all cats can, thank you very much, but… still a cat. Sai will have much, much harder time wrangling him into playing Go.

5 Hikaru and Sai can switch places, with Hikaru becoming the ghost for brief periods of time. Which would almost be fine, with Sai occasionally in control of Hikaru’s body he could play Go to his heart’s content while Hikaru took a nice ghostly nap. That’s… not how it works, though - and a random Heian guy suddenly appearing in place of a modern teenage boy is a biit harder to hide and explain than a sudden shifts in personality.

Various fanfic ideas for various fandoms…

1 Wen Kexing died to make Zhou Zishu immortal and ever since then Zhou Zishu has been looking for Wen Kexing’s reincarnation. During the Burial Mounds debacle, Zhou Zishu thinks Wei Wuxian might be it, the similarities are there (hell, even their destroyed cores are the same, only wwx survived the event, while wkx died losing his). But no, it’s not Wei Wuxian. It’s Meng Yao.

2 Hojo’s experiments with Cloud worked and he is conducted into SOLDIER as new First Class, intended to replace the big three. Zack has to deal with a Cloud with messed up memories, priorities and interests - and hide the fact that somehow Hojo both turned his buddy into the perfect SOLDIER that will endlessly level up in strength and never degrade… and somehow managed to miss the fact. Oh, and also, he’s pretty sure none of the big three are actually dead.

3 Desmond in Vampire Hunter D verse. How it happens, idk, either as immortal, as cryogenically frozen test subject or as time traveller. He doesn’t mean to become a monster hunter, it’s just… a thing that happens. Eagle vision keeps giving him missions. Well, it’s something to do, a reason to keep moving - and a good excuse to keep accidentally running into interesting vampire hunters.

4 AC2 but it’s a transmigration story. Desmond Miles is just a normal everyday bartender who’s playing a videogame, and who suddenly finds himself in the body and life of the game’s main character, Ezio Auditore. With a betrayal and mass execution ahead of them, he has to decide how he’s going to play things - and figure out how things might be changed by survival of the Auditore family.

5 AgriCorps Obi-wan, while drunk at a harvest celebration and feeling slightly feral about permaculture, makes a bet with another AgriCorps Jedi that he can grow food and do it damn well anywhere. This ends up with him in Tatooine with the mission of growing enough food to feed at least a hundred people inside a year. A lot can happen in a year.

random-thought-depository:

backgroundelf:

I don’t think orcs are elvish enough. You have this race that was made by taking elves and twisting them, but they are always shown as so far removed from elves that unless you are told their origin, you wouldn’t guess it. Which is a shame, because I think they would be more effective if they looked like elves.

Because what happens if they look like elves? For elves, this would lead to a whole range of issues. Does killing an orc count as kinslaying? It’s a lot harder to sidestep that question if the look similar. If you want to make it really dark, have elves face off against orcs and have the elves recognize some of the orcs. Even if it doesn’t count, that’s going to cause some psychological damage to the elves to be killing people that look kind of like them. And depending on how exactly they differ from elves, you can bring in the horror of the uncanny valley. As for humans and dwarves, if the first group of pointy-eared humanoids you encounter are monsters that slaughter your people and ravage your home, you’re going to be way less trusting of the next group of pointy-eared humanoids you encounter. What if some of the problems in early dwarf/elf and human/elf relations was due to cases of mistaken identity?

So orcs should still look like elves. Elves that had been tortured and dragged through Hell, but still clearly of elvish origin. My ideal orcs look more like uncanny valley zombie elves than the dark, beefy beast men they are usually portrayed as. I know this departs from Jirt’s descriptions, but I think there’s room to make orcs really creepy.

Traits my ideal orcs would have:

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I like the idea of making Orcs Elf-like. A few different possible ways I can think of to do this (I guess these are mostly “if you’re trying to be canon-compliant probably wouldn’t work but you might take an idea or two from them, and file the serial numbers off and they might be an interesting idea for original fiction”):

Orcs as predatory Elves: Take inspiration from portrayals of Elves like in Charles Stross’s The Nightmare Stacks. Orcs still have something like the beauty and grace of Elves, but it’s wilder, more predatory; more like the beauty of a leopard. Like you said, they’re the kind of Elf that eats babies. Physical features might include very inhuman pointed mobile ears, powerful long almost lupine jaws, sharp teeth, claws. They might also have a lot of subtly threatening mannerisms; even in relatively peaceful interactions they move fast, they’re stealthy, they invade your personal space, they like showing off their teeth and claws and weapons, you can tell by the way they position themselves around the room that they’ve got blocking your exists and maneuvering you into unfavorable positions and hurting you at the back of their minds. They like meat, and they like it raw and bloody, and people are very much on their menu.

Orcs as Nazi Elves: They’re superficially beautiful and noble-looking. You start to notice something wrong when you see them in a group and notice how homogenous they are. They’re like a Nazi’s fantasy of “perfect” tall fit blue-eyed blond “Aryans” with “perfect” features, they almost but not quite look like clones of each other. They embody a single narrow, cramped idea of perfection, and their unnatural homogeneity is a frightening window into the mindset and methods of their masters and what sort of world their masters desire to create.

Orcs as ‘roided up Elves: This is similar to the idea of them scarring easily. It’d make sense if Melkor modified them to increase their combat prowess in ways that didn’t give much consideration to their over-all well-being. So they’re kind of like Elves that have been force-fed a bunch of steroids. They’re more muscular and stronger than regular Elves, but it’s not really good for their health. All those powerful muscle movements wear out their joints and cause them to injure themselves and stuff. Maybe they have a short lifespan. Or maybe they have enhanced healing that compensates for it, but in a way that doesn’t prioritize their well-being. All those broken bones and joint injuries tend to heal wrong, over time they start to look twisted, and by the time an Orc is 40 or something they’re in serious chronic pain, and they’re still functional despite it, they can power through it, but they’re not having a good time (and this contributes to their aggression and quarrelsomeness; older Orcs are hurting and that makes them cranky).

Also, changing them this way might involve messing with their physiology in ways that really mess up their bodies, like it might involve making them produce unnaturally immense amounts of testosterone and stuff, which might make them ugly and aggressive. They might look like grotesquely Chad-ified Elves, with huge jaws and huge chins and huge noses and heavy brows and coarse skin and lots of body hair, maybe even fur if you want to give them a dose of serious inhumanity. And maybe it’s kind of like they’re constantly ‘roid-raging and a lot of the Orc temperament is a result of that.

Orcs as domesticated Elves: Orcs are to Elves as police dogs are to wolves; they’ve been domesticated; changed to be servants of another being. The physical changes associated with domestication may involve neoteny. I think that approach would be great for making it a very viscerally uncomfortable experience to fight Orcs. Orcs look child-like. Adult Orcs have powerful adult bodies, sure, but they have faces like young teenagers (or whatever the Elf equivalent is). Fighting Orcs feels uncomfortably like fighting child soldiers; it feels like fighting precociously big and strong 12-14 year olds.

And this may be more than a matter of appearance. Orcs must have a pretty high mortality rate and Melkor would probably want to minimize the amount of child-care they needed, so I think it would make sense if Melkor gave Orcs accelerated physical development and brain development. Maybe by the time they’re eight or ten years old an Orc is already physically and sexually mature, already physically a powerful mature warrior, ready to march off to join Melkor’s or Sauron’s armies and kill and burn and pillage. And they’re not exactly a child at that point, their brain development is accelerated too, an eight or ten year old Orc has brain development like a human older teenager or twenty-something, but they still have very limited life experience, and if you managed to have a real conversation with one of them that would show. So not only do they look kind of child-like, not only does fighting them feel uncomfortably like fighting child soldiers, but a lot of Orcs actually are something kind of like child soldiers.

I think this approach would be great for showing that Orcs are also Melkor’s and Sauron’s victims. Imagine scenes from like thisorthis but instead of being ugly scary monsters that make animalistic roars the Orcs basically look like precociously big thirteen year olds and have weirdly child-like voices (I don’t know what a child’s voice but with the force of a big adult pair of lungs behind it would sound like, I guess it might be pretty weird). I think that’d be basically unfilmable cause it’d be so uncomfortable for people to watch that an approach like that would never get approved by a commercial studio, but that’s kind of the point.

And I’m pretty sure this gets into contradicting Tolkien’s portrayal of Orcs, but another layer of tragedy that would be fit really well into this idea is Orcs aren’t naturally bloodthirsty violent creatures, being more domesticated means their natural temperament is actually more social and less aggressive than that of their wild ancestors. If you gave an Orc to human parents as a baby they’d grow up to be a very friendly, extroverted, gentle, basically delightful person with lots of consideration for others; their biggest problem in human society would probably be that they’d be easy to manipulate and take advantage of because they’d be very trusting. In Melkor’s and Sauron’s and Saruman’s Orcs these traits are twisted to make them obedient to their dark masters; Melkor’s and Sauron’s and Saruman’s Orcs believe in their masters as little children believe. Orc soldiers aren’t ferocious dogs of war straining at their leashes, they’re hyper-disciplined totally loyal professionals who follow orders and will always do their best to get the job done, whatever the job is. They’re very brave, but it’s the “will follow orders no matter how much personal danger it puts them in” sort of bravery. They’re not rigid, they’re as smart as you or me (though often with a lot less life experience) and they use that intelligence against their enemies, they’ll improvise, attack on their own initiative where they see an opportunity, etc., but battles are just problems to be solved to them, like building a bridge. Imagery trying to make them look scary would be stuff like this, focusing on the idea of a huge army of disciplined, merciless soldiers who will obey their evil masters without question, but really, I’d prefer to lean into that this interpretation would make it blatantly obvious just looking at them that these are profoundly tragic creatures. Imagine an army marching, and they’re obviously physically powerful creatures, but they have faces like children, and they’re singing together in high voices like the voices of women or very young boys, and what they’re singing is this or something like it (“We take the storm and power / of Mordor through the world! … It’s a good day to kill! / Painted red is earth and sky / Even Manwe will bow down!”).

Which, if you run with that, would suggest a relatively optimistic answer to the “wait, so after Sauron was defeated what happened to the Orcs? Did the ostensible good guys kill them all? Even the baby Orcs?” issue. Like, imagine it’s a few months or years after the One Ring got thrown into Mount Doom, and a bunch of Orcs show up at a human town somewhere, and of course the townspeople expect the worst and are terrified. And the Orc leader says they want a meeting with the local mayor or baron or whatever, and that guy’s like “well, I guess I don’t have much to lose by finding out their demands.” So he goes out to meet the Orc leader, and…

He thinks it’s a female, though it’s kind of hard to tell. She’s big and looks very strong. There’s a disturbing contrast between her painfully young-looking looks like a thirteen year old girl face and all the obvious signs of past violence on it; there’s a huge scar that crosses her mouth and has carved a permanent notch in her upper lip, and at some point the left side of her face seems to have been caved in by a club or a warhammer or something and healed in a distorted caved-in shape and it looks like that wound destroyed her left eye. The other eye looks bloodshot, almost as if she’s been crying.

And she says she and her followers want to surrender.

She says, “Our Precious King Excellent has stopped telling us what to do. He has always told us what to do before, and we do not know what to do without him. We do not know what to do. We are lost. We need someone to tell us what to do. Please tell us what to do.”

(“Precious” and “King Excellent” are two suggestions I’ve seen for a translation of the name Sauron calls himself).

I’m definitely filing this idea away for “if I ever write the sort of fantasy that involves a Dark Lord who commands armies of biologically distinct Soldiers of Darkness, I’m probably going to write said Soldiers of Darkness as like this.”

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You could mix these up somewhat. E.g. you could combine the predatory Elves idea and the 'roided up Elves idea and give them almost a werewolf look.

Also, I didn’t really spell this out in my original post, but one way I think the Orcs as domesticated neotenous Elves idea would lend itself to making Orcs tragic is you could use it to develop an idea that Orcs actually aren’t naturally fierce and really don’t enjoy battle, but you wouldn’t guess that from looking at a lot of their external behavior.

They’re actually engineered/bred primarily for docility and submissiveness. They’re by natural temperament cooperators and appeasers, not fighters. Their natural default responses to danger lean much more toward flight, freeze, and fawn than fight. If an Orc baby was adopted and raised by human parents, they’d probably turn out the sort of person who’d probably cry if somebody punched them. Their ferocity is mostly submissiveness that wraps around toward aggression in a way that’s only possible because they’re intelligent beings. Walking toward people who want to kill them is actually really stressful for them, and doing so is like 90% an exercise in their System 2 fighting down their System 1. Actually being in battle is a profoundly unpleasant experience for them. It’s not that they have any particular inhibitions around hurting and killing other people, that part is easy for them, but battle means people are trying to kill them and sometimes they get painful injuries and their hyper-domestication means the sort of fight responses that make it so humans can sometimes enjoy it anyway are quite weak in them, it’s mostly just a scary and awful experience for them. And a lot of them first go into battle when they’re, like, literally nine years old, and sure they’ve already got strong adult bodies and adult-like brain development at that age, but nine years of life experience is nine years of life experience, they don’t have a whole lot of mental resources to handle stuff at that age. They’re actually quite brave and effective fighters despite this, but it’s almost 100% System 2 loyalty/obedience to their master + muscle memory.

But one of the main emotional resources Orcs have to handle that experience is their submission/loyalty to their master and their confidence in their physical strength, their weapons, and the fact that theirs is the side with the bigger armies and the monsters and the wunderwaffen. So they absolutely would do a lot of the “scary” behavior you see in e.g. LOTR movie Orcs. They’d pound the ground with their spears and pound their shields and make a monstrous din. They’d load people’s severed heads into a trebuchet and throw them at their comrades to taunt them. They’d make a point of not getting out of the way until the last possible moment while a huge rock flies toward them. They’d chant “Grond! Grond!” as they roll their mega siege engine toward Minas Tirith. Saruman’s Uruk Hai would cheer thunderously as Saruman orders them to march to Helm’s Deep and stain the land with the blood of Rohan.

Like, I mentioned how uncomfortable to watch some of the scenes from the LOTR movies would be if instead of scary ugly monsters that make animalistic noises the Orcs looked kind of like precociously big thirteen year olds and had weirdly child-like voices, but actually yes those scenes would structurally work with this interpretation almost beat for beat, you could just change what the Orcs look and sound like and rely more-or-less entirely on that to make them hit very different.

Like,this scene would totally work with this interpretation with only minor structural modifications. Consider how the Uruk Hai would experience it. They’re the products of Saruman’s breeding program, so they’re probably pretty young. Your average Uruk Hai is, like, literally ten years old. They’re the same age as a lot of the children sheltering in the back of Helm’s Deep. This is the first time they’ve left Isengard. This will be the first time they’re in an actual battle. They know that a lot of the Rohirrim have been seasoned veterans longer than they’ve been alive (let alone the Elves they’re going up against, who are probably orders of magnitude older than them). They’re outside in a thunderstorm and they’re wet and cold and not having a good time. They’re not natural fighters, walking toward the fortress full of armed people who want to kill them is actually a pretty stressful thing for them to do; they’re doing it 100% because Saruman told them to. How do people like that comfort themselves and each other in this situation?

They do things that remind them that they are strong and they are many. They pound the ground with their spears and pound on their shields, and the thunderous racket it creates reminds them that they are many, that while they’re young they have powerful adult bodies, that they’re physically powerful creatures, that they’re strong, that they’re Saruman’s fighting Uruk Hai whose armor is thick and whose shields are broad. They don’t roar and snarl, cause that’d just be a silly look on them, but they shout, they chant. Maybe Saruman’s name. Maybe something suitably threatening in Black Speech (do Uruk Hai use that?) like “There will be no dawn for Rohan!” And they have high voices like girls, but they also have big, powerful lungs, and there aretens of thousandsof them, it’s loud, it’s a big sound like thunder or the crashing, pounding waves of a turbulent ocean, its loudness reminds them that they are many and they are strong, the women and children sheltering at the back of Helm’s Deep will hear it and be afraid.

I feel like Aragorn’s “Show them no mercy, for you shall receive none!” line would hit poignantly different in this context. Like, yeah, it would be a lot more viscerally uncomfortable to kill this version of Orcs (especially for Elves, cause they’d be a neotenous version of Elves) and there probably would be more of a need to remind people that while these are tragic creatures they’re also dangerous merciless enemies and need to be taken seriously as that; if they win here they’ll massacre everyone in Helm’s Deep just as mercilessly as the beast-men Uruk Hai from the actual movie would.

Something I originally intended as part of my previous post but it was getting so long I decided to do it separately. It’s pretty tangential to the Dorley thing but does connect to some of my ideas. Have a literal 25,000 year old vampire OC! Also some nuancing of Elle; she’s such an obvious symbol of woke capitalism I initially gravitated toward writing her as super-evil and the sort of abuser who manipulates and uses marginalized people by pretending to be their friend, and I still kind of want that characterization for her, but lately I’ve been trying to nuance her somewhat.

Under read-more for length, and also content warnings for slavery, mind control, sexual/reproductive coercion, incest, child-killing, cannibalism, characters being approximately ‘60/'70s expected level of politically incorrect, and, uh, extremely long-term imprisonment is the best way I can think of to describe it. This was heavily inspired by me finding the idea of a 25,000 year old vampire fun and by the vague statements in Glow, Worm that vampires do age, just very slowly, but also by the rather awful thoughts “how do you make a 25,000 year old vampire relatable? You deprive them of the opportunity to have 25,000 years worth of experiences” and “What if: Dorley but instead of force-fem it’s about patriarchy and kingship and what James C. Scott talks about and taking the vampire thrall thing to its ultimate logical nightmare fuel conclusions, and it’s much worse because that’s appropriate because it’s more closely adjacent to the long terror in the gender as coercive political project room?”

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A little after she’d finished thrall-conditioning Annaliese, Elle found another vampire she thought might be useful in setting up her 'programme.’ Her name was Jarna, and she was a thrall-brainwashed vampire slave like Annaliese, and she was being sold by her previous master, who said he didn’t need her anymore. Jarna has a super-thrall “bullshit vampire power,” similar to Annaliese’s. Jarna’s blood is actually much more potent than Annaliese’s in terms of being able to thrall lots of people at once, but it keeps less well; Jarna’s thrall factor doesn’t survive her blood being frozen, and has a shorter shelf-life than Annaliese’s under refrigeration. For a while Elle had an idea that she might be able to use Jarna for the 'programme’ just like Annaliese, and/or that Jarna’s super-thrall might be useful to her elsewhere.

Jarna was… strange. She looked like an old woman. She was very tall; more than six feet tall. She had brown skin and a combination of features that didn’t really fit into any ethnic group Elle or Annaliese or anyone else could think of; she looked… different from anyone on Earth. Annaliese noticed she smelled different too. Jarna being a vampire was a big confounder there, of course, vampires and humans smell different, but… Jarna’s scent was noticeably unique in a way that went beyond the way almost everyone’s body odor is unique.

From Jarna’s descriptions of her earlier life, as near as they could tell, she’d been born into some primitive tribe, and then she’d been abducted and taken to a place ruled by her previous master, who Jarna called Tatasi(that was not the name Elle knew him by). Tatasi had transitioned and thrall-brainwashed Jarna and during the thrall-brainwashing process he’d discovered her super-thrall ability. With appropriate control techniques Jarna could control thousands of people at once through blood thrall, and that was what Tatasi used her for; he used her blood to mentally enslave the people who worked for him. Her ability made her very useful to Tatasi, and it didn’t seem to pass to childe vampires, so she’d been precious to him - not as a person, but as a tool. Frightened of the possibility that harm might come to her, he kept her confined to apartments in guarded compounds for a very long time. At first she’d spent a very long time mostly confined to three inner chambers in his house, and then later she’d been moved around more, but always she was kept inside and in seclusion. Elle thought Jarna’s lifestyle during her thralldom to Tatasi sounded a lot like the life of a woman in purdah. And then one day Tatasi told Jarna that he didn’t need her anymore, and Tatasi sold her to Elle.

Much as Jarna herself didn’t seem to fit into any race Elle or Annaliese knew, Jarna’s descriptions of her homeland didn’t seem to quite fit any place on Earth. At first they’d thought it might be somewhere in Africa: it was a savannah, or something that sounded like one, and Jarna made vague references to animals that sounded like they might be elephants. But Jarna didn’t look African, she looked more Indian than anything else, but that didn’t seem quite right either… And her homeland had very cold winters, winters of deep snow, winters when rivers and ponds and lakes froze over - the descriptions reminded Annaliese of her miserable two months of freedom in a Russian winter, but maybe worse; Jarna talked about powerful winter winds, there were few trees to get in their way so they would blow unimpeded across the open plains and they were so forceful and so cold and they would blow things around; she seemed to remember it vividly. They thought maybe the high Arctic or the Eurasian steppe, but Jarna didn’t look like an Inuit or a Mongolian or a Kazakh or a Turk. And Jarna’s description of her abduction suggested relatively close proximity to a sea to the west, and it didn’t sound like the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea, it was a cold and wild sea with crashing, pounding waves and icebergs, it sounded like the north Atlantic, and then they’d sailed through a straight that sounded like maybe Gibraltar but that couldn’t possibly be right… None of it fit together, none of it made sense! It was like she was describing an alien planet! No, more confusing than that - it felt like she was describing Earth but the picture just didn’t fit together right!

Elle had thralled Jarna almost as soon as she’d gotten her off the airplane, not even really for brainwashing at that point but simply so Jarna would obey Elle instead of being loyal to her old master. If Elle and Jarna had the sort of intimate thrall connection Annaliese tends to form while thralling people they would have been saved a lot of guessing; Elle getting access to a single memory-image of the 'elephants’ of Jarna’s homeland would have clarified everything. But thrall is idiosyncratic. It’s a relationship. A relationship of domination, but still, a relationship; its shape depends on the people involved and the circumstances. Elle and Jarna didn’t form the sort of mind-link through which they could easily share mental images. Their thrall connection mostly just made Jarna obedient. Elle could have looked directly into Jarna’s memories, but that would have required pushing in a way she didn’t want to do yet.

Jarna claimed that she’d been transitioned from human to vampire and put into seclusion by Tatasi as a young woman. And if that was true it was horrifying. Because Jarna looked like an old woman, and if she was transitioned young that could only mean that she became old as a vampire, and that was something theoretically possible, but it would require an immense span of time. Vampires do age, but it’s very slow. The very old vampires, the ones who’ve lived thousands of years, have just barely perceptibly aged; if they had solid jet black hair when they transitioned they might have some barely noticeable grey hairs around their temples now, or something like that. You need to look at the very oldest vampires, the ones almost as old as civilization, to really see it, and even then, they haven’t aged very much, assuming their recollections of their youth are reliable. If Jarna became old as a vampire, how old was Jarna?

The answer to that question came by accident. Elle had a large library in her mansion, and Jarna could not read English at this point (in fact, Jarna couldn’t read any language at this point; Tatasi had never bothered to teach her to read and write), but sometimes she liked to look at books with pictures, and sometimes she’d ask Annaliese what the pictures were of. And one day Jarna came to Annaliese and Elle very excited, holding a children’s illustrated book about the Ice Age.

Jarna showed Annaliese and Elle an illustration of a herd of woolly mammoths moving across the ice age tundra, with a single mammoth foregrounded. And Jarna pointed at the foregrounded mammoth and said, “I know this animal! We hunted them! My people hunted them!”

Jarna flipped excitedly through the picture book, and pointed to illustration after illustration of extinct animals that she knew, that she recognized. Oh, but she thought the artist hadn’t gotten them quite right! And at some point in her long boring captivity Jarna had taught herself to draw quite well, and she started making drawings of what those animals really looked like. And her drawings did indeed look a little different, and somehow more realandalive. As if she had seen living woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, cave lions, cave bears, and so on, and the artist who made the illustrations in the book only had bones to work with.

Elle said in quiet awe and horror, “Jarna, those animals have all been extinct for ten thousand years.”

Jarna smiled and said triumphantly, “I told you he kept me shut up in rooms for a long time!”

Elle started thinking about some things Jarna had said, about being marched to the shore of a cold and wild sea to the west and it not taking many days, about a cave, and about… And she started pulling books down from the shelf of her great library and showing Jarna pictures inside them, pictures of cave paintings and the entrances of some of the caves the paintings were found in, thinking just maybe…

Eventually Jarna pressed her finger against one picture, a picture of a cave painting in a cave in France that Elle and Annaliese guessed depicted an auroch, and Jarna said, “I think this is my home!” After a few moments Jarna said, “It is! I know this painting! My mother and grandmother made this! They let me watch - they were teaching me… I watched this being made!”

Elle said in awe and quiet horror, “Jarna, that painting is over twenty-five thousand years old.”

Jarna had a big smile on her face and she tapped the photo again and said, “I watched this being made!” And then after a few moments she added, still cheerfully and still with a big smile on her face, “I told you he kept me shut up in rooms for a long time!”

There was a pregnant silence and Elle seemed to just sort of look at Jarna for a while, and then Elle reached out and caressed Jarna’s face and said softly, “That’s why I couldn’t figure out what race you belong to. You belong to a race that doesn’t exist anymore. You’re a Cro-Magnon woman.”

Of course! No wonder Jarna’s descriptions of her homeland and her enslavement sounded like descriptions of an alien planet, yet tantalizingly familiar! They were descriptions of an alien yet familiar planet! The world of the Ice Age! Jarna’s homeland was Europe! But not Europe as modern people knew it! The strange Serengeti-like but cold in winter homeland she described was the Europe of the Ice Age, a land of open grasslands full of Pleistocene megafauna! The cold and wild sea the slave-catchers had taken her across really was the Atlantic, specifically the Bay of Biscay! And the slave ship really had carried her through the Straight of Gibraltar!

Elle gathers around her… Lieutenants? Assistants? Thralls? Companions? The trans women she vampirized and then thrall-brainwashed as an experiment. She wasn’t satisfied with the way they turned out. They’d been too independent, being the kind of person who transitions in the '60s or '70s selects pretty strongly for that, and of course she’d been able to use the thrall brainwashing to break that, but in the process she’d had to break too much. Thus her exploration of other options for solving her bloodline problem. But they’re people she trusts. They have their uses.

Elle has Jarna tell her story again, and this time really go through it systematically and thoroughly while they pass bounce inferences off each other and her, and they all listen to it with new ears.

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Jarna’s people were not nomads. There were nomads in Jarna’s world, but Jarna’s people looked down on them a little and pitied them a little, the way agricultural people later would. Jarna’s people were fortunate to occupy a place that herds of animals funneled through on their spring and autumn migrations. Jarna’s people were not farmers, but they’d invested in their land; built structures that funneled the herds further, diverted them like water, funneled them into killing places. They used fire to shape the landscape too, improving its value as a hunting ground and encouraging the growth of edible and otherwise useful plants.

The diet of Jarna’s people was rich in meat and rather poor in just about everything else. When the herds migrated through their valley there were great hunts, slaughters, in which they killed many big animals. This was a time of feasting on fresh meat, but also a time of much work. The men - mostly the men - had the work of actually killing the animals, of course; it was almost like a military operation. And the women - mostly the women - had the work of smoking and otherwise preserving most of the meat of these animals. Jarna’s people had become so good at killing animals in these hunts that a primary driver of their cultural evolution had been managing all the meat the hunts yielded, finding ways to preserve and store it. The great hunts provided the bulk of the food Jarna’s tribe ate all year; they lived on preserved meat more than anything else.

Jarna’s people were fortunate in another way; they occupied a cave, which’s thermal mass insulated them in winter, and which provided them with perpetually cool, dry places where preserved meat stored well. The neighboring tribes to the south and southeast were similarly fortunate, and had their own caves. The neighboring tribes to the north, west, northwest, and northeast were not so fortunate; they had to winter in huts on open ground beneath open sky. And the nomads had to make do with tents that they could take apart and carry on their backs.

Jarna’s people lived in and around their cave, and it was like a village; hundreds of people lived there, there were hundreds of people in Jarna’s tribe. By the standards of Jarna’s world, this was a large settlement and a mighty people; Jarna’s tribe was the most numerous and therefore the strongest tribe in the area. Jarna had considered herself a fortunate person, to be born among such a tribe.

This was the rhythm of life for Jarna’s people: in spring and autumn the great hunts, and all the work of preserving the meat. In summer, groups of mostly men would fan out across the country to hunt still-abundant big game and bring fresh meat back to the main body of the tribe at the cave, and groups of mostly women and children would fan out across the country to gather edible plants and shellfish and bird eggs and useful non-food materials and catch fish and birds and small animals, and some of that was brought back to the tribe too; the edible plants the women gathered were important for nutrients if not for calories, and some of them were preserved for the winter in various ways. In winter the whole tribe would retreat back into the cave, and live on stored food, and wait out the cold. Second to food, acquiring and processing fuel for fires in the winter was the great pre-occupation; the cave, fortunately, had some openings near the tops of the biggest chambers that allowed some smoke to escape, prevented excessive accumulation of smoke; Jarna’s people had expanded them and even dug and carved out a few new ones over the generations.

Because Jarna was a girl, it had initially been expected that as an adult she’d preserve food, and she’d make and repair clothing and nets and carrier bags and baskets, and she’d go out with the gathering parties of mostly women and children to gather plants and catch small animals and gather wood and other things that could be fuel for fires, and she’d go into the deep part of the cave and paint things there. That was what most women in Jarna’s tribe did. By the time Jarna was pubescent her older female relatives were already regularly taking her with them on gathering expeditions. And they sometimes took her with them into a big, deep chamber of the cave that had no natural light, and let Jarna watch while they painted by lights of flickering lamps, and started to teach her how to do what they were doing. The making of images in this deep chamber of the cave was a responsibility and a privilege of a few matrilineages of the women of Jarna’s tribe, and Jarna understood that being taught how to do this was a responsibility and a privilege, was something special.

But Jarna was a… the best English translation of the word is tomboy. She seemed to relate better to boys than to girls, to prefer doing the things boys did, to more easily make friends with boys than with girls. And Jarna grew to be very tall and strong for a woman. So she joined the hunters, like a boy. At first she learned with the small boys from the old men who were too old and feeble to hunt themselves now but knew a lot about how to do it, and then as a teenager she started actually participating in big game hunts.

Many years after this conversation with Elle, Jarna sometimes visited the graduate school, the other institution, and that place being what it is, some of the girls there wondered if Jarna might be a trans man or at least kind of transmasculine. Jarna told them she doesn’t think so. She never had a problem with her female body, never had any desire to change it. She just seemed to… relate better to boys and men, somehow. It’s a bit hard to tell, though, because… would changing your body like that even be an idea that occurs to you if you live in a world where it’s totally impossible? Testosterone shots would have been an outside context concept to the young Jarna, like a jet engine! And after that… well, her cognitive binding enslavement to Tatasi didn’t leave much room for exploring her gender.

As a young woman Jarna fell in love with another woman. Her lover was a… regular woman? A woman who did women’s work and had a more female-typical for their society social life. It was normative for women in Jarna’s tribe to marry and have kids sooner or later, but lesbian relationships were accepted as long as they didn’t interfere with that; lots of women were openly poly (though it wasn’t called that) with a husband and a female lover; Jarna just openly had a romantic and sexual relationship with this woman and nobody had a problem with that. It felt like the relationship in Jarna’s life that was best described as romantic. At this age Jarna also pretty frequently had sex with some of her similar-age male friends, but that was more of a friends-with-benefits thing. She didn’t feel she was ready for marriage, and she didn’t let them have the kind of sex with her that might have gotten her pregnant. She thinks her human self had a pretty good deal sexually, in a sort of “she was kind of like a straight boy but also androphilic but also she had a woman’s body and was OK with that, it’s super-easy to get sex from boys and enjoy it if you’re like that” way. When she told the girls at the other institution heard this it sparked a discussion about how firmly this put her in the “yeah, definitely queer” category.

One of Elle’s trans women thralls was curious about whether Jarna’s people had anything like a social institution of transgenderism. They did! They had one of those transfeminine castrati shaman classes! Her tribe had four people like that! And there was the tomboy thing, and… that’s probably the best translation, but it distorts some of the nuances, it was understood as kind of… fourth gender-ish? Though it was pretty tangential to trans, people like that were understood as women, just… kind of masculine women?

One day, when Jarna was out hunting with a party of herself and four men, they were attacked. Two of the men were killed, and Jarna and two of the men, including her brother, were subdued and their arms bound and made to march.

Some of the neighboring tribes in Jarna’s region practiced something halfway between bride kidnapping and slavery. Jarna’s tribe didn’t do that, and were proud that they did not; they thought it an evil custom. If a captive woman escaped and made it to Jarna’s tribe, Jarna’s tribe would give her refuge, and some strong men to escort her back to her own tribe if she wished to return to them. This had provoked more than one war against a neighboring tribe (Jarna’s people and their neighboring sedentary hunter tribes did fight wars against each other, mostly over disputed hunting grounds or blood feuds - the battles could get quite bloody). Jarna’s tribe did not fear the wrath of their neighbors; Jarna’s tribe was the most numerous and strongest tribe in the region. This was the only reference Jarna had at this time for slavery. She thought it strange that her captors had taken some of the men as well; if they were doing the sort of slave raid that she was familiar with, they would have killed all the men, and taken only her.

The captors were strange. They were very tall, taller than Jarna, and heavily built, they looked strong - they were strong, she knew because she’d fought them! But their faces were strangely fine and child-like, like the faces of young pubescent boys who had not yet fully entered into manhood.

They tied her and the other two hunters of her tribe together, and they made them walk forward in a line, tied to each other with ropes. They made them walk to the west for more than a few days. Sometimes they gave Jarna and the other captives a little of some strange, hard food; it was the first time Jarna had tasted something a little like bread. They carried packs of this food; they didn’t give the captives much of it, mostly kept it for themselves, mostly Jarna and the other captives just got water, from waterskins refilled from whatever stream or river was convenient.

After some days of walking to the west, they came to the shore of what people in a much later age would call the Bay of Biscay.

Jarna had never seen the sea before, but she’d heard of it. She’d heard of the sea. And she’d heard of the mountains to the south of her homeland, and the lands of mild winters beyond them. And she’d heard of the steppe-tundra to the north and east of her homeland, where the winters were longer and colder than in her homeland, and where people lived in huts of mammoth skin and mammoth tusks and mammoth bones, because there was very little wood.

It was a frightening sea. This was the Ice Age, and it was a colder and wilder sea than the Bay of Biscay the humans of historic times knew; more like the North Atlantic. It was a sea of crashing, pounding waves, and a forceful icy wind blew from it, and Jarna suspected looking at it that she would not survive in it for long.

The captors set up a camp of sorts, in a place terribly exposed to the forceful cold wind from the sea. They tied Jarna and the others to the stump of an old dead tree, and tied their legs together, so they were quite helpless. Two of them remained with the captives while the others went away. Every once in a while they would untie one of the captives and let them walk a little way away and relieve themselves, and then they would tie them back up again. Only one at a time. And every once in a while they gave the captives some water, and less frequently a little of the strange, hard food.

A few days later, the others returned, bringing with them another marching line of captives; four captives on this one. And they untied Jarna and her brother and the other hunter from the tree stump, and untied their legs, and tied the two lines of captives together, and made them walk for a while, until they came to the ship.

Jarna at this time had no concept of a sailing ship, but she had some familiarity with small river boats, so she looked at the ship and correctly extrapolated its function. And now she looked at the sea with true fear. They were going to try to cross that in a boat? With her and her brother and her cousin stuck on it? That… that had to be dangerous!

Jarna wished she could hold her brother’s hand, but that was impossible; their hands were bound behind their backs.

The other four captives were from the shoreline people of this area, who often entered the ocean in boats, for fishing and whaling and trading. One of them knew the language of Jarna’s people, for the shoreline people sometimes sailed up the rivers to trade with the inland hunters, and that woman saw the fear on the faces of Jarna and the other hunters, and explained to them as best she could that her people often moved across the sea in boats, and… it wasn’t exactly safe, but it was no worse than the hunting the men of Jarna’s people did. Of course, the sea was rough today, her people would not put out to sea on a day like this, but that big boat was much bigger than anything her people built, and was probably more stable than anything her people built.

The captors walked Jarna and the other captives to near the ship, to where the icy waters were almost touching their shoes. There were more of the big but strangely child-faced men on the boat, and they lowered a long plank of wood to near where the captives were standing, and the captors made the captives walk up to the plank and onto the ship with them. The thing that had most struck Jarna about the sailing ship was the sail. She’d watched women weaving with fibers taken from wild plants as a child, even helped them and done a little herself, and she boggled at the work that must have gone in to making such a huge piece of cloth. By pantomime one of the captors indicated to the captives that they should relieve themselves over the side of the ship, which they did, knowing this probably meant they would be restrained for a long time now. And when that was done the captors gave the captives a little water and then marched the captives down into the hold of the ship and tied them down there.

The ship soon departed the shore and put out to sea. During the journey the captives were mostly kept tied down in the hold. Every few hours they were, one at a time, allowed up into the open air so they could relieve themselves over the side of the ship, so the waste went into the ocean. And twice a day food and water would be brought down into the hold and given to them, and when they had eaten the containers would be removed. A few of the big child-faced people would check on them frequently, to make sure they hadn’t begun to work their bindings loose.

The hold had some little windows up near the ceiling to let in air and light, and the rope arrangement Jarna was restrained with gave her enough freedom of movement to stand and look out one of those little windows. The hardest part staying on her feet while the ship rolled about in the waves. So when the ship put out to sea Jarna was able to see the coast recede, and then she was able to track its journey somewhat, or at least to watch the coast pass by. The slave ship rarely moved out of sight of the coast (“That makes sense,” Elle commented, “Ancient sailers usually stuck close to the coast, they were afraid of the open ocean”). Sometimes Jarna saw distant icebergs - she’d asked the shoreline people woman what they were, and the woman had known and explained it. The boat had gone south at first, then turned to the west (“Makes sense if they were going from France to Gibraltar by the Atlantic route and following the coast, they’d have to turn west to follow the Spanish coast!”). They stopped at a spot on what must have been the northern coast of Spain for some days, and then three more captives were loaded on and tied down in the hold - Jarna and the other hunters and shoreline folk couldn’t talk to these new ones at all, they had no language in common. And then the boat set out again, and it sailed a little more west, and then turned south, and then southeast, following the coast (“My God, I can just follow it on the map! She must have had a great sense of direction too! Of course she did, she was a hunter!”). And then it passed a mountain Jarna remembered, and Elle ordered her to draw the mountain to the best of her memory (“That’s the goddamn Rock of Gibraltar! That’s goddamn Tariq’s Mountain! It… looks a little different… It’s probably eroded a little in the last twenty-five thousand years! And the shoreline looks different… Of course it looks different, the sea level was a lot lower then! My God, that she remembers it so well after all this time! She must have an absolutely photographic memory! God, that whole trip must have really been burned into her mind!”).

Elle showed Jarna modern pictures of the Rock of Gibraltar, and yes, that is the mountain she saw, though it looks a little different now.

And having passed through what must have been the Straight of Gibraltar, the slave ship crossed what must have been the Mediterranean Sea, though it was a colder and wilder sea then. And it came to shore in a place where there was a…

An outpost! Jarna had no concept of such a thing at the time, but it’s obvious in retrospect. A satellite settlement, from which ships were built and launched, where expeditions could be resupplied. More of the strange child-faced people there, and the vampiric lieutenant who controlled them (apparent as that in retrospect, but Jarna recognized him as a man with a strange authority over the other child-faced people). And from there the captives were made to walk overland, tied together with rope in a line (in a coffle, though Jarna had no word for such a concept at the time). They were walked to what must have been a place in the inland reaches of the Euphrates, and on its banks there was another outpost, and a river boat waiting to take them down the river. And the boat took them far down the river, to a place that’s now somewhere under the waters of the Persian Gulf, to a place where…

To a place where there were fields.

Ten or fifteen thousand years before the known historic beginning of farming, there were cultivated fields of grain, and irrigation works, and thralls working the fields. Jarna had never seen cultivated fields before. Very few people in her world had.

And in the middle of the fields there was a town. A town! Not a big town. Maybe better described as a big village. It had maybe a thousand inhabitants, maybe not even that. But by the standards of Jarna’s world, this was a mighty city. It might even have been the biggest permanent human settlement in the world at the time. There were three to five times as many people here as at the cave of Jarna’s tribe when the whole tribe was gathered together, and Jarna thought of her tribe as a big tribe. And there were large buildings! Most of the people here lived in barracks of a sort. And there was something she in retrospect thinks of as Tatasi’s palace, though even he didn’t have that concept at the time; he called it his house. Jarna had never before seen or imagined such a thing as a settlement with large buildings constructed of bricks.

Most of the workers she saw toiling in the fields were the strange big child-faced people, but not all. Tatasi’s slave-catching expeditions ranged widely. To the south, they reached South Africa. To the east, they regularly reached India, and sometimes went as far afield as Indonesia, Australia, and East Asia. To the west, they reached Spain and Morocco and… well, Jarna’s journey gives a glimpse of how far they sometimes ranged. He even sent slave-catchers into inner Eurasia. Tatasi had reasons to be acquisitive of thralls from far-away lands who might have interesting new genes.

Jarna and the other new captives were offered water to drink and a kind of soup to eat. And they were hungry and thirsty, and the soup actually smelled kind of good. And when they ate it, it actually wasn’t bad. And then it did something to them.

Tatasi has a super-thrall ability, like Annaliese and Jarna. The soup was laced with Tatasi’s blood, and eating it put Jarna and the other captives under blood thrall to him, made them his slaves.

That day, Jarna and the other new captives met Tatasi. And Tatasi sent the rest of them to the barracks and the fields, to be new workers for him. But with Jarna, Tatasi decided to try a little experiment. Tatasi transitionedJarna.

————–

Jarna saw things in Tatasi’s mind through her thrall connection to him. Tatasi is old. From the hints that can be gathered second-hand through Jarna, it seems likely that Tatasi was born and transitioned during the early warm phase of the Eemian interglacial, the interglacial period before the present one. Which would mean Tatasi is around 125,000 years old. Which suggests he ages much more slowly than Jarna. Maybe because, if Jarna’s second-hand account of Tatasi’s life is to be believed, Tatasi was the first vampire.

Certain clues suggest Tatasi was born somewhere in the area that’s now Israel, Lebanon, or Syria, before the onset of the most recent Ice Age, before what he remembers as the great cooling and drying of the world. Embedded in Tatasi’s mind were images of the homeland he was born into. And it was a land with cultivated fields and towns.

Conventional human histories put the first emergence of agriculture in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent around 10-15,000 years ago. Conventional vampire (mostly) oral histories roughly agree with and enrich this picture. According to ancient vampire legend, the first vampires started out as human witches and sorcerers who called something from the darkness between the spaces into them to live in them and give them power and unnaturally long life. Embedded in this origin story is an actually pretty historically interesting description of the society of the sedentary acorn-wheat proto-agricultural complex that existed in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent during the global warming that preceded the Younger Dryas Cold Snap. According to the legend, it was from that society that the first vampires emerged. In that society agriculture was young enough that people remembered that it was women who’d begun to cultivate wheat, as an extension of their gathering activities, and that farming only gradually became the occupation of both genders as population increased and hunting became increasingly marginal as a food source.

If Jarna’s impressions of Tatasi’s memories were to be believed, 125,000 years ago Tatasi had been human, and something like a prince, and as he surveyed his father’s domains he walked through cultivated fields of wheat.

Jarna said there was no contradiction. She’d also seen in Tatasi’s memories that the civilization of his people had ultimately been a failure. It had endured for 25,000 years, but it hadn’t progressed much. It never invented moon rockets or guns or even iron-working. It never expanded beyond the western flank of the Fertile Crescent. It never achieved any unity; from its origins to its end it was a constellation of hundreds of tiny city-states (dwindling at the end to dozens and then to a few and then to just one), if you could call its major settlements cities. It never even created a real city. Its greatest settlements were tiny by modern standards; not much more than twenty thousand people (and a few thousand people was a more typical population for one of its “cities”). In truth many of its “cities” might be more accurately described as big agricultural villages; most of their residents were agricultural laborers who walked out to the fields each day and returned to the central settlement each evening. And when the Ice Age set in and the world cooled and dried, its people had abandoned their cities and their cultivated fields, and dispersed into the wilderness, and gone back to being hunter-gatherers. Its cultivated fields of wheat had become choked with wild grass, and its cultivated gardens had become choked with weeds, and over the hundred thousand year winter of the Ice Age its cultivars had thoroughly reverted to wild type, and it was left for the women of the same region a hundred thousand years later to re-invent agriculture all over again from scratch.

It seems… maybe not unbelievable. It’s the same region agriculture first emerged in immediately before the Holocene, so it probably has favorable conditions for it; if an agricultural society did arise in the Eemian, it would be a plausible place for it. And the Eemian had a nice climate, maybe nicer than the present interglacial, and agriculture got started multiple times independently during the present interglacial; if anything it seems weird if it never got started during any of the previous interglacials.

Tatasi wasn’t a name. It was a title. It literally translated as Grandfather. Among Tatasi’s people, it was the title of the ruler of a city-state, and thus the title of the most powerful people in the world Tatasi inhabited when he was a human. It was not a particularly grandiose title; the headman of a village or the leader of a minor clan or even just a literal grandfather was called the same thing. If Grandfather’s people had invented titles equivalent in grandiosity to lordorking, he would have called himself that. But his people had never done that. Grandfather was the most important-sounding thing he could think of to call himself, so that was what he called himself, and that was what he made his thralls call him.

If Jarna was to be believed, Grandfather had no sire. Nor had he been born from a vampire mother. He was a younger son of his city-state’s previous human Tatasi, and his older brothers were the ones being groomed for the title and the power, and he was jealous of his older brothers, so he sought and found a witch, and he persuaded her to teach him magic. And using the knowledge she taught him, he called something from the darkness between the spaces to live in him and give him power.

Elle was skeptical. That’s just mythology! Vampirism isn’t some spiritual possession! Vampirism is an infection! They’re called Vand symbiotes. You can see them in a microscope! They invade your cells and take up residence in the cytoplasm. They function a little like a second set of mitochondria, but interacting with the host in much more complex ways. Your vampire bloodline is just the genetic profile of your Vand symbiotes; it’s like your mitochondrial DNA lineage except you don’t necessarily get all your Vand symbiotes from one sire. Sure, there’s some weird thaumativory stuff going on in them, but it’s basically a physical infection, no more mystical than the common cold! He probably fried his own brain with all that time he spent stroking his own ego! It happens sometimes to really old vampires! Memories can be notoriously unreliable even over just a human lifetime, now imagine what can happen to the brain of a narcissist who spends thousands of years surrounding himself with thralls and making them validate his grandiosity!

Using the powers the thing he’d called into him had given him, Grandfather defeated his father and his brothers and took control of his city-state. He killed his father and his brothers. And he put the people of his city-state under blood thrall to him and enslaved them that way. All of them. Grandfather has a powerful super-thrall ability; when he was a young vampire, with the right control techniques he could use it to control more than ten thousand people at once.

After that he… mostly didn’t seem to do very much. He simply ruled his city-state, for the next 15,000 years, until the world began to dry and cool and the civilization that produced him began to die around him. If she were in his place, Elle would have tried to create a bigger empire, but Grandfather was apparently uninterested in that. Perhaps he simply lacked the imagination to conceive of such a thing. His civilization had never produced an empire, and Grandfather was… strangely unimaginative in some ways.

110,000 years ago, the great cooling and drying of the world began. The cold itself was not much of a problem for the civilization of Grandfather’s time, even in the Ice Age their land stayed warm, but as the world cooled it was also mostly becoming drier, and that was a big problem for them. There was less rain to water the fields, so food production shrank, so the people became hungrier and the population of the towns shrank.

What usually finished off the process was not direct starvation but a one-two punch of malnutrition and infectious disease. Disease had always been a big problem for the civilization of Grandfather’s age, the dense and sedentary populations of their villages and towns was an environment where infectious diseases could easily spread, and they were less well-adapted to living in dense populations than even the humans of the early Holocene (let alone of the humans of the modern age, who are mostly the products of thousands of years of brutal selection pressure for resistance to crowd diseases). It was probably one of the reasons they never got very far; epidemics and endemic infectious diseases greatly sapped the vitality of their society. Malnourished people are vulnerable to infectious diseases. As the food supply contracted and malnutrition increased, the death rate from infectious disease increased; people would die, and the proximate cause was some endemic disease, but the ultimate cause was the malnutrition that weakened them enough for the disease to finish them off. In a way worse, the increasingly malnourished populations of the towns and villages were increasingly vulnerable to epidemic diseases, to plagues. Terrible plagues swept through the land and, Grandfather’s people being smart enough to recognize the correlation between plagues and crowding, people tended to react by fleeing the towns and villages and dispersing into the wilderness. As the subject populations under their control declined, both by death and by flight, the rulers of the city-states tried to compensate by squeezing their remaining subjects harder, increasing taxes and labor duties, which provoked more of their subjects to flee and created a failure cycle. Sometimes there were even revolutions in which a city-state’s subjects would kill their rulers, demolish their own city, and disperse into the wilderness, into freedom (the technology of the civilization of Grandfather’s time never got good enough to make being a typical subject of their society unambiguously better than being a hunter-gatherer). Sometimes a weakened and vulnerable city-state would be targeted by the rulers of neighboring city-states, who would raze it and march its population back to their own city-states to now be workers for their own city-states, in an inevitably negative-sum process that killed many and destroyed much and weakened the society as a whole. Sometimes tax collectors would come to a village and find it had simply been abandoned at some point, that its inhabitants had simply all fled into the wilderness, into freedom. Sometimes a town or a village would simply be slowly and quietly abandoned over time, its population shrinking and shrinking until there was nothing left but empty collapsing ruins being slowly reclaimed by nature.

As the fimbulwinter of the Ice Age deepened, the towns and villages of Grandfather’s civilization were destroyed or abandoned one by one, like lights being turned off at night. At the beginning of the process there were hundreds of city-states. Then there were dozens. Then only a few. And then, finally, there was only one: Grandfather’s city. Grandfather’s blood protected his thralls from the diseases. And Grandfather’s people alone did not abandon him; they could not; the blood thrall he kept them all under from childhood to death insured that.

Grandfather had to shrink the population of his little kingdom, to fit it within the tightening limits imposed by the drying climate. That was easy for him. He had almost total control over how many children his thralls made; abstinence-only birth control works fine if you’re dealing with people who basically literally can’t disobey you. And if he wanted to thin the numbers of his thralls in a hurry, he simply killed some pre-pubescent girls by drinking up their blood.

His more usual predilection was to drink to death pre-pubescent boys. For the same reason farmers often slaughter male animals young but keep the female ones. Women were necessary to replenish the stock, but now that he didn’t need armies to defend his kingdom from rival lords all those boys were a bit surplus to requirements; reproductively, he only really needed a handful of males around to serve as studs. Oh, he kept a lot of them around for heavy labor on the farms and irrigation canals and construction and building repair projects and for genetic diversity (Grandfather didn’t know about genes, but he knew inbreeding could kill small communities), but… he really didn’t need all of them. Which left food for himself and his vampiric lieutenants as the obvious use for the surplus. When Jarna saw Grandfather’s city, she noticed that she saw more women than men there. And no really old people. He drank to death all the thralls who were too old or too maimed or too disabled to work, too. Technically he didn’t need to drink anyone to death, the ratio of human thralls to vampires he maintained was plenty to allow Grandfather and his lieutenants to live entirely by donations small enough to not permanently harm the donor and that was how they got most of the blood they drank, but the normal patterns of human life inevitably generated people who Grandfather saw as more-or-less useless to him, and drinking them up seemed to him the obvious efficient method of disposing of them.

One of the reasons the Eemian civilization never got very far might be that, compared to Holocene civilizations, it suffered from a cruel disadvantage: it had no domestic animals. When Grandfather was born, even the domestication of the dog was tens of thousands of years in the future. Maybe that was why: between the Eemian and the Holocene humans had made friends with the dog, and that might have served as a template to allow them to make friends or slaves (depending on how you looked at it) of the goat and the auroch. To Grandfather’s people, an animal as a partner was an alien concept. Their agriculture was entirely about the production of plant-derived foods. All their meat had to come from hunting, fishing, whaling, and the gathering of shellfish, insects, and other small animals. And no domestic animals meant no milk (aside from the human breast milk drunk by babies and small children), no cheese, no reliable access to eggs. It may have greatly restrained the size of their population, with all the downstream effects of that (fewer people to come up with new ideas, fewer workers, less dense social networks…). At the very least, it no doubt made them less well-nourished, less healthy, less resilient against infectious diseases… Grandfather came up with his own ghastly solution for that. When he killed a human thrall who wasn’t useful to him, after he or his vampiric lieutenants drank the blood, he ordered other human thralls to eat the flesh. He considered it efficient, and his blood protected them from prion diseases and other infectious diseases associated with cannibalism.

Grandfather’s city was able to endure through the Ice Age because he could impose conditions of survival and community continuity on his thralls that free humans would never have accepted. He got his little kingdom through the Toba Catastrophe by making his thralls kill and cannibalize every one of their own under the age of seventeen, and every one of their own over the age of forty, and nine out of ten of the men of their own remaining after that. After the supervolcano winter ended, he got his kingdom back to something close to its pre-Catastrophe population within two generations.

A few centuries after Toba, Grandfather decided it was time for a big move. Grandfather was, for all his power, a fearful creature. Grandfather didn’t understand the Ice Age, he only knew that the world was cooling and drying and the process was continuing, unevenly and with reverses but in the grand scale consistently, for thousands and thousands of years. He was worried that the world was dying, that eventually the oceans would freeze and all the land would become a desert. And that frightened him, because if the world died Grandfather would die. How old was the world? How long would the world last? Grandfather didn’t know! And that scared him, because it meant that perhaps it was old in the way a seventy year old human is old, perhaps it was dying, and he did not know if it was possible to escape it before it died. And Toba shook him up, scared him. So Grandfather sent out scouts to survey the world a little. And then he abandoned the city he had ruled for so long, and moved his thralls in a great trek to the south, to a place on the banks of the great river that flowed through the valley that had become dry land as the Persian Gulf receded, and there his thralls built a new city, and they lived in the new city and he dwelled in it and ruled it. He hoped that if the cooling and drying of the world continued, this new city far to the south would remain viable for some time after his original homeland had become uninhabitable. And if the cooling and drying of the world in time threatened even this new city, from this new city it would be easy to move his people again, by boat this time, to somewhere on the coast of Africa, where it was warmer.

Then the other problem started. Not the decay of the world. The decay of Grandfather’s own body. It seemed that he did age, very slowly, and specifically as he aged his super-thrall ability was losing its potency.

Grandfather had the ability to sire new vampires, and he had sired some; in the age when human kingdoms still existed they had been useful as superweapons against his rival human “Grandfathers,” and he’d since killed most of those because he didn’t need them anymore but he still kept a few vampire lieutenants around and even made a new one every once in a while when one of the old ones got killed by something or died of old age (he’d lived long enough that this was starting to happen to his oldest vampire lieutenants). But the new vampires he sired always turned out much weaker than him. And none of them inherited his super-thrall ability. He figured that was probably because he was the first, the original host, and that gave him a special relationship with the thing that lived inside vampires and made them vampires. So a hierarchy of thralldom (some of his humans thralled to his lieutenants who were thralled to him) wasn’t going to fix this problem.

There was thrall-brainwashing, of course. He used it on his vampire lieutenants, and on humans who performed duties for them that made it impractical to supply them regularly with his blood. The slave-catchers Jarna encountered were thrall-brainwashed, and so were the personnel at the outposts she passed through, and so were the loggers he sent out to lands with an abundance of trees to bring wood back to his city by boat, and so were the traders he sent out on trading expeditions, and so were the foraging parties and fishermen he sent out to bring fish and meat back to his city to provide some supplementary meat and fish for his thralls and rich food for his own table. But thrall-brainwashing isn’t perfectly reliable. See what seems to be happening to Harriet in Glow, Worm. Oh, done well it’s mostly pretty reliable, but when a person lives as long as Grandfather they start to worry about even low-probability events. Grandfather didn’t completely trust thrall-brainwashing. He preferred the certainty of the blood thrall, which bound his slaves directly to his will.

The most straightforward solution was to shrink the population of his kingdom to fit into the new limits of his thrall ability. And he did that. As Grandfather’s thrall ability gradually weakened his city gradually shrank and shrank. By Jarna’s time, Grandfather’s city was a fraction of the size it had been when he first set up shop in the low valley that’s now the Persian Gulf.

He pursued another mitigation strategy too. He started selectively breeding his thralls for susceptibility to blood thrall. Much of this was simply breeding them to be docile and submissive and weak-willed. Much of what he did with them was actually an artificial acceleration of trends that had already been playing themselves out in human evolution for millions of years. There was a lot of overlap between the traits that would make a person compliant to the social order of a place like an ancient Sumerian royal cloth-manufacture workshop or a Medieval manorial estate or a modern public school and the traits that would make a person compliant to the social order of Grandfather’s city. A lot of Grandfather’s breeding program was accelerating the self-domestication humans were doing to themselves. The strange big but child-faced people Jarna was captured by were humans with extreme domestication syndrome, more extreme than that of modern people. Grandfather also started to breed his thralls for increased size and strength and reduced sexual dimorphism; since the population limit of his city was the limit of his thrall ability rather than food production, the increased value big strong people had as workers for him was worth the increase in the amount of food they needed. The big child-faced people Jarna saw were the result of tens of thousands of years of Grandfather’s breeding program; bred to have strong backs but weak minds. The slave-catching expeditions were partially about giving Grandfather interesting new genes to work with for his breeding program (Grandfather didn’t know about genes, but he knew about heredity).

Still, Grandfather was not satisfied with these solutions. Grandfather was a fearful and paranoid person, he worried about even small risks, perhaps because he lived so long; over tens of thousands of years even small risks added up. Grandfather knew the dangers associated with having a small and isolated community: Tasmania syndrome, genetic homogeneity creating vulnerability to disease, inbreeding, the fragility inherent to having all your eggs in one basket. The more his city shrank, the less safe Grandfather felt. A big community is a safe community, and a safe community would have meant a safe Grandfather. But the blood thrall was the only method of social control Grandfather really trusted. By Jarna’s time Grandfather had stripped the social hierarchy of his city down to a dreadfully simplified form. Grandfather’s city had no bureaucrats, no priests, no propagandists. Grandfather’s city had only one form of social control: thrall. And that meant the size of Grandfather’s city was strictly bounded by the limits of his thrall ability. Grandfather’s city could not grow.

Grandfather was tantalized by the idea of somehow siring a vampire who inherited his super-thrall ability. That was perhaps the central point of his slave-catching expeditions; he’d discovered the “bullshit vampire powers” effect and was hopeful that if he started with the right kind of human he might be able to sire a vampire with a super-thrall ability. He had diverse potential subjects to choose from. This was after the final out-of-Africa migration, but not that long after it, and before farmers spent ten thousand years displacing and assimilating everyone else; humans were considerably more physically diverse in this period than they are now. Many of the captives Grandfather’s slave-catching expeditions brought back weren’t Homo sapiens sapiens. Some of them weren’t even Homo sapiens. Until Jarna, all those experiments were failures. He almost always killed the vampires produced in these failed experiments (while they were under blood thrall to him, so they didn’t fight back). Grandfather was a fearful and paranoid person; even with blood thrall and thrall-brainwashing to control them, Grandfather didn’t like having too many other vampires around.

With Jarna, Grandfather finally hit the jackpot. When Jarna transitioned, she developed a super-thrall ability, similar to Grandfather’s but three times stronger than the one he had at the time. Grandfather thrall-brainwashed Jarna, resculpted her into a person who would be completely obedient to him, and then used her to control the rest of his thralls, and Grandfather kept Jarna secluded inside his house and near him, partly to keep her safe, but also partly so he could monitor her intensely to make sure the thrall-brainwashing wasn’t decaying and reinforce it if it was.

One of the first things Grandfather did when he felt secure in the new arrangement was to send many slave-takers out to bring captives to his city in much larger than usual numbers. With Jarna’s super-thrall, Grandfather would be able to triple the size of his kingdom, and he wanted to make that happen faster than natural increase of his existing thralls would allow. To capture more thralls, Grandfather sent out men with weapons, but he also sent out boats full of cloth woven by the women thralls in his workshops, and parties carrying big packs full of cloth and jewelry: trade goods. There were places in Jarna’s world where nature was rich enough that even without agriculture there could be societies with villages and chiefs and slaves, where slaves could simply be bought. Grandfather ordered the slave-takers to, as much as possible, bring back mostly fertile women. Fertile women were the new thralls he was particularly desirous of acquiring now: he planned to bind them with Jarna’s blood thrall and then make her order them to make many children with the men of the big child-faced people, and by doing so rapidly increase the numbers of his thralls without diluting the results of all the hard work that went into his breeding program too much. And when the slave-takers returned, bringing back mostly young women captives, that was what he did.

It took a generation or two to triple the size of Grandfather’s kingdom, bringing its size toward the limit of what Jarna could control with her super-thrall. Grandfather was pleased with the result. A big community was a safe community, and a safe community meant a safe Grandfather.

After that, Grandfather didn’t do very much for the next ten thousand years or so. He simply dwelled in his city, and gave orders, and existed, and his city did not change much. For the next ten thousand years or so life for Jarna mostly continued in a long-running routine, day after day, year after year, century after century, millennia after millennia.

In truth, Grandfather’s “city” was really more of a big agricultural village. Most of his thralls worked the fields; walked out to them in the morning and walked back from them in the evening. Long before, there had been satellite villages, with arrangements for regular deliveries of Grandfather’s blood to them, but they’d been abandoned as Grandfather’s super-thrall ability waned and he shrunk his kingdom to conform to its tightening limits. After agriculture, the next biggest pre-occupations of Grandfather’s city were textile manufacture and firewood acquisition. He had a huge workshop in his house where hundreds of thralled human women made cloth and clothing and rope; it was almost like a factory. It produced clothing for his thralls, and cloth for the sails of his ships, and so on, but it also produced cloth for trade. Cloth was the primary export of Grandfather’s city; Grandfather used it to buy things from human communities. More than anything else, the resource Grandfather had in abundance was labor, and his trading practices reflected that.

Jarna’s job was simple. Every morning and every evening most of Grandfather’s thralls would eat together in a huge communal dining hall. And during the evening meal Jarna would be there. And Jarna would be bled by a few of Grandfather’s thralls, using a technique similar to the one the Maasai use to bleed cattle. And there would be a huge pot of soup, and Jarna’s blood would be added to the soup and mixed into it, and then the soup would be served out to the thralls, and the thralls would eat it. And Jarna’s blood would put them in blood thrall to her until their next dose the next evening, which would be given to them the same way. It wasn’t a very intimate kind of thrall; Jarna’s brain wouldn’t have been able to handle all the input if it was. It mostly manifested as the thralls simply being obedient. While most of the humans ate, Jarna was given a series of humans to drink from to restore the blood and strength she’d lost (her donors got a special dose of her blood beforehand). After the meal Jarna would give the thralls broad instructions for the rest of the night and the next day, and tell them to obey Grandfather and his lieutenants and the humans Grandfather had selected as supervisors. And while she did that she’d press into their minds certain attitudes and ideas; Grandfather was their god, they existed to be instruments of his will and to satisfy his desires, other authority figures were legitimate insofar as they were extensions of his will and sought to satisfy his desires, and so on.

A petty reason Grandfather was pleased to have Jarna was it meant he wouldn’t have to be bled regularly. He disliked being bled regularly, and he was happy that now being bled regularly was outsourced to Jarna. Jarna understood why he disliked it. She disliked it too. She could feel that losing all that blood every day

It’s not a perfect analogy, but I think this post about owls would be good inspiration/reference for a “it’s a real organism, not a horror movie monster” take on Blindsight vampire behavior, and I’m definitely taking notes for my fanfic.

- The point about lower metabolism is a big one. Canonically, the most extreme and weirdest adaptations vampires have are about lowering their metabolic rate so they need less of that protein ancient vampires needed to get from eating people. It would make sense if their behavior is also very oriented toward keeping their metabolism as low as possible. So I think Blindsight vampires would be very lazy creatures, kind of like cats, and for similar reasons.

I think the different priorities this implies might explain a lot of the vampires being less conscious thing. Humans are smart omnivores and as a result of being smart and omnivorous we’re relatively food-secure by animal standards; we have surplus energy and surplus brain-power to play with, and we invest it in socialization and play (categories which, broadly defined, include activities like art, religion, science, philosophy, politics, and non-reproductive sexuality); we’re an energetic species with high enrichment needs. Vampires are smart but evolved for a much less nutrition-secure ecological niche, so they’re much more concerned with conserving their energy and have lower metabolisms, so they have different relationships with socialization, play, sexuality, and food. A vampire is never bored; they know exactly what to do with idle time: sleep. A vampire would never make a cave painting or carve a knife’s handle into the shape of a lion; they’d much rather take a nap.

I think it’d be very on-brand if vampires can do very shallow open-eye sleep like cats and spend much of their lives in that state.

Kind of funny to think about this in the concept of Blindsight’s cyberpunk dystopia sort of setting. Like, you know some corporate person is going to hear the basics of what vampires are like (more intelligent, less social, less conscious) and think “perfect worker who can be kept in a cell and made to write code or something for 15 hours a day,” but oh boy, they would not work like that. I mean, the cell part is right, they’d have very low enrichment needs compared to humans, but the tireless drone part would be so wrong. They evolved as food-insecure ambush predators of slow-breeding dangerous prey, that means short bursts of intense activity punctuating long periods of relative inactivity. Working long and hard is for seed eaters! Funny to imagine some rich corporate type needing to have this explained to them after angrily complaining that the vampire they were sold is a total slacker who spends literally twenty hours a day in bed.

Handshake meme of vampires and ADHD people shaking hands on “getting everything done in the last three hours before the deadline.”

- “Owls see with their ears, not their eyes” - not a perfect parallel to vampires, but for the fanfic I’m definitely going with the interpretation that vampires “see” with their ears and nose much more than humans do.

- “An owl is also an ambush hunter rather than pursuit, every part of their instinctual wiring is geared to ensure they are not seen. If they are not seen and if they are not heard, they are safe, and they can be fed and they can relax in their invisibility. … Owls are more complex because the idea of being paraded in front of a crowd of humans or hunting game your noisy feet will scare away are very disagreeable to the owl for good reason.”

THIS!

If you were a vampire in the ancestral environment, the most dangerous thing to be around would be a vampire not of your family/band, and the second most dangerous thing to be around would be a group of humans. Humans would be a terrifying species to have as an obligate prey item: we’re smart, we make and use weapons, we work in groups, and we hold grudges. I think logically vampire instincts would reflect this; they would instinctively want to hide from humans, and being in a room with a group of humans and no easy escape or in a crowd of humans would be a disagreeable experience to a vampire.

I think, given their highly sensitive senses and greater sensory processing requirements, vampires might also be vulnerable to sensory overload.

Going by this model, being in a bar and on crowded city streets was probably a pretty disagreeable experience for Valerie: lots of noise, lots of lights and movement, lots of humans, no easy concealment or escape.

I think there’s a lot of experiences vampires and autistic people might handshake meme on.

(I think it’d be very on-brand if vampires intuitively perceive eye contact as a threat display and do not like it).

I think it’d make a lot of sense if vampires are actually pretty nervous/fearful creatures, but it isn’t obvious to humans because they don’t express fear and distress the way a human would; they have very little fawn response, it’s mostly freeze/hide, flight, or fight with them; a vampire panic attack or sensory overstimulation melt-down is externally expressed as flight, hiding, or extreme aggression.

Basically:

“All of this is what makes owls incredibly unethical to keep as pets. … An owl is a wild animal misunderstood even by self-proclaimed experts and many of us in the field are only just recently actually seeing them. There are so many misconceptions about owls that lead to them being abused and traumatized by being treated by something they aren’t. … In many ways, an owl is very much a wise animal because they devote all their time to silently observing. What people mistake as the bird simply “zoning out” is actually the bird analyzing everything it’s hearing and seeing. They don’t need to look around to observe, their ears see even more than their very keen eyes. They make silent note of everything you do in their presence, and if you misstep and cross them, they will remember it.”

Yeah, that vibe.

Which, y'know, it is kind of interesting to think of Blindsight through the lens of, like…

OK, per this model, Jukka is a being who puts a high priority on conserving his energy, and who might experience a lot of built-for-humans environments as overtaxing his sensory processing resources.

Seems like the sort of being who might find that “Scramblers interpreted human signals as hostility because a lot of our conversations are about ‘useless’ non-survival-related stuff and Scramblers could only interpret that as an attempt to make them waste computational resources trying to analyze nonsense” idea truthy. He wouldn’t be the first neuroatypical person to project his own experiences onto the alien.

Crazy fanfic Idea for later

Power Rangers Mystic Force crossover with RWBY.

Jaune and Saphron are from another world, escaped with the morphing gems.

Saphron is the badass boss/ Sun Knight Mage

Jaune is helping her search for new Rangers. Moon Knight Mage

Powers are based on old legends and elements. Zords are referred to as ‘Titan Zords’

Nora ➡️ Thunder Fairy Mage

Ren ➡️ Wind Dragon Mage

Oscar/Oz ➡️ Forest Dryad Mage

hear me out (pt. 3)

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bodyguard!zuko x celebrity! katara

bodyguard! au where katara tries to run away from her bodyguard at any opportunity until she doesn’t want to run away at all

caty-catts:

hear me out (pt. 2)

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spy/agent! toph x shop worker! aang

(aaand probably some sort of plot twist, like toph is going undercover and uses the ‘innocent helpless blind girl’ disguise while aang is himself part of some illegal business or organization that uses the shop as a disguise)

(I just developed a whole plot around this, sorry)

(also, it’s some sort of modern with powers! au)

so. toph is probably sent to check up on the strange actions around the area of shop. such a nice worker there clearly puts her on edge. she wavers between believing his nice (almost too nice) demeanor and just stalk him to clear things up.

aang as a person who is somewhat undercover himself but worked quite a bit in the shop is on guard with the new face in the neighborhood, even if it is some blind harmless girl.

but story gets further, clues piles up, inconsistencies show up. there would be scene like this:

(they accidentally catch each other doing something probably illegal)

toph: *stares in his direction*

aang: *stares at toph*

toph: oh for fuck’s sake, twinkle toes

only after this they start to become closer (they were not even friends before that) and probably somewhat in the process one of them catches feeling

hear me out (pt. 2)

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spy/agent! toph x shop worker! aang

(aaand probably some sort of plot twist, like toph is going undercover and uses the ‘innocent helpless blind girl’ disguise while aang is himself part of some illegal business or organization that uses the shop as a disguise)

hear me out

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surfer!zukoxlifeguard!katara

None of the ghosts were able to attend their own funerals because they wouldn’t have been held on the grounds. Perhaps Kitty and Fanny could have witnessed their wakes or after funeral gatherings but that’s it. None have seen their own graves(apart from the plague pit). Kitty, Thomas, Fanny, The Captain, Pat & Julian have gravestones out there somewhere.

Wouldn’t it be sweet to have Alison and Mike do some research and travel to their graves to take photographs so they can come back home to show the ghosts where they are buried.

Robin’s body was probably dragged off somewhere by a bear and most of Mary would have been consumed by fire and incinerated so no burials for those two sadly.

Of all of them, Fanny would be the most curious to see what epitaph her family made for her and if it looks regal and dignified enough.

At first I thought The Captain being an army officer during the war meant he would be buried along side them but since he died most likely AFTER the war was over, maybe not. It’s possible he was taken to be buried elsewhere if he had relatives that would claim him. That might have pained him somewhat because I think he felt the most comfortable in the army. We never hear him talk about anything else. No childhood memories or family. Clearly the army was his tribe.

#weirdthingsyouthinkaboutwhenyouresupposetobeworking