Toadfish Monastery

What it says on the tin, folks.

Just go here to look at it: http://www.mediafire.com/view/w7rsvpx46i47uz0/Brother%20G's%20myth%20draft.pdf

By the time that I'm done with it (hopefully sometime at the end of the month) it'll serve rather well as an introduction to comparative mythology. The main text is like a TVtropes or Tough Guide to Fantasyland for mythology and religious, with the idea being that you can't intentionally do anything with the building blocks of myth if you don't know that they're there. You can't avoid or subvert them on purpose, and you definitely can't decide to intentionally play them straight if you don't even know that they're there.

So for the benefit of writers everywhere, and also for anybody who's interested in mythology, I decided to cook this up.

World knows that the internet has given me enough goodness over the years. It's time that I give something back besides some story ideas and bad fiction.

Alright! First story of my return.

And it's pretty sad (wait, what?).

Also, the story will probably be at least a little confusing. Beyond telling there is showing, and beyond showing there is just implying. This story is an exercise in implying as much as possible over showing or telling: this is a single episode in a long, eventful life, and the story tries to capture some of that "in the moment" feeling. My Beta reader said that the story still works despite not knowing the whole story, but I'd like to get your thoughts.

Please be very critical. If there's anything at all that you don't think works, let me know.

Absolutely Positive

You made the lentil soup yourself. No-one can make it the way that you do. A dash of this and that. Humble ingredients that are spun together to make a meal fit for a noble. At least, you think so. Many nobles have disagreed with you on the matter.

Perhaps that is why they needed to die.

It isn't that you killed them for lacking in good culinary taste or simply disagreeing with you. But they couldn't appreciate the simple things. They couldn't see the refinement of humility or the grandeur therein. This had many different consequences. One of them was that they were unable to appreciate the best things in life. Another was that you have been been killing them whenever you could get away with it.

That's life, isn't it? And it's also life that you won't be able to kill any more of them. And life that they'll die soon anyway.

It's done. Babylon the great has fallen. Your dreams of empire crushed to dust.

And here you are, all alone, eating lentil soup.

There are books all around you. Surrounding you. Like a cloud or a ring of fire. On every imaginable topic, rising high in piles like towers and great walls. Here a treatise on astronomy, there five volumes of poetry by a circle of poet-historians all centuries dead. If you close your eyes then you can envision each and every one of them in its place, exactly where you left it.

If you can close your eyes then you can remember your first day in Babylon. You had not always been a speaker for the living, or a philosopher, or a demagogue (and all three were the same in Babylon, or so they were to you). Once, you had been a trader. A sailor. A night shipwreck had brought you to the edges of Babylon, and you walked to the lights from the crash site, no other survivors in sight. Who would have thought that you would stumble across a library? Who would have thought that you would enter therein?

Perhaps it was fate. If so, then you wonder what it was that had made fate love you so, as much as you love books. And you wonder what it was that had made fate so fickle, and made her turn her eyes and her favor from you.

You drop the spoon into its bowl and stand. It is time. "I come, I come," you whisper. A smile spreads on your face. "Why do you call for me?"

The world is falling to ashes at your hands. All future history aborted and replaced with a hideousness that burns your mind's eye. You have a duty to perform, a rectification to perform. And you are hardly going to do that in the nude.

Luckily you have clothes hanging beside your desk. You slip on silken underclothing first of all. Comfortable clothing, to be sure, but once its purpose was to catch the arrows aimed at the ancestors of your adopted people. The sleeves are long and wide, far from restrictive. Next to go on is a poet blouse and a short, dark blue skirt. Less your style than your previous dress or undress, but you can own it all the same. You have to. The rules for formal dress are older than your grandfather. And he's pretty old.

You remember walking through the streets in the wake of the Iconoclasm. The Trial of Sisyphus was brought to the forefront of your mind. "The quest for power is an empty thing," you told John. "Sisyphus' wife threw his corpse into the public square."  

John didn't say anything. It was John's corpse that was thrown into the square, John that spent ten years in Hell before your friends could secure a release. But that's why you say it. You understand. You understand the pain. And what else you understand, what must be understood by John if it is not already, is that these are more than stories. Or else all other things are no more than stories.  

But if there is mourning for the sacrifices that have been made, then surely there can also be rejoicing over fresh gardens and empty tombs. "Here, John," you told your friend, and the two of you looked around at the scattered statues all about you, like the books in your study. "Hear the silence of the idols."  

Stories, you did not know if John understood. But you could see in your comrade's eyes that acceptable losses were understood. John lost something, in those ten years at Letois, and John accepted the pain every day (there is no price too high for the glory of the city Babylon).

You slide copper bracelets over your left hand and hang jade rings from your ears. You move as you dress, you dance as you move. Happiness is not good for mortals but neither is sorrow not fitting for immortals, and you know that no-one has ever been a prince by playing a pauper. Do you weep today?

There is salt enough in your lentil soup already, you think. Why would you add more? What reason do you have to weep? You can feel the sun rising and falling in your body, and the waves reaching and sinking. You stand alone, and you stand alone in the midst of creation. This is the nobility of your soul, that you can see past the dark of space into that day when the gods, now dead, now not-yet-born, are made by the hands of men and women with their eyes firmly fixed upon the stars.

This is the nobility of your soul, that you can see in your heart the future ashes and rubble of Babylon, and not flinch. That you can see, and see past it- to the songs that will be played on other worlds in generations hence. And today you see to it, where it will not be seen, and make a cure against a sickness unto death. To realize, and to exist in awareness of yourself and your own future gods.

To stand. And to do your duty.

A memory floats into your thoughts, from scant days ago. You were speaking with John and Elymas. The three of you had begun to realize that the war was not going as you had planned it. That the city would fall. That every pain and trial in your collective history would be turned to vain.

Unless...

Unless. The most powerful word with which a sorcerer can conjure.  

You wrap your hands around one of John's, and look at Elymas. "The process from perception to comprehension is like this, a closing fist," you say. "I will persuade Persephone before you, as Sisyphus did."  

Neither of them doubt you. This was your dream all along. Your dream that you made yours, or your dream and theirs, woven into a more brilliant tapestry. Your dream was history itself.

You put on felt socks and leather boots, and over your hands go soft green gloves with a button leaf design.

"Oh, Aesopus," you say. "Aesopus, there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn!"

You take the golden crown into your hands and rest it on your head. You look at it in the mirror and make a face. You toss it away with a flick of your fingers and pay no attention to where it goes.

"Benediction. Benediction, Mister Cross. Haha!"

You give a little spin where you stand, and giggle. Very girlish of you- but then, you haven't allowed yourself to be a girl for so long. Perhaps you can be one again in this short space of time, hanging between moments.

You take your suit-jacket off of its hook. Orange and white pinstripes. Perhaps you can allow yourself just one touch of personal expression.

Your fingers deftly work their way up the jacket's buttons. Smooth out a couple of ruffles in your outfit. Tie your hair back into a ponytail.

You hear the front door open downstairs.

You look at yourself in the mirror. This is it: the katalepsis of the sniper.

There are footsteps coming up the stairs.

You ascend the chair. It must look very silly, if you're going to be honest with yourself. Your hands brush against your throat.

You think back to Sisyphus one last time. Think of the war, the stone, the victory. The struggle was enough, and he had become Man alone.

John appears at the head of the stairs. You can hear a scream, you can hear the words, but you cannot attach to them any meaning.

You look at John. Smile. "Look! For I shall die, and in dying shall conquer death!"

You kick the chair out from under you, and then your neck catches against the belt.

"Zeno! Zeno!"

John won't get you down in time. You're safe.

You've done it.

"Happiness is a good flow of life."

- Zeno, as quoted by Stobaeus

Among my many other projects is the RPG Anthology, which would contain about 15 rules-lite RPG games, each twenty pages or less (including both crunch and fluff). Even assuming that each game would be played once (and I'd think that you could at least play any of them a couple of times, unless you were tremendously easily bored by New Things), it'd still be a lot of bang for your buck (and a lot of these you could probably get ten or twenty sessions out of, or even an entire campaign, not to mention what you can do after modifying them further).

I'll update this a few times a week, but here are quick three-to-four sentence outlines for the games which I'm currently considering:

Gonzo Characters are agents of a time police agency or something similar, tasked with going back in time and stopping time criminals. There is no GM, and instead antagonists and troubles are designed through random rolls of the dice, and the simple desire to have Something Awesome happen. This can result in, say, an ex-hitman from a species of intelligent cockroaches which evolved millions of years after the extinction of mankind, a cybernetic agent of Mossad, and a Ferrari which has been infected by an AI virus, being sent back in time to the Roaring Twenties in order to stop a schizophrenic chimpanzee from giving a perpetual energy device to Wizard-Hitler.*

Unnamed; henceforth referred to as "Rats RPG" Characters are rats, and have to deal with the day-to-day lives of being, well, rats, and trying to get food while avoiding death at the hands of Things Bigger Than Them. They have their own culture, and other animals have their own cultures hinted at (although skewed through the rats' eyes; feline culture is perceived as very bloodthirsty and cruel, because that's all which the rats see), and have a system of magic which involves summoning up ever-hungry gods and convincing those gods to do what they ask, and to not eat them. It's highly dangerous, and there are times when you might just want to take your chances with the cat, rather than convince a god to kill the cat.

Vampires... IN SPACE!! Space Opera setting, with horrific atmosphere. The characters are agents of an organization which deals with vampires, which can take an infinite variety of forms and classes, and whose only unifying link is that they are predatory beings which can infect others with their condition. The players are actually going up against the GM, who has a certain amount of points with which to set up opposition. Sessions are split between investigation and then dealing with the vampire itself, and players get an advantage by increasing the terror of their characters.

Tall Tales Set in the wild west, the characters are Mythic Heroes who must participate in apparently impossible exploits in order to strengthen Story, which in turn empowers them further in a manner appropriate to what stories they have inspired with the act. As time goes on, the only really appropriate challenges come from other Mythic Heroes, while those who are generally ignored by Story can use Determination to break the way that the legends are supposed to go, and oppose even the greatest of Mythic Heroes, but in the process risk becoming that very thing which they stand against. Story itself is an entity as much as it is a force and a process, and what it has in mind is anyone's guess, as Mythic Heroes across the land strengthen it more and more, and it changes the scope of reality ever further.

Nascent Gods Suddenly, the characters have the power to alter reality, but unfortunately do not start out with fine control (it's ridiculously simple to affect "all living things" but nearly impossible to affect only one person) and restraint (until you learn how to keep yourself under control, there's a risk of any stray thought at all suddenly triggering your abilities). The game starts out with the trouble apparently arising solely from these two concerns, but they'll learn sooner or later that their reality warping is attracting the attention of horrors which call themselves angels, claim to be servants of a recently-deceased god, explain that it is their duty to kill the characters so that their power can be reclaimed, and prove to not only be invulnerable to the powers of the characters but can in some cases "unravel" what they have done.

Unnamed; henceforth referred to as "Petpunk" Inspired by WE3, the characters are cybernetically-enhanced animals whose hardware is made up of various modifiers (such as damage modifier, area of effect, capacity, attribute enhancement, and so on) which are then explained with player-determined fluff (and since a flamethrower can just as easily be a strange ray gun, or a blast of fiery breath, this works for a pocket-monster styled game as well). There'll be many different species to choose from, ranging from rats to cats to birds to dogs.

Solitas The characters are incarnations of minor, weak things which no longer have much power in the world (elephants are going extinct and chivalrous warfare no longer receives much attention, to give two examples) and which are struggling to obtain "ley," which grants them that power. Ley naturally coalesces in certain places, but is also soaked up at a certain rate by humans and stored in their portions of The Dreaming, which is made up from the collective subconscious. Powers are not dependent on what one is an incarnation of, and running out of ley not only means one's own death but also the destruction of what one represents, yet if one can also bring one's concept back to dominance in the world if only the dangers inherent in obtaining so much ley can be survived.

Playing Gods The characters are god-like beings who acquire energy each turn with which they can shape the world, populate it, guide their creations, and ultimately either destroy their rivals or come to some sort of accord. It works very well as an endless sort of game, although those who want to make it competitive can do so as easily as doing what is necessary to eliminate the other gods (which requires an assault on them through one's own creations, as the gods cannot themselves harm each other).

Breaking Point Currently with no real fluff yet, the game will have several different sanity meters, each one for a different broad manner of mental instability. By willing taking upon oneself instability points, one can gain short-term benefits, and once a certain amount of instability is reached, permanent damage is dealt to the character, giving a moderate benefit but also major psychological damage. The Cthulhu Mythos would fit well here, if you wanted to reward characters for willingly going insane, and so would Neon Genesis Evangelion, if you didn't mind drawing up some loose mechanics to account for the mechs.

Slices of Life The characters are "faeries," constructs of stolen Passion transmuted into magical energy and woven into physical form. Passion must be burned every day in order to survive and can be spent in order to provide attributes, but only so much Passion can be contained at any one time. Characters must also maintain relationships with entirely human individuals, whether they be lovers or bloody enemies or something else entirely, in order to hold Passion, and these relationships will provide much of the driving force of the story. Characters might angst should their feeding habits cause permanent harm to a friend, but players are encouraged to remember that faeries are well-used to the idea that humans are, basically, intelligent sources of food who can be individually endearing.

Discount Salsa The characters are the handlers for their agents, and monitor and oversee those agents as they undertake missions of a nearly endless variety. The agents, however, are no mere human specimens, but instead have been altered through rediscovered sorceries, genetic manipulation, and drugs concocted from the blood of dead-yet-dreaming gods. Half of the game is making sure that the agents undertake their missions successfully, while the other half is maintaining a strong enough relationship that those agents will trust them and more often than not act not as they wish or think is best, but as the agent orders them to do so. Unfortunately, handlers must figure out the finer points of their agents' personalities over time, before they can take those into account, and keeping a good, close, trusting relationship with the equivalent of a Lovecraftian Hannibal Lecter has never turned out to be conducive to long-term mental health.

4-Color Four forces called the Yellow, the Black, the Red, and the Blue have chosen this world as a battleground, and empower champions for their cause, who quickly become reminiscent of superheroes. Each of the four forces provides different types of abilities (Black Champions manipulate energy, for example, while Red Champions are physically enhanced, whether in speed, senses, strength, durability, or something else entirely) and as they reach certain levels of alteration, the changes become more pronounced, even slightly detrimental, and the force which empowers them begins to influence their minds.

I put this up on Dark Lord Potter today, since maybe i'm just tired did not, ahem, hit off too well over there (and I can certainly see why, even if they're the first to think it horrible*), and I thought that I may as well put it up here, too. I'll try not to put too much stuff up here ever. I'll certainly never put a fic up here when there's maybe i'm just tired and a second fic being actively reviewed, but even so, tell me if I'm starting to push things a bit much.

*And please, be brutally honest even down to the littlest detail which you don't like. Sometimes DLP just has different tastes, and other times they're the only folk who are calling it like it is.

As a side note, since Glory's name is a tad close to being a Sueish-sounding name, now that I think about it: It was actually drawn from a list of actual names, back from when you could call your kid Abstinence or Tribulation or He-Came-Into-This-World-To-Save without your kid hating you for life because of how humiliating it is. Given her background, the name seemed like one which would be rather preferable to, say, Meek Cheshire or Peace-of-God Cheshire.

Anyways, here it is. Take it apart, dissect it brutally, and tell me how it's a piece of horrible crap. I have another story which almost got accepted by a publisher (it was too long, and they had too much of that particular genre) but I think that this one is better.

___

She had to knock for nearly two minutes before he appeared at the door, looking exasperated and with a young child attached to his leg. A thin man with mixed features, mostly Middle Eastern but with a tinge of chestnut, Jacob looked like he couldn't have been more than forty years old, but Glory Cheshire knew that his appearance couldn't be trusted on this matter.

His cheery grin would have been infectious, had Glory been coming here for a more jovial purpose.

"I'm sorry about the wait, miss. How are you doing today? Brr... It's an awful cold that's out today, isn't it?"

"I'm doing fine," Glory answered.

"And you are...?" Jacob leaned his head forward.

"Glory Cheshire." She blinked. "And you're Myriad-officer Jacob Bindan of the Yellow Army."

He drew his head back, and looked behind him before he responded, in a hushed voice. "What are you doing here? I still have a year of lea— Oh God. Oh." Jacob's left hand moved of its own accord, but of course he wouldn't have any weapons on him. He had been playing with his children just now; that wasn't the best time to be carrying a gun or knife.

"Don't pray to people you outrank, Myriad-officer," Glory responded, frowning at him, and she looked down at the young girl, still tugging on her father's shirt in an effort to get him back to their game. "Your father and I have some business to discuss. You go run and play now, okay?"

The little girl just stared right back at her, until her father put a hand on her head, ruffling her hair. "Go on, Sarah. I'll... I'll..." He swallowed. "Go tell your mother that I just got picked up. It's an emergency, and I'm sorry that I couldn't tell her."

"Okay papa!"

Jacob closed the door behind him, and he and Glory were all alone in the cold and the falling snow. He shut his eyes. "Can we do this somewhere else?"

"I just tried to get rid of your daughter so that she wouldn't have to see, Myriad-officer. I'm not going to leave your corpse on the front step for your wife to find." Glory started to walk off.

"Thank you," he said, before he began to follow after her.

"I'm slightly surprised that you're not trying to kill me. I always am. I'll never get used to it, I think."

"We don't operate all that differently, Mi— I suppose you don't have a rank I can use?"

"Military man to the end, Myriad-officer." Glory smiled. "I was a sergeant before I got drafted into the special corps. If you must, it'd be nice to hear someone call me that again."

He nodded to himself. "Right. Sergeant Cheshire." There was a hint of a smile on her face when he said that. "If you operate anything like my people, there's got to be at least seven other people who could snipe me out right now. I'm usually quite humble, but it would be foolish to deny that I'm important. I'm actually quite surprised that you found me. And that you managed to remove anyone who was assigned to keep an eye on me."

There was a fork in the path they were walking along, and Glory took the one which led into the woods near Jacob's house. She removed a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and handed one to the myriad-officer before she lit two of her own, and then placed it back. "Last smoke before you die. It's harder to kill like this, you know."

"Excuse me?"

"Killing like this. All close and personal. Having a chat with the person you're going to kill, moments before you're going to do it. Assassinating isn't normal warfare," Glory explained as she looked at the trees. "I'm a warchild," she continued, speaking softly. "I was, aheh, I was conceived in the trenches outside Crisseroon, about two hundred years from now, and a decade later, objective time, I was born in a Green Army hospital while my father was dying half a mile away in Big Barrel.

"I was disassembling guns soon after I could walk, and it's harder for me to sleep in perfect quiet than amid the sound of screams and gunfire, because gunfire was something you had to deal with in the trenches, but my mother's platoon spent the sixth and seventh years of my life in a jungle where silence meant that there was a predator in the area, and I never lost the instinct that associated silence with possible danger. I still have a habit of talking just to make noise, so that I don't get unnerved. My aunts and uncles were Gygax Platoon, and half of them weren't human, and I had siblings enough, even if none of them were blood kin. It wasn't a bad life. Mom died when I was twelve, and when I was fighting off in the Deller Ridge I met another instance of her. What are the odds? She never had me, never even met Dad, got into the War in a completely different manner, and we talked for twenty minutes before my group had to move on. She wasn't really my mother, but she was still proud of me, and that was..."

Her lip trembled for a fraction of a second, and the myriad-officer barely caught it. "'Bittersweet' is probably the best way to put it." She swallowed. "I don't want to do this, really. Part of me is glad that I got put in the specials, because I can serve The Green so well, and Dad would have liked that, but... a bigger part of me wants to fight like my parents and my dad's parents did. I miss the old platoon. I miss fighting on the Fringe, where we're never supplied well enough and half of everything is scavenged. I feel like I'm betraying them in some way, going beyond what they did. It's a whole different battlefield that we fight on. It's hard to kill people like this."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I want to be..." She shook her head. "You're going to die. We both know this. I can give you a few minutes to come to peace with this before we move on to the formalities, can't I?"

"I don't mind." He lit up the cigarette with the proffered Bic and inhaled slowly.

"Why do you fight?" she asked him.

"Excuse me?"

"We all have our reasons. Barely any of us kill specifically for The Green or The Yellow. Too few of us know enough about the War to possibly be patriotic or whatever term you'd like to use."

He inhaled again before he answered. "I blundered my way into it. I was already military before I joined the Yellow Army. They say that they still don't know how the battle wound up on my world, although I suspect that it may have just been a test on their part. My world wasn't due to enter the War for another forty-eighty years. But they saw what I could do, even when, without warning, I was up against weapons and monsters nobody on my world had conceived of, and two weeks later, my commanding officer is telling me that they got a request for my transfer to a different base. Next thing I knew, I was getting my introduction into a war across time and space."

"You've been on leave for long?"

"A little more than a year."

"She had your eyes," Glory pointed out.

He folded his hands behind his back. "This world, and this period, happens to be valuable to The Yellow. They have timepaths running up and down all over this century and the next. I made a deal with my superiors, when they recruited me, and with every fifty years of service, I get two years of leave here, starting one month after I last left, subjective to my wife's time. She thinks that I work occasionally for an intelligence agency, so it won't be totally unexpected if she gets a notice of my death."

"Smart."

"You're tired," Jacob observed.

"I prefer to kill people with a jury-rigged rifle, not a ceremonial handgun."

"How long have you been fighting, Sergeant Cheshire?"

"Twenty-eight years since I picked up a rifle," Glory answered. "I don't know how many people I killed when I was poor bloody infantry, but they don't ask you to remember their faces. I don't feel bad about not keeping count. I've carried out eighty-nine assassinations that I can remember, and there are two-hundred-and-twenty days since I joined the specials for which my memories can't account, because not even I had enough clearance to know what I was doing on those missions. It's funny how everything becomes so painfully precise with the specials. I don't try to keep count. Even so, I somehow manage to do it."

"I think that I fought against Gygax Platoon a few times in the past, Sergeant Cheshire. They would have been part of the Chamber Regiment, yes?"

Glory nodded as she nursed her cigarettes. She was on her third pair now. "I'm surprised that you know that."

"I always had a head for details. I could even name off a few of the squads in Gygax if you gave me time to think about it. I fought Chamber a few times over my many centuries. Every last member was a credit to The Green. And you're a credit to Gygax Platoon, make no mistake about it, Sergeant Cheshire. We get asked to do things by the Colors, and often they're things we aren't fond of. But you have an important job, one that's indispensable."

"Why are you doing this?"

"My men— and women and beings of various other genders, when they had genders— looked to me for an intelligent word on more than one occasion. And not just an intelligent one, but a wise one. A comforting one. I wore many hats, and one of those hats was being the provider of words to settle their minds. I see no reason to not help you, even though you're soon to kill me. After all, when it comes to it, the only difference between you and me is the color of our uniforms on the battlefield. When it comes to it, we're both just as clueless about what the War is being fought for. Just like everyone else, we have to come up with our own personal reasons for fighting it."

He turned to her. "It's not your fault, or mine, that we're where we are right now, with me soon to die, and so there is absolutely no reason for me to not attempt to give some comfort to a good soldier. I would have been honored to have had you under my command."

"Thank you, I suppose."

"Think nothing of it."

Glory looked away, looking into the trees. He wasn't too far off when he made his guess on the numbers. There were twelve people, actually, all through this area, both to make sure that nobody could interrupt the assassination, and to make sure that the good myriad-officer, should he suddenly decide to make a futile attempt at resisting, would have more bullets than brain matter in his head in the second that he tried to attack his appointed executioner.

The pair of cigarettes in her mouth had been burnt down to stubs now. She let them fall to the ground, and pressed a boot down on them. "You've been responsible for dozens of successful campaigns. You've been a myriad-officer of the Yellow Army for eighty years, but the lack of promotion isn't due to a lack of opportunity. On the contrary: you were offered a promotion no less than seven times before they got the picture and stopped asking, and each time, it was turned down because you felt that you wouldn't be able to handle a larger command as well as you can handle what you have right now. Brilliant, simply brilliant, but that brilliance peaks with about a thousand people under your command. You can handle more than that well enough, but not as well as with just a thousand."

She closed her eyes for a second, inhaled, exhaled. "We sent twenty thousand crack troops to take a starport town and with your help, a single myriad, a single force a thousand soldiers strong, made sure that a small town of twelve hundred people would be immortalized forever in the minds of both armies, but especially The Green's, as the killing fields of Canterbury. The Yellow knows as well as we do just how important you are. We spent fourteen years figuring out where you were and how to get to you."

The myriad-officer smiled sadly. "Canterbury? I never heard of it. I suppose that this is why I'm dying today."

"Only four hundred of our people survived those killing fields and we still didn't get the starport. You pulled an Atlantis out on us and, if anything, you did it better in Canterbury than we did in Atlantis. We needed to take the town in order to keep The Yellow from reinforcing that region. We needed to keep those reinforcements away so that we could take that region, so that we could split the continent down the middle. Once we took the continent, we would have taken nearly the entirety of that world's industrialized zones. Our victory on that world, Brahe, would come with the taking of Canterbury, and after that..." Glory sighed. "With that foothold, and another three hundred years, we could have taken an entire spiral arm in that galaxy."

"How long from now?"

"The killing fields began five years from today, subjective to your time. You would kill all but four hundred of us over the course of two months." Glory lit up another pair of cigarettes and inhaled deeply. She let her breath out slowly. "Now? Brahe's a meat grinder. Neither of us can afford to give up there. We may win yet, but literally millions of soldiers will have died to do what would have, without you, needed only two hundred thousand deaths. We thought that that would be the worst-case scenario, but we never knew that they had slipped Myriad-Officer Jacob Bindan into Canterbury."

"Thank you, Sergeant Cheshire. For letting us do this away from my family."

"The only difference between you and I is the color of the uniforms we wear on the field of battle," she repeated back to him. "This is standard protocol, in the end; when there's nothing you can do to stop it, the least we can do is not kill you in front of civilians if we can manage it."

"Still, thank you."

A pause.

"An operation like this is going to have three components," Jacob said. "We're the first one. The second one is laying down a temporal anchor, so that no matter what The Yellow does, no amount of time travel will change the fact that, on this day, I was terminated by your side. The third one is a distraction, a diversion. An assault on a scale large enough to give The Yellow no choice but to divert their forces from trying to stop my death, and the temporal anchor, in order to keep this entire world under their control." Another pause. "An entire planetary invasion, all for the sake of a single assassination. Of course, you'll be leaving once you're done, unless you were intensely successful. Where are you attacking?"

"We're setting up sun-bombs in Angelou City and Trilhaum. One of them will go off in..." Glory looked at her watch. "Two minutes ago, actually."

"No." He looked about ready to take her neck in his hands, even though he would die before he could move them a foot. Only his absolute stillness was keeping the others was sniping him out right now, no doubt.

"Don't worry. No more than one of them is going to be going off. Prematurely. Not nearly at full power and, again, only one. We don't want to boil this world any more than you do. But The Yellow, even though they know this, won't be able to risk it. Maybe we accidentally put The Psycho in charge. Maybe one of them will accidentally go off, and with the first one already detonated, the second will have an exponential effect. So they will choose between you and this whole world. They will choose between Canterbury and this world."

"They'll... choose this world."

Not simply a statement. A plea to be reassured that, as valuable as he was, they wouldn't choose him. He had his children on this world, after all.

"They'll choose this world," she told him. It was true, after all.

"Thank you, Sergeant Cheshire."

"Are you ready?"

He nodded. She put out her cigarettes and stowed them in a pocket for later.

The gun which she pulled out was a three-chambered revolver made from the sort of alloys which could only be made in zero gravity. The bullets were inscribed with prayers, written in a font so small that the naked eye would barely be able to tell that they were there.

"Myriad-officer Jacob Bindan of The Yellow, you have done honor to your Color. You have done great things. No soul, Green or Yellow, could reproach you for your deeds. You could have done no better than you have done in your life." She pressed the gun to his forehead. "We honor you by giving you a clean death, and giving you the reason for it, and it is an honor for me to be your executioner. Go forth and prepare a place for us, if there is a world beyond this which we have not reached."

There was a sound like thunder, and the myriad-officer fell to the ground.

"Doco le verish, da Jacob Bindan," she muttered and then she turned and walked away. Past the crew moving in to verify his death and send word to activate the temporal anchor. Past the snipers set up to make sure that everything would go cleanly. Past the little road leading to the little house in which he had lived, and where his wife and his children lived, and did not yet know that he was dead, and were just now learning that a city of tens of millions was bathed in flames.

Within the hour, Glory would be on her way home again, home again, centuries and timelines and galaxies away, and be fast asleep, dreaming of her own young son, and of a time when she didn't have to talk to people before she killed them.

Hello! maybe i'm just tired has its roots in an attempt to mix together the magical girl and Lovecraftian genres into a horrific, but working, mixture, and while the degree to which it hits on the former of the two is up for debate, I'm not too concerned with that anymore, since the story and universe have spun off into something coherent anyways, and the attempt at a fusion was only a means to get my brain started on a path for worldbuilding.

The story takes place in the late 1950s, in an alternate world which is greatly based off of the world shown in The Repairer of Reputations, a short story in Robert W. Chambers' 1895 anthology The King in Yellow. The anthology is also the basis of a lot more of the novel, and while the universe at large is more based on Lovecraft's works, the plot of the novel draws more elements from Chambers.

I'm not too concerned with matching exact speech patterns as they would have been in the 1950s (at least for the time being), since I'm more concerned with getting the actual content out, and then editing it to match more closely. The same thing applies to slang, since I've found that I write it more realistically when I change things after, because otherwise I tend to use it a bit more than it should be. There are a few exceptions here and there, most notably with the word "fug(ging)," which, according to what I've read, was used commonly in sci-fi stories of the time period in order to get past censors while also getting the point and feel of the word across to the reader. The use of that word, as opposed to its counterpart, seemed to fit Marie.

The novel alternates between transcripts of the taped sessions Marie is taking with her new therapist, Sheila Thurgood,* and then periods of prose, usually around four thousand words long (although the first "interlude" is much shorter).

I'll normally be posting an update every Monday, but I'm putting up something now so that I can't put it off or forget about it any longer.

I'm not going to be doing much wandering around on this site and will primarily be looking over stories based on what's recommended to me, but if you comment here, and you've got a story somewhere on this site (or anywhere else, for that matter), give me a link and I'll make sure to return the favor.

Ask as many questions as pop into your mind about the world, and please tell me whether these are things which you think most readers would want explained now, or if it's just a question which has popped into your mind and which can be be answered later on in the story. I'll still answer it immediately, but I'd like to know if the story should be edited to answer that question earlier on (if, indeed, it's something which had occurred to me as a question which someone would ask in the first place) or if it's fine being answered later on in the story.

Anyways...

*Surprisingly, the last name came out of a random generator based on the US Census, and so there's absolutely no meaning behind the choice of name.