The Harbinger Report T-Minus 2 Days

Welcome to the Harbinger Report.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwwpqAOXF57ZYnVZb3hyTTJFdWc

Fictional Revelations: October 2017

This is Fictional Revelations, a half assed attempt at a podcast, hosted by Professor Harbinger and Captain Slithery. Here we talk about stories and myth and tropes. This month: Halloween and Scary Movies and Awesome, Dear Boy!

Listen to the Podcast

 

Note: The link may not be working. I will split it into smaller files shortly.

A closer look at the Wendigo

All monsters begin as something mundane. The fractal begins with simple rules, and then spirals out into something more, and sometimes, something much worse. The origins of the Giants are unknown to the Psychonauts, but the origins of the Wendigo are not. The Wendigo were once human.  

The Wendigo are what happens when the hunger of the Grey Locust is left wild and uncontained by the Locust King and the constraints that the Grey places upon the Hungry Empire in an attempt to maintain its cold order.   

The hunger drives them, and in the early stages they still seem human.  

The Stillborn  

From a distance, one might mistake the Stillborn for people. Up close, the mistake is unlikely. The Stillborn's skill has gone white and chalky, and clouds of dry skin cells explode around them with sudden movements. Their eyes have gone milky blue-white and the skin has tightened all across the face to give the eyes a sunken look. The Stillborn's hair has bleached to translucent silver and seems to defy gravity, floating about the skull like an unholy halo.   

The Stillborn still speak, but their language is unintelligible to any non-wendigo. They have their own culture and mythology, those none who understand it are able to transmit it back to those who still understand human speech. The path to hunger is nearly always a one way journey.   

The Hungry Ghost  

As the body is consumed by the hunger, the Stillborn go from emaciated to truly skeletal, with skin stretched so tightly of bone and sinew that they could be mistaken for desiccated corpses if they choose to remain still. The teeth sharpen and elongate and the eyes decompose completely in the head, replaced by cold blue lights. At this point, the Wendigo is known as a Hungry Ghost. The Hungry Ghost, like the Stillborn army, still physically eat. However, they no longer attempt to cook their food, and seem unable to digest it- as the food sits inside their huge distended bellies.   

The Ravener  

The final state of deterioration. The Wendigo's head is now a skull with glowing eyes, resembling nothing so much as the terrible love child of an elk and a bear. Carnivores teeth poke out of a herbivore's jaw. A predator's eyes sit uneasy in the skull of a prey animal. What skin remains is ragged and wispy and flutters in the slightest breeze. The Ravener is an animate skeleton that glows with a cold blue light. The body of the skeleton too is twisted, elongated and ape-like, but with the hooves of an ungulate, the ribcage and fore paws of a polar bear, and bizarre protrusions extending from the individual vertebra of the spinal column.      

The Recurrence of the Tower

Whether its the Tower of Retribution in Berserk or Kami's Watch Tower in Dragon Ball, The Tower of Babel in Ancient myth or the New Tower of Babel in the film Metropolis, The Dark Tower quoted in King Lear or the Dark Tower in the works of Stephen King; no matter the form of the story, epic tales grow towers like damp houses grow mold.

 

The Inverse Mentalism Principle

Hermetic Principle 1 - Mentalism
“Everything is mental; the Universe is a mental creation of the All.”
~ The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus

This is of course vastly inaccurate. Universe is entirely physical, and the mind, which is to say the mental Dimension, arises out of the physical. But all human interaction with the physical is entirely bounded by the mental. Everything is not mental in nature, but we cannot interact with the universe without pretending that it is.

Through magic we play with the universe, lying to ourselves so that we can use those lies as a useful way to interact with the vast mystery outside of our comprehension.

The Leviathan

The Fading Lake and the Drowned City are not deep bodies of water for the most part, but there are deep parts. And in those areas, sink holes and trenches, buried caverns formed of sunken bits of a long past golden; here the Leviathan makes its nest.

Most of the time, the Leviathan is content to remain hidden beneath the waves, feeding upon whatever has left the scars in its mutilated hide. Most of the time. Some of the time, the great giant sea monster explodes up to the surface and devours settlements on the Coast. Like the Behemoth, the Leviathan is singular. There is no more than one to bear the name. Unlike the Behemoth, the Leviathan is predatory, and those sentient beings that it devours it certainly does not devour by accident.

Unlike the Behemoth, there are not structures on the back of Leviathan that the Psychonauts might plunder. But when the Leviathan is active, the ancient underwater tunnels and structures where it normally sleeps are open for exploration by the bold and near suicidal. But psychonauts should be wary. The Leviathan got its scars somewhere.

The Paradox of Forrest Gump

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotHoudini

In TvTropes archives, under the section for "Idiot Houdini" we have this entry:

"Forrest Gump... ...He fumbles and stumbles through life pursuing on a whim whatever seems like a good idea at the time, yet nothing he ever does throughout the film leads to negative consequences for him."

I have to disagree with it. A great deal does go wrong for Forrest. He meets with great success and great tragedy. He is violently bullied as a child. Loses a close friend in combat in Vietnam. Has a difficult and troubled relationship with the woman he loves, which often places him in violent and dangerous situations. Loses his wife to illness and has to raise his son alone.

I want the reader to pause for a moment and imagine this life again, but told through different eyes. Your childhood friend and pseudo-sweetheart is sent into foster care because her father is sexually abusive. She is expelled for posing in Playboy, and ends up bouncing from bad situation to bad situation. You do well in College playing football, and would probably drafted to the NFL, but are instead drafted into Vietnam. There much of your squad is massacred, including your closest friend. You manage to save some of your squad and your commanding officer- but he ends up crippled and traumatized with PTSD and caustically blaming you because he wanted to die. You find a talent for table tennis and are used by the military as a political show piece. You eventually do meet your childhood sweetheart and marry her, only to discover she has a terminal illness and you have a son you'd never met before. Also this happens around the time your mother dies. Keep in mind you never knew your father. Through luck and circumstance, you made it rich due to a natural disaster; another case where, like in Vietnam, you were rewards while those around you suffered.

Told through any other eyes, the tale of the life of Forrest Gump would be a tragedy on a scale with "The Great Gatsby" or "Citizen Kane". The Key difference here, is Gump's perspective. Now, we know that Forrest Gump is cognitively disabled to a certain degree. But, and this is key, so does he.

Two key points in the film make that clear. The first is his declaration to Jenny that "I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is." The Second is his fear, upon meeting his son, that Forrest Jr. may share his disability: "He's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen but is he smart or is he - (Places hand on chest).."

Forrest is not smart, but he is self aware. The deaths of Bubba, and Jenny and his mother all show that he is not incapable of experiencing sadness or despair. His generosity to Bubba's mother, and Lieutenant Dan, and his bulldozing of jenny's childhood house show his understanding of the troubles of other and of his empathy and compassion.

Forrest could easily have fallen to the same despair that afflicted Dan and Jenny. He had the capacity, the film makes that clear if we look- he chose not to do so. And in so doing he lifted up and redeemed those around him, Dan and Jenny in particular.

Forrest Gump isn't some idealist who believes unflinchingly in some divine plan, as evidenced by this quote:

"I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floatin' around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it's both."

Forrest isn't an Idiot Houdini in this film, he's an anti-nihilist. And just maybe, he's a living Buddha.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheAntiNihilist

The Behemoth

The largest Thing to walk upon the Wastelands; the Behemoth is, like the Leviathan and the Sentinel but unlike the Watchers and Trolls and Colossi, singular in existence. Psychonauts who have studied the Behemoth are uncertain whether the behemoth has always been singular or whether the great beast is the last of some monster species.

The Vast majority of the Behemoth's time is spent sleeping in the southern wastes. The Behemoth sleeps so long that dust will cover much of the giant's flanks and scrub grass and tumbleweeds will seed and take root. The Behemoth does not sleep long enough for cities to spring up, but upon each waking Psychonauts have observed a hut or ruined tower or two upon the back of the Giant. Because of their location, the story inevitably places things of great note or merit in these structures and brave Psychonauts will frequently attempt to climb the behemoth and explore the structures.

When the Behemeoth awakens, it feeds. The Behemoth is an omnivore, although seemingly by accident. The great giant lumbers across the landscape and grazing by devouring whole hillsides as it literally bites the tops of hills and mountaintops alike. It can devour whole camps or settlements this way, though most scholars agree that this is almost certainly accidental.

To the Scavenger Folk, the waking time of the Behemoth is a time of dangerous omens and ill portents, not the least of which because the Behemoth could simply decide to sit on a Scavenger Camp without noticing that it had done so.

Bread and Circuses

I am watching the videogame industry. As a child of the 80's, this is second nature to me. I consider entertainment industries such as this one to be canaries in our collective coal mine. I have been watching as the video game industry has transformed itself from a group of salesman selling a product, into a group of drug dealers selling an addiction by withholding most of the products they sell until you are addicted. I've been watching the creeping invasion of privacy perpetrated by both video games and social media. And I've been comparing the two trends. If any of you have played any of the Whit Wolf 'Mage' games, or if you have read any of the literature written by Daniel Quinn, you should have a sense of understanding the idea that our world is a collection of stories. And that the world ends when the stories cease to be coherent, when people cease to believe and tell the story. What a story ceases to be fulfilling, but when it is still providing a certain amount of support for the populace, those studying the culture attached to the story tend to notice arise in distractive entertainment. Sports and media become more involved and more all consuming. I need to distract and divert the general populace becomes a primary concern of those in power. When those in power start to lose the tools by which they can enforce compliance from the general populace, we start to see surveillance as a norm. Whenever there is a breakthrough in the capabilities of the general populace, we can expect a counterpunch, a push back, from those in power. In other words, the spell cast upon the general populace by the current Global Elite is shuddering and faltering. Those currently in power are now at risk of being unseated, by whoever waits in the wings to be the next Elite. And this is a dangerous time for all parties. The bear is wounded. The bear is cornered. The bear is dying. But the bear is not dead and it can kill you as it thrashes about.

The Question of the treaty

The tribes and clans of wild folk and the green peoples will nearly all speak of the treaty if question about law by a psychonaut. Any one of these folk or people may give the treaty and the Psychonaut's lack of adherence to it as a reason for not speaking with or assisting the psychonaut. A member of the treaty peoples might explain it briefly if pressed. Such an explanation would likely point out that the wild folk contains both predator and prey and that even those amongst the wild Folk who are prey themselves do in fact prey upon the green peoples. The treaty is the agreement whereby the tribes and clans of green peoples and wild folk might deal honorably with one another while still allowing room for natural predation. A fox will hunt a grouse. A goat will feed upon the bushes of many species. But despite this, through adherence to the treaty, goat folk may trade with fox folk and berry persons. The Psychonauts will naturally wonder; may they sign the treaty? And Yes, they may, if they have passed the initiation and endeared the rites of passage and earned the right to call themselves warriors under the Freepath. And foremost Psychonauts fresh to the foglands, is the primary goal.

A brief Snapshot of the Foglands

The Foglands is an eerie place for new arrivals to experience. The concrete hard sand dunes and broken rocky ground have been desaturated by some earlier tragedy and most of the landscape is the weird monochrome of a 1950s television broadcast. The sky, by contrast is a toxic looking bloody orange by day, and a deeper near opaque orange black at night- marked by a hallowe'en orange moon. The brackish lakes and inland seas are nearly all a rusty orange from the oxidizing metal and salt content of the water. Grey and Orange. Monochrome and and garish contrast. The visuals along are enough to make some new arrivals lose what lunch they brought with them for the incursion.

The Four have a discussion

Into the void a cold tenor voice rang out like, ice field splitting across the horizon, "This is the story of us."

A second, distinctly motherly voice wreathed in an echoing chorus interrupted "And them. Don't forget that."

A third wet voice that seemed to thrum rather than speak add, "She means you, the reader."

"They may be listeners." Added a voice that echoed like a sermon in a sunken cathedral.

"In any event," The first cold voice said, regaining control of the narrative, "This is the story of us, and how our story is your story."

The motherly voice continued, "This is the story of how we made you."

"And how you then returned the favor, " the third voice thrummed.

"And this is the story of paradox of those words is the key to understanding your importance to the story." The Cathedral voice added.

"Because the story is where we live," The motherly voice said.

"And where we will find ourselves once we die," The cold voice concluded.

"And where you find us now." The Cathedral voice added.

"I'm trying to set up the story," The Cold voice objected, "You are ruining the mood."

"I am explaining important information," The cathedral voice insisted.

"You're just going to confuse them," the motherly voice said.

"Then I'm doing my job," The Cathedral voice answered.

"May we get on with this, please?" The Cold voice said.

"Yes," Said the Motherly voice," Our readers may be growing bored."

"Our Listeners." The Cathedral voice.

"Our audience," The Cold Voice said, "And while we waste time, our audience is dying."

Shadows and Artifacts

Objects in the shadowlands are not stable. Things collected in one incursion will not be retained into the next incursion unless they are attuned to the psychonaut's avatar. Things that can be attuned include artifacts, spells, watchtower links, realm keys, sparks and such. Any normal bits and pieces found in the shadowlands will fade upon departure from the shadowlands.

Fading Lake Regional Locations: The Witch Hut

The Witch Hut

A traditionally Forboding hut sits on the edge of the Fading lake, standing on low stilts to appear to float in the water when the lake is high. A Witch is always present in the Witch Hut. Which one is present will vary, although the Witch will rarely be a named Archetype, and will rarely admit a definitive identity- least of all to a green Psychonaut not worth her (or more rarely his) time.

Playtesting the Foglands

My Intrepid band of Psychonauts have run our first play test of the foglands. Entering the fog lamps true the gate room in the ring, but without any activated watchtowers, they ended up at the altar Stone plinth.

There they encountered the Colossus Giant, and our three Psychonauts disagreed on whether or not one could communicate with a Colossus. Much Amusement was had, and no Psychonauts were harmed in the making of this joke. And certainly no Psychonauts were eaten by Giants.

Two Psychonauts went scurrying through junkyard tunnels aided by one of the wildfolk, an intelligent badger who gave his name as... ...badger. within the tunnels, they ran afoul of a giant Ghostly monstrosity which looks vaguely like a caterpillar built of human parts and wearing a small faceless mask; which they took with them after Escaping The Thing.

the third psychonaut not decided it was more productive to bait and taunt the Giants until by a series of improbable successes he ended up with a parachute and a corpse of another psychonaut riding one of the winged Watcher Giants to the temples and shrines surrounding the Screaming Stone.

The area around the screaming Stone was populated by the hungry and agitated troll Giants. Here the Psychonauts briefly reunited before the more adventurous psychonaut acted as a distraction to draw off the trolls well the other two Ren two and attuned to themselves to the Watchtower at the head of the Totem Wastes.

Their goal achieved, the distracting psychonaut used the mask taken earlier to drive away the trolls and the play test ended in Victory.

The Fisher King Spider, The Deep Water Spider, The Eye Spider

A Bright painted spider with an elongated abdomen and which sports, instead of a cephalothorax, a miniature carapace shaped like an eyeless human skull. Mandible protrude from the front of the thorac, where the skull would have teeth. And in place of a cranium, the carapace fascimile skull sports a human-like eye swivelling in a bizarre ball socket.

The Fisher King Spider is a creature like Falsenight, stolen from and built by the Locust King from a piece of an ancient Elder- one of the Three. In this case, a stolen eye from the Weaver.

Unlike other mythic creations of the False King, the Eye Spider is not a large monstrosity. The Spiders that form its temporal bodies in the Shadowlands are only slightly larger than a typical hunting spider, smaller than a tarantula or camel spider certainly. The Deep Water Spider is not any spider however, and creates many avatars in the Shadowlands- an army of quietly watching bodies.

The Eye Spider is paranoia and surveillance and the chilling effect that such surveillance has upon creativity in creating the story.

The Eye Spider makes webs out of stagnant or polluted water and travels along its webs and only along its webs. but it can allow the web to disperse and 'surf' along drops of water or within (or upon) any stagnant or polluted body of water- as these things are all implicitly its web as well.

The Eye Spider can cast a charged line of water to strike the skin of a denizen, and thereby influence what they see, changing their perception of the Shadowlands.

Due to the Deep Water Spider's movement limitations, it is at its most powerful in the Foglands and nearly as powerful in the Mirrored City, and virtually powerless in Arcadia and The Painted Labyrinth, and completely powerless in Hollow Heart.

Wastelands Regional Location: The Fading Lake

The Fading Lake

The Fading Lake is a brackish lake whose water line rises and falls with mysterious apparently non-tidal rhythms. The Fading Lake harbors secrets beneath the silty bottom, but Psychonauts will be hard pressed to explore those secrets without impressive preparations. Some experienced Psychonauts have claimed that beneath the silt is a half flooded temple from the time of the Mirrored City, whose machinery still runs. They further claim that the turning of these ancient clockworks is what causes the waters of the lake to rise or fall. Other experienced Psychonauts who have sought to prove or disprove this claim have failed to return to the Foglands for later incursions.

Wastelands Region Location: The Haypenny Camp

The Haypenny Camp

The chief competitor to the Salt Market, the Haypenny camp is cleaner and tidier, but also smaller and less well stocked that its more famous Plateau based competition. The Haypenny camp is also nearly half settlement if one looks purely at the number of tents, and sacred hospitality is practised in both the Open Market and the Old Camp. The people of the Haypenny Camp are not free peoples, but no Stillborn Army or Hungry Empire either. They sit in between, balancing on the blade of rusted straight razor, trying to survive on the business provided chiefly by newly arrived Psychonauts.

The genre savvy Psychonaut will quickly realize that the Open Market operates as the starter shop and the Old Camp functions as the first hub village for Psychonauts making incursions into the Foglands.

Leviathan's Elephant

There is a glaring problem with the logic of Thomas Hobbes; which posits that we are all brutish self-interested thugs who would kill our mother for a penny, and so need an absolute government to keep us in check. The problem is simple. If we are all thugs, and need a government with absolute power to control us, we will then have given absolute power to a group of thugs.

Wastelands Region: The Womb

The Womb

A collection of natural limestone caves twist beneath the the heart of the wastelands. Expanded by unknown denizens, stalagmites sculpted into strange humanoid forms and new passage way added and small corridors expanded to accomodate foot traffic. In some places, unknown visitors have placed altars and shrines and statues of sacred beings, and time has allowed the limestone to partially encase them in stalagmites and sometimes full limestone columns. The Womb is now a dangerous set of labyrinths used by many denizens as a place to conduct rites of passage and ritual vision quests. Bioluminescent fungi and airborne spores dimly light different areas of the caves with strange iridescent raninbow lights. But beyond the light lurk monsters, including the occasional chimera- suggesting a link between the Womb and the Painted Labyrinth.

Some interesting Castlevania

"Castlevania Rises from the Grave". I found this while browsing.  Have a look.

http://www.denofgeek.com/us/games/castlevania/267827/castlevania-rises-from-the-grave

Sam Vimes on Socioeconomics

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. 

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

Altar Stone Regional Locations: The Screaming Stone

The Screaming Stone

To the East of the Altar Stone Plinth is Screaming Stone. One of three truly enormous humanoid statues (the other two being the Weeping Stone and the Thinking Stone), The Screaming Stone looms above the landscape and stands over three times as large as the largest Giant. The Three Great Stones are hollow structures, though still impossibly heavy and monolithic. Psychonauts could disappear into one of the Great Stones and wander for months, and that's before they discover the vast tunnels underneath each stone monster. The open maw of the Screaming Stone is a massive viewing platform, from which one can view the landscape for miles in any direction and which is a good place to get an early glimpse of the Plateau.

Redundancy

I have read multiple times in multiple sources that people don't do the things they love because of fear.

And these same sources, most commonly self-help books, seem to assume that this fear is unfounded and the only thing holding people back.

But the truth is, that so many people are fearful because their livelyhood is dependent upon a single source of income over which they have little control. Their fear is frequently justified. If they fail, they stand to lose their means of making ends meet.

The fear stems from the fact that the cost of failure is very high. And the cost of failure is very high because, not only do they have no redunancy should their current system fail, but they also have very limited control over whether their current system succeeds or fails. Downsizing happens every day.

Altar Stone Regional Locations: The Altar Stone Plinth

The Altar Stone Plinth

Psychonauts who find the first gate key will inevitably end up in region of the Altar Stone Plinth upon their first use of the Foglands Gate. The Plint itself is a massive stone, carved as though to be a base to hold some larger statue or vase. The Plinth is as large as a human temple, and the top shows scraping and wearing that is visible on to those tall enough to see the top or brave enough to scale a structure considered sacred to the Giants. What, if anything previously sat upon the plinth is unknown, but the Giants are entirely too willing to place dead psychonauts there as offerings or leave live Psychonauts there- presumably to die of exposure (although their actual motive is a mystery).

Around the Plinth are a collection of stone barrows and dolmen built from large standing stone placed by the giants and then modified by smaller denizens into burial grounds and holy places, hiding holes and ad hoc housing. Psychonauts will find many secrets in these structures and many denizens- friendly, neutral and hostile.

After much exploration, Psychonauts have discovered that a series of more impressive Dolmen, which are connected by a series of underground corridors, are associated with key stars in the Northern night sky. Interestingly, the sub locations in the Step Pyramid region have similar references to key stars in the Southern night sky.

With us or Against us

Here's a great lie and a great secret. This is perhaps the most important secret of the Hungry Empire, certainly it is the most important secret of the Men of Black and White.

They want you to believe, as heroes are often told in tales, that if you are not one of us, you are one of them. They want you to believe that that whole of the sleeping Flock and all of the Stillborn Army are Men of Black and White in waiting- ready to pounce or betray at a moments notice. They want you believe that only you few who are already awakened are on your side in the fight.

They want you to feel alone and isolated. They want you to feel as though the vast unawakened majority are a vast ocean through which they can swim and through which we must fight.

They are wrong.

We need Villains!

Mad Scientists are often yelling from their secret lairs that "they'll show them all!" Well that's because most of us went to the WRONG SCHOOLS!

We went to schools that told us to sit down and shut up. To get a safe job and not make waves. We went to schools designed to turn us into bystanders, into Godfearing bloody NPCs!

Well, I won't have it! We deserve better! the World deserves better! ALL WORLDS DESERVE BETTER!

Heros want bystanders to save. Leaders want followers to rule. Well, I SAY IT'S TIME TO GIVE THESE ARROGANT PRICKS SOME VILLAINS to CONTEND WITH!

Wastelands Locations: The Altar Stone Region

The Altar Stone

The area of the Wasteland known collectively as the Altar Stone or Altar Stones is a collection of statues and standing stones that radiate out from a central point. The area is apparently sacred to the Giants, as Psychonauts who journey there will find that the area always has a few such visitors. The Giants will prostrate themselves before the enormous humanoid statues, and will leave offerings. Psychonauts should be wary near the Altar Stones, as the Giants visiting the stones are more animated than normal and an unwary Psychonaut may find themselves beaten to death against a rock and then gently placed before one of the stones as an offering from some devout Giant.

Speculation on the relationship between the Giants and the Stones has gone on for as long as both have been known to exist. Some scholars speculate that the humanoid apeparing statues are in fact dead or hibernating Giants. Other vocies have suggested that these are simply altars to whatever gods the Giants worship. Experienced Psychonauts have noted that first time visitors to the Foglands always find themselves deposited in the region of the Altar Stones, and have suggested that the Giant might revere the area itself as a bringer of food. The suggestion being that the giants subsequently built the Altar Stones around the region where unready and easily captured meals appeared with satisfying regularity. Whatever the reason, the Giants aren't telling and certainly aren't going away.

The Altar Stone region is filled with secret rooms and hidden tunnels and labyrinths. Experienced Psychonauts do incursions to explore the Altar Stones frequently. For first time visitors to the Foglands, the Altar Stones are a dangerous place filled with practically unkillable very hungry Giants and ancient death traps that stubbornly refuse to rust or malfunction. The area is confusing and maze-like, with huge stones and statues forming twisting labyrinthine tunnels and troughs in the landscape that the psychonauts must navigate carefully to escape with their limbs intact.

A very very Short and Thoroughly Incomplete List of Locations in Arcadia

• The Village
• The Cematary
• The Lake
• The Mountain
• The Forest
• The Plains
• The Coastline

The Song of All

Nothing begins because nothing ends. Before we were, our parents were. Before our people were, there was an older people. Before humans were, there were other species. Before life was, the earth was. Before the Earth was, the sun was. And so it goes back. But it never reaches silence, and it never reaches a beginning.

Because, before this universe, this song of one existed, there was something else and something more. We cannot see or hear beyond the boundaries of this song- but we know that there is more. We know that there are other songs. Before and beyond the bounds of the one song there is all songs.

But we do not know what that is. And so we can say all this simply.

In the beginning there was Mystery, because nothing really begins and nothing every really ends.

This does not explain things, but it allows us to sing our song, our one song. And this is all we can do. We are bounded by the notes and verses of our song, we sing the lyrics and make it real. We are all so very tiny against the vastness of our one song, that even contemplating it is too much for us, but every one of us sings that song and every one of us is part of the performance. Some parts are larger, but all parts are so very very small- and yet, despite all this, every part is required. Every portion essential to the whole.

And so we sing.

In the beginning there was Mystery, because nothing really begins and nothing every really ends.

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An Abridged list of Locations in the Mirrored City

The City

• The Ward of Gildguld
• The Ward of Mitchuas
• The Ward of Gaibrus
• The Ward of Zeudin Vashas
• The Ward of Lamris
• The Ward of Friedites
• The Ward of Valstaris
• The Ward of Xerfer

The Lef River

• The Northern Waters of Gongin
• The Southern Waters of Lamlex
  

The Frontier Lands

• The Mountain Stronghold
• The Frozen Plains
• The Windswept Plains
• Strongiron Village
• The Living Forest
• The Second Forest

What I can use

I have come to the conclusion that although life doesn't always give me what I want or even what I need, it will always give me something I can use.

Brave New Titans

I don't watch Attack on Titan. And to my knowledge there been no big news regarding the anime/manga sensation. I could be wrong, but have no interest in checking to see.

What I do have is an interest in the Descartes narrative. The conspiracy narrative tells us that we love in a prison and like the rabbit farm in 'Watership Down', we not only don't k ow that we are imprisoned- we don't want to know. The 'Deus Ex' series posits the possibility that we may even be complicit, drones or even enforcers in the machine of oppression.

And this narrative is no longer a rare and curious outlier. This is the biggest selling concept in teen lit short of sexing up sexy hundred year old vampires inexplicably still into teenaged girls.

This is an action movie stable. Even the standard bearer for the good company man: James Bond, has a penchant for going outright rogue now.

What is going on here? What is everyone feeling? The since everyone seems to have is that '1984' and 'Brave New World' both happened and nobody noticed.

And each group describes their own villains. Liberal see a right-wing conspiracy. Conserve dipsea left-wing conspiracy. Atheists see a theocratic conspiracy. Religious conservatives see a secular conspiracy.

It seems unlikely that all of them are correct. The conspiracies overlap and conflict to such a degree but it seems simpler to dismiss them. But it seems unwise to dismiss such a strong Trend in public thought.

I believe it was Alan Moore, the comic book Legend, Who posited multiple conflicting conspiracies all fighting against each other. And this seems more plausible explanation. But there's another option, what if there is no conspiracy?

What if the thing that people are mischaracterizing as a conspiracy is simply the cold mechanistic workings of the complicated systems we have built over the last two thousand years of civilization? What if we put ourselves in the Box? What if we conspire against ourselves? What if we are them?

A Brief and Incomplete list of Locations in the Ring

The Threshold

The Lotus Garden

• Village Region
• Graveyard Region
• Lake Shrine Region
• Dark Mountain Region
• Bone Forest Region
• Great Plains Region
• Coastal Seas Region
• Bridge to Stellar House
• Bridge to Void House
• Bridge to Gate Room
• Bridge to the Threshold

Void House

Stellar House

The Gate Room

• The Front Room
• The Back Room

Rainbows

Hardest question in the world to answer.

But it's not about what makes you happy.

Happy a trap

happy is a distraction

Happy is a symptom of something more important

and if you chase happy, you will never catch it.

Happiness is a rainbow

and if you chase a rainbow it will flee from you.

To catch rainbows

you need to chase rain

Mnemonic Cholera

I am not old. I am ancient. My body is a very reasonable thirty seven years old, give or take the replacement of atoms and the time I spent in the womb. My mind, is other than that. I have been sentient to a varying degree for those thirty seven years previously mentioned. But through story, I have expanded the scale and scope of my mind like a blossoming fractal rose. My mind expands forward and backward in time. My mind grows towards possible consequences and sees alternate paths that never were and many that never will be. My mind, driven by knowledge encoded in story, and urged forward by a driving curiosity, is an eldritch abomination- a thing beyond space and time that reaches out towards the heat death of the universe and the earliest rumblings of the big bang and ties them together and then casts them apart. My mind is a monster god and a forgiving angel. My mind is a visionary and a tyrant. My mind is a child and a lunatic, a messiah and an untouchable.

Why do I say this? Not to brag. My mind overflows, my brain often insufficient to contain it. I create art, I pour my mind onto the page. I see and I rant and rail and write and draw, in a desperate attempt to get some of my mind out of my brain and relieve the pressure. But there is another pressure: the pressure to learn more.

And it gets too much, and its hard to hold it all alone. And so I need to share it. Like mnemoic cholera, transmitable and prone to cause those infected to expell the infected contents themselves. Charming, certainly.

Brief Overiew of Location in Hidden Heart

The Dual Core Chambers

• The Chamber of the Survivors
• The Chamber of the Scavengers

The Three Wings

• The Glass Wing
• The Emerald Wing
• The Dust Wing

The Four Corners

• The Table Corner
• The Dark Corner
• The Scorched Corner
• The Salt Corner

The Five Terminals

• The Serpent Terminal
• The Mystery Terminal
• The Bridge Terminal
• The Ancient Terminal
• The Alliance Terminal

Walls Crumble

So, Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia have both voted in favor of independence. And naturally both national governments, Iraq and Spain, have rejected these votes. The USA has seen its worst mass shooting in history, perpetrated by an sixty-four year old white guy apparently acting alone. Despite this ISIS claimed credit. There were two suicide bombings in Syria, at a Police Station. Which, frighteningly, is nothing new. The US government has successfully pressured Egypt into seizing a shipment of North Korean provided RPGs (rocket propelled grenade launchers) that were being purchased by businessmen, presumably as part of an illicit under the table deal between Cairo and Pyongyang.

Over the Weekend, Houthi forces in Yemen claimed to have shot down a US drone. A man in Marseille stabbed two women (ISIS claimed responsibility). Soldiers in Cameroon shot dead at least eight protesting Anglophone separatists. And ISIS seized control of the town of Al-Qaryatain in the Homs province. Neo-Nazis held a march in Sweden. Al-Shabaab in Somalia attacked a Military Base outside Mogadishu. Another member of Donald Trump's Administration has resigned, Secretary of health and Human Services Tom Price this time- over a scandal regarding his use of private planes. The persecution of the Muslim Rohingya minority in Burma continues.  The US State Department has pulled out families of employees and nonessential personnel following what media outlets are describing as a string of mysterious apparently sonic based attacks, Havana is cooperating with the US and has invited the FBI to assist. Japan is getting ready for some contentious elections, with two parties merging to better oppose the ruling Party. China continues its Anti-Corruption purge, and critics continue to speculate on the motives behind the purge.

Trends to notice, independence and/or separatist movements are back in the news. In Spain, the police were deployed to scare voters away. In Iraq, the national government blustered, but since the Kurdish Peshmerga pretty much already controls the territory claims by Iraqi Kurdistan that doesn't mean much. In Cameroon, language is key division, with the government failing to protect the rights of English speaking Cameroons. And let us not forget that ISIS is functionally a separatist movement, one that is also attempting to become a Caliphate, but seems now unable to sustain that long term.

Al-Shabaab is not a separatist movement, but Somalia has a functioning unrecognized nation in Somaliland and the rest of the nation is still a profoundly failed state embroiled in civil war. Unity is a problem for Nations worldwide. With approval for the sitting US president are some of the lowest early approval rates ever seen for a US president. China's anti-corruption purges are believed to be politically motived. The Rohingya purges could easily be interpreted as a means of the ruling government to focus discontent towards a persecuted minority rather than the government. Japan is struggling following the saber rattling by North Korea, which may end up unseating Shinzo Abe.

What does all this mean? Larger Political bodies spring from the resources and power to maintain them. Balkanization occurs when governing bodies lack the strength to hold their nations and/or empires together, and lack the resources to supply and support the people of their nation and/or empire. It's not a matter of bread and circuses. It's a matter of bread and truncheon. And what all of this unrest is showing us; is that around the world, the groups in power are losing the ability to provide for the their people and also losing the ability to force their citizens in line.

 

Brief List of Location in the Painted Labyrinth

The Shrines of the Three

• The Firebird Temple
• Weaver Cave
• The Spiral Tower

The Meeting Places

• The Amphitheatre
• The Globe Sepulchre
• The Bazaar
• The Council Stronghold
• The Alliance Gate
• The Witch House

Precursor Ruins

• The Beetle
• The Twin Collosi
• Dikinesh Canyon
• The Altar of the Elder Brothers
• The Grave of the Corn Lady

The Pillars

• The Great Western Pillar
• The Great Eastern Pillar

The Bridges

• The Hummingbird Bridge
• The Butterfly Bridge

Campaign Grounds

• Barren Island
• Hunting Grounds
• Tenfold Manor
• Damacles Graveyard Throne
• Daemon Temple
• The Short Tower
• The Keystone Cave
• The Solar Moon Henge
• The Place of Slaughter
• The Fern Forest
• Cavern Lake of Discord