Update jumpscare!

 Still on here! Life has gone off the rails crazy train big time with circumstances and happenings—I think there's even someone new in here, and/or maybe even an absence. We mostly still want to all do intros for ourselves, and sometimes when someone fronts they'll start writing theirs and save it unfinished (Vestige, NOCH, Stranger and Asher wrote a lot of theirs but never posted them because some fields were still blank) but mostly we've been. Kind of a whirlwind in the head. Reached a fever point, posted asking for help, got a couple donations and commissions, then quit our job. So now we have a week or two to complete commissions plus any more that come in while we find another job. I think we can do it, but all of this was Asher's catalyst, and we don't even know if he existed prior to last Thursday.

Anyway. Point is: I don't 100% know who I am right now, I think probably Sender, but I also think I might 90–95% Sender and don't want to write a slightly inaccurate bio. I think my head is on fire in terms of plurality. I feel like a tossed salad.  I think we're just going to take a pause from the bios and see where we settle in a week or so. It's been a week since we even posted last iirc, and that's because I was being attacked by Charybdis. For now I just want to write casual stuff, like symbol meanings, personal talk, fill up some of our tags, and talk about music, art, writing and the beautiful potential of uncertainty.
Okay, yeah, probably Sender.

🝯

Skyglow

So! I said I was gonna talk about writing!
On our Tumblr, we reblog a lot of joke posts with tags about our WIPs and characters we were reminded of, or post the rare funny out-of-context art of non-canon interactions, but I don't think we ever really publicly showed just how much these stories consume us on a daily basis. To friends we've referred to them as like children; these three things that are so deeply important in our life because we've been building them up from nothing for the past three or so years, they continue to surprise and frustrate and delight us as if they had minds of their own, and the bigger they get, the more it seems like that's true. One day we'll be done with our part, and send them out into the world to make us proud. We joked to our partner that they have to be okay with having stepkids.

Our oldest is Skyglow. I'm actually not sure of the exact age of my stories, or at least how to label them, because they all start from something very unlike what they are now, and at what point in that process do I say the story as it exists now was originated? Almost every long-term passion project I write technically started years and years ago with a fleeting daydream about something completely different and snowballed into a real idea that doesn't at all resemble its progenitor. But at least I know that Skyglow is the most developed and fleshed-out of all of them. I will try to get into it without getting too excited and explaining too much of a story I still intend to publish. It's excruciating that a lot of the parts I'm most excited about would be considered spoilers for first-time readers and that I can't share them right away, but such is the way of writing.

Real quick before I get into it, some comp titles for a point of reference: Fahrenheit 451 (and Ray Bradbury's dystopian works in general), The Left Hand of Darkness, Planet of the Apes, Dungeon Meshi, Mickey 17, Them!, V for Vendetta, Stargate, Runaway to the Stars, Arrival, and Dougal Dixon's "After Man" and "Man After Man." Most of those are things I watched/read after coming up with the idea for Skyglow, went "whoa this reminds me of part of my own story" or "ooh this is inspiring me regarding a certain part" and rolled it up into my snowball.

Without future ado:

Skyglow is a webcomic. Or at least, it will be. It will be a bit of a shorter one, almost like a novella in narrative length, and comprised of only two chapters, albeit lengthy ones. The introductory protagonist is Aston Beckett, a member of a society from the distant future, about 200–300 years. (2283 CE, if you want to get specific; that's the frame of reference I have in my head right now, personally, but I'm not sure if I'll actually mention it directly or that it won't change slightly by the time I would.) The society in which Aston lives has been governed by a totalitarian capitalist surveillance state for a while now. Privacy is an expensive luxury, entertainment products have replaced art, and to support a universal lifestyle of consumption, pollution has decimated the ecosystem, and most people like Aston live in sprawling cities and have never seen things like grass, trees, wild animals, the ocean or the night sky.

The story starts with Aston being given a sentence for a crime. The audience is not shown what crime this was, but it's implied to be a severe sentence, and he is on death row. He's randomly selected from a lottery and "given" the "opportunity" to be a guinea pig for human trials of a new technology instead, in exchange for parole if he plays his part right. The technology in question is multi-dimensional travel; he's told he's going to be a pioneer, though the implication is very clearly that it's less of a big deal if he dies than anyone important.

The universe he lands in has an alternate history. Or more accurately, an alternate prehistory. This universe diverged at the end of the Permian when the Great Dying did not happen, and vertebrates like reptiles, birds and mammals never became dominant. As a result, vertebrates fill the ecosystem's niches we would associate more with bugs, and the larger, more intelligent animals on this Earth are arthropods, particularly one species of wasp-like hymenopterid, a species that stands bipedally, grows to human sizes, and built a civilization much like that of humans. Exactly alike, actually, as written history has played out almost exactly the same as humans' did—in fact, in as many English words, they refer to themselves as humans, Homo sapiens. The year is 202X.

Aston introduces himself to the first denizens of this universe he meets as a rebel leader, telling them that in the future he comes from, he was imprisoned and given this sentence for valiantly trying to fight his terrible government.

One of those first people he meets is Leon Talbot, a graduate student in entomology. Leon is undeniably very smart in his area, and even his professors would begrudgingly admit he's going places, but interpersonally, he is not exactly gifted. He has a love for all living things; living things just do not all have a love for him, so he prefers to spend more time with the ones that do (namely, animals) and away from the ones that don't (other people). But he can't ignore an opportunity like Aston, who, from his perspective, is a giant talking intelligent bug that claims to be from an alternate universe where it's practically a cyberpunk dystopian future, which is evidenced in his amazed reactions at things as simple as plantlife, or rain that isn't acidic. Especially when Aston mentions his heroic endeavors in this mysterious resistance. Of course he's infatuated. Aston, who has been shown up until now as very much a stone-faced, caustic personality, absolutely does not return Leon's enthusiasm. He has priorities.

Nevertheless, Aston is reluctantly reliant on Leon's two-way expertise to navigate this society while he tries to outwit the government of his own—and with Leon's surprisingly eager willingness to assist the cause, ends up unravelling a conspiracy from the outside. Literally.

Skyglow is a science fiction portal-hopping adventure, climate politics fiction, a high-stakes drama with ridiculous moments, a comedy with dark  and violent ones, a slow-burn queer romance between two equally traumatized outcasts, and a zany but also earnest romp through a speculative biology alternate history where the question is asked "what if people were big wasps instead?" It's about autism and trauma and being othered, it's about dehumanization, it's about the nature of humanity, it's about what it even means to be human at all, it's about communication with people you don't understand, it's about the excess waste and slow creeping deteriorative violence of capitalism, it's about climate change, it's about perspective and the power of education and experience, it's about internalized homophobia, it's about misanthropy, it's about the role one's upbringing has in how they treat others, it's about radicalization to the left, it's about the commercialization of life itself, it's about exploitation and systemic oppression, it's about ableism and carceral labor, it's about trust and betrayal, and it's about recognizing oneself through the alien other.

But mostly it's about bugs.

𐄬𐄑 Transversal

This is our other long-term passion project, and compared to Skyglow, it's actually turning out to be really, really long, complex, convoluted, and narratively full to the brim. It's going to be a webcomic, or at least a web series (it's complicated) here are, as of right now, 7 planned chapters, all of them being rather lengthy and multi-faceted. I used to think of Transversal as my "sandbox project," where I've created a setting where "anything can happen" and that allows me just to play around with concepts I love to write and characters I don't use elsewhere, but after I actually started to put love into it, it crystallized into a genuine, tightly-wound narrative of its own.

Comp titles, like I did for Skyglow, include... lots. Lots and lots, probably more than will be listed, because it's not just long but also absolutely overflowing with sci fi and fantasy possibilities and contains a lot of narrative themes and concepts, so there are so many smaller parts of it that could be related to something, but off the top of my head, I'll just say: Doctor Who, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Paranatural, Runaway to the Stars (again), I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, House of Leaves, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Mob Psycho 100, Animorphs, Welcome to Night Vale, the Spider-Verse movies, and in ways too complicated to explain here, the 1994 movie-length CGI Thomas Dolby music video "The Gate: to the Mind's Eye."

Ok. So.

"Transversal," also stylized as "𐄬𐄑 Transversal" (or 20020 Transversal), is (will be) a half-comic, half-written text webseries with intentionally shifting artstyles and occasional elements in other mediums depending on what the story calls for. (I'm planning it this way because it's a really daunting project and I feel like if I can write some of it, or draw some of it in different styles, I might actually finish it in my lifetime.) It opens with an event eventually dubbed "the Cataclysm," in which, on the date of February 29th, 2020, instead of some kind of mundane global emergency happening (whatever that would be), fantasy and science-fiction tropes suddenly become fact to the normal real world—i.e. magic powers, alien contact, invention of time travel, dragons—and it follows the aftermath of that, the consequences of the idea of "anyone can sort of do anything," specifically centered around one casual friend group of former dissatisfied burnout 20-somethings who become wrapped up in a series of events with cosmic stakes.

It's hard to explain the full plot, especially with so many characters that all tie into it but have their own goings-on, so I will do something for this one that I won't do with any others, and literally just go chapter-by-chapter, up to the point I consider too-spoilery, and just explain where the story starts to go. Through almost all of it, with the exception of maybe even just the final chapter, the characters are usually separated, grouped and divided their own into smaller sub-plots, much like a TV show, and POVs are scattered across these plots, so events don't necessarily tie into each other until certain meeting points within and at the ends of chapters, so, it will be easier to discuss the chapters more with segmented pieces on each sub-plot rather than a point-A-to-point-B little tale.

Chapter 1 is the one that opens starting with the Cataclysm from the perspective of a loose group of queer, mentally ill or unemployed acquaintances who weren't important before and are very much not expecting to become important after. That includes Dorian, a nihilistic recluse; Lilly, an aimless and very autistic introvert; Chester, an eternally-single serial gay romancer; Noel, a terminally online attention-hound; Morgan, a schizophrenic dropout, and their cautiously-titled girlfriend Mireya, an insecure and paranoid wake of regrets. After the Cataclysm, though, their lives are permanently uprooted when several of them become affected by this sudden "some people have magic powers" event happens; Dorian gets bitten by a wild animal on a full moon and you can tell where that's going, Noel and Lilly find out they have dragon shapeshifter lineage, Mireya is possessed by a demon, etc. For each further conundrum they find themselves in, a strange talking cat appears, claiming to be a cosmic being from outside their world named "Quasar," and gives them oddly specific and often frustratingly accurate direction for where to go and who to seek. Whether they like it or not, their lives suddenly become things of scrutiny and vigilance, since in response to the Cataclysm, several religious and political groups arise in panicked opposition to any dangerous people who are inviting the end of days by being at all implicated in "magical" circumstances. Among the most fervent of these is a tightly organized and wealthy fundamentalist group, formerly an anti-gay rights hate group now dedicated to the "Resolution," a return to normalcy, headed by multimillionaire corporate darling Evan Wolfe, whom the protagonists eventually become an intense target of.
Events do not necessarily follow one right after another, but over a period of time, we see: Contact is made with aliens across the galaxy and even other galaxies, all of whom are apparently having the same thing happen to their previously normal planets; magic allows society to advance impossibly far impossibly fast, opening up avenues to not just distant stars but also across time; angels, demons, fae and other magical creatures arise and affect influence. Within our smaller sphere of POV characters, they begin to become more involved than they would like to be. In altercations with Evan Wolfe's organization, both high stakes and the baffling depth of possible impossibilities are revealed. Dorian fakes his death twice and actually dies once, though through a loophole, is the (unwilling) recipient of an Orpheus manouevre. Noel finds compatriotism in a fringe group of newfound dragon shapeshifters who declare their fantastical genes to be the key for undoing the Cataclysm, and constructs a ploy to go after Lilly legally when she refuses to join them. Lilly's defense lawyer in court is a hyper-processing indestructable robotic ant called "TeVes," and Mireya, to exorcise the demon, finds occult assistance in supposed "new natural psychic" Fitz Kinsey who, as we find out, is actually a stressed 19-year-old just taking a gap year to get away from his strict parental figure (and his strict parental figure's post-Cataclysm pride and joy, an overbearing and weird self-aware AI smarthouse souped-up from a complex pre-2020 AI he invented and proudly calls the "Neurally-Operated Computerized Housekeeper"), and didn't want to be a part of any of this either. Throughout this, the characters can't seem to get away from being wrapped up in more and more situations with every incident and introduction that Quasar leads them to.
It's all incredibly silly. It's off the rails from page 1, very literally. Bear with me.
Mostly what you need to know, for now, is that A) this is a setting which has no laws of physics, and previously did—a normal, mundane world, suddenly transformed, unexpectedly, into a fantastical one, where there is only one rule: all rules can be broken; and B) Evan Wolfe is "the big bad" of the story, and so far he and his group are positioned in the story as the primary villains who the protagonists are going up against.

In chapter 2 Evan Wolfe dies, his group is disbanded and the problem is solved.
1. Specifically, Dorian kills him, through revealing that he is a were-wolverine whose blackout transformations can be triggered by sheer rage and mauling Evan. (I'll be writing this simply as a list because it isn't necessarily told in order.) Unfortunately, after this, Dorian begins to experience hallucinations of Wolfe's mangled, homophobic corpse ghost haunting his every waking moment. Wolfe's group is infiltrated and taken out from the inside with the help of yet another Quasar tip, an enigmatic, morally fickle and socially inept shapeshifter who introduces themself without a name but clearly doesn't behave like a human and actually ends up following only their own esoteric  and oddly basal priorities and making things harder for the group half the time. The cast assumes they are an alien until proven otherwise, when it's revealed that Earth's Cataclysm did not only affect humans, and highly intelligent animals (such as crows and dolphins)were also bestowed with magical properties; their new dubious ally is actually, literally, an octopus who gained the ability to transform themself into other creatures to interact with them. Dorian names them 7 after the number of limbs they apparently have in their true form instead of eight.
(If you know me and we're friends: you know why I go into detail here. If you don't and aren't don't worry about it This Is Not For You. Moving on.)
2. Lilly and Noel get into a fight a bit more physical than it would be in a courtroom and Lilly ends up killing them. That's sort of it, a short scene in which two dragons fight each other and one dies, but the fact they die and their killer is wracked with a classic case of self-defense guilt is kind of a relevant plotpoint so.
3. Humanity invents time travel, and stumbles upon, apparently, one second rule : It is impossible, no matter what, to travel to any time before February 29th, 2020—before the Cataclysm. Several of the cast, namely Dorian, Lilly and Chester, travel to the distant future where everything wrought by the Cataclysm is already integrated into the mundane, and see how it may be possible for the newfound strangeness of the world to be used to better lives, and for the abnormal to become normal.
4. Meanwhile, Fitz, now thirdwheeling Morgan and Mireya as an expeditious exorcist-for-hire, discovers an alarming and physically impossible truth about himself and his stern, emotionally neglectful "grand-uncle" who raised him:
Sometime after the Cataclysm, a young engineer named Terrance Kinsey had, in fact, discovered a way to break the only rule. With only his own expertise and a repurposed pocketwatch fitted with a rudimentary but magically-supplemented AI, he created a time machine which could forcefully shatter the chronological barrier and travel to the past before 2020: but at a terrible cost, because his first and only test run of the device sent them both too far, and he was stranded in the 1970s with nothing but an over-apologetic busted talking clock. He spent years upon years trying to fix it, but he had no resources; the source of its power didn't exist yet. By 2001 he was desperate and frustrated, and his device's lifespan was waning. With the last bit of Cataclysmic magic he had left at his disposal, he removed the AI from the machine and placed it in a human body, a child which he would raise claiming to be its "uncle," and once the Cataclysm happened, he could restore it into his time machine again and use it to undo the paradox and make it so he had never been sent back. And he does so, despite how very unkeen Fitz is on it, since from his perspective, he has never been a magical artificial intelligence fitted to a recycled pocketwatch with reality-bending time powers before, and Terrance is not entirely receptive to any "this goes beyond child abuse" and "this is body horror" grievances.
The weird AI smarthouse is just what it is, though, no shocking twist about that. But for all its resentment of Terrance, it is also increasingly not a fan of Morgan and Mireya, and it's kind of getting alarming just how intelligent this artificial intelligence is.
Also, Terrance ends up inadvertently putting a curse on Morgan, who now starts to slowly transform into a mythical heraldic beast, and he didn't really mean to, but it is what it is.
5. Right at the very end of chapter 2 Fitz-as-a-time-machine does in fact fulfill his purpose of breaking the chronological barrier. However, he does not end up doing so to Terrance. He does so, entirely by accident, to Lilly, who is vaporized into 2014 and stranded like Terrance was.

After chapter 3, I can't get into much beyond very basic points, because that's when it starts to have an actual over-arcing plot instead of being more chapter-by-chapter, but I can do a basic rundown of chapter 3 and explain where this is all going:
Chapter 3 is mostly two things side-by-side:
1. Lilly's side "adventure" struggling in 2014 and a rescue mission by Fitz, TeVes and Dorian (and secretly the Charles Dickens-style wailing mutilated ghoul of a televangelist millionaire who lives in Dorian's mind) to retrieve her (and apparently, her girlfriend Yasmin, who she met in 2014 and who didn't know she's a shapeshifting dragon from the future—this is why communication is important).
2. A MacGuffin hunt for two magical artifacts, following a "plot reveal" speech by Quasar in which it's revealed the universe itself is in danger of total destruction, that also happens to take place mostly in a horror labyrinth underneath the English channel constructed by NOCH's over-reaching influence as revenge for "losing" Fitz (who is, again, in 2014, to go back and get the person he proverbially knocked into last week). During this, the remaining cast who are following this thread (Morgan, Mireya, Chester and intermittently 7) find and assist, among innocents caught in the architectural crossfire between a lesbian calygreyhound and their supercomputer archnemesis (I TOLD you it was convoluted), jaded and cynical 17-year-old Theia Caldwell and her precious young sister Iris, who Theia would kill for if anything happened, and probably never forget the face of the person who hurt her sister.
3. Both of these come to an endpoint when two things happen, simultaneously, without knowledge of the other: without Fitz's influence, the demon returns full force, and is greeted by a desperate Morgan who ends up making a deal with him to dispel their curse in exchange for permission to possess them; Mireya, also desperate to break Morgan's curse, at the encouragement of the demon (who does not inform her what he already did with Morgan), absolutely murders that kid sister in cold blood to appease him after selling her services to a shadowy group of what can only be described as "future real-estate agents" who put her brain in a lethal robot death machine.

I told you it was convoluted.

Chapter 4 introduces a lot of elements that shouldn't be mentioned until I've actually released up until that point of the story, because for as weird as it is up until then they actually change the game, so it's remaining unexplained, but would you believe me if I said it gets 10x even more convoluted and ridiculous, involving tragedy, nihilism, fatalism, exponentially increasingly grotesque manners of interpersonal dehumanization, suicidal ideation, explicit representations of PTSD, implied genocide, genuine cosmic horror, overly intense existentialism, major character death, minor character death by truly disturbing means, romance followed by horrific betrayal and/or traumatic and unfair separation, a genre of fiction/narrative device that can't even be mentioned because it's the ultimate conclusion and thread throughout and the word itself is a spoiler, and iHop?

Play to Pay

I said I have 3 WIPs. That is not entirely true. I have 3 stories I'm working on long-term who I hold near and dear and beloved to my heart who are my big projects and my recurring priorities, but I also have smaller and shorter fleeting ideas for things I don't really want to let go of, because that's just inevitable. And since one of my Big Stories has the same name as this blog I feel like it's more fun to hold off on that, so here is Play to Pay.

Sort of like pets, or houseplants instead of children.

Play to Pay is a video game. I mean, I don't know how to code and it would take a while to learn, so I usually say it's going to be a short story, but ideally, it's a video game, because the story itself is a metafiction commentary on the video game industry and video games as a medium.  Look. I'm not a games guy. But you can't help having ideas when you engage with a certain medium even a little.

Our POV is Sol, a software engineer who is self-admitted weirdly name but otherwise regular. He dreams big and thinks of himself as an artist, but to make ends meet while he's still working on his own game, works for a small indie dev company, no more than 20 people including the interns, whose primary source of income is an overextended series of streamer-bait, kid-targeted  "horror" games riding off the success of the mascot horror trend, with a marketably childish cast of cartoonish monsters and a method of design that can put them out faster than once a year. Namely: labor exploitation, because the crunch times at the studio are nightmarish, and Sol finds himself completely unable to even work on his own projects. Frustrated and stifled, he submits a resignation to his boss, but accidentally lets slip an implication that he also intends to whistleblow and cause a controversy about this well-loved horror game's creators. His boss retaliates with the reason I call the story "sci fi body horror"—reveals the true nightmare of his games by trapping Sol inside the next installment as one of the enemies. I think it works better as a game because it's so short but it also very much dates itself to the time period I came up with it (now, currently).

I hate how self-aware I am that most of my story ideas are just "I hate my job" or "I hate needing to have a job." Also I feel now's a good time to mention that for the posts about my WIPs I've been using the music field to recommend the song that makes me think of it the most. I would never have put Lemon Demon otherwise.