SPACETRAVEL's Serial Thing

Machine Elves is part of this. Sometime, I'll just get to paste it in as an update. Maybe a bit altered, but still; easy. As I said, brothers.

And...I can't respond about how Lux deals with things without giving a spoiler. He has no subtlety at all.

Some writing.

"Like a dentist's chair, but meaner" is a wonderful description. You really do have a way of putting images into words.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Thanks! Actually, I wondered if that was too simplistic, but maybe it only takes a few words. I could've been more descriptive, but this was not the place to drag on and on.

Also, as per Haven's request, drawing the child of Baron Samedi and Shiva. It might be finished tonight.

Some writing.

Ok, here.◊ A Blue Man in its natural habitat...sort of. Sorry about the quality. I'll probably write some more tonight as well.

edited 1st Jan '10 11:11:46 PM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

Lux II was given three chances to edit this post. He spent all three.

I cannot tell you why I did this.

---

Conceivably, time could have passed before Lux became aware that he was in another place. Only Aubrey knew. Whatever had happened before then probably had not been worth seeing, anyway. Maybe Aubrey typing while Lux waited in a boring void. Maybe a loading screen, not just seen, but experienced. Yeah, Lux decided; he would pretend that he had been spat out among the stars instantly and not give it another thought.

He still felt nothing. There was nothing to feel. He had no body—except eyes, maybe, but he doubted it after a second. Eyes could be felt blinking, and he felt no eyes. Without them, the sensation more resembled having thought the image into existence. As well, the peripheral vision of eyes had a limit. He had never seen in three hundred sixty degrees before. If he had had a stomach, he might have experienced an initial nausea, but he could not feel his stomach from so far away. If he had any body at all, he approximated it at a sphere covered in lidless eyes, and they had a lot to take in.

The dendrites, the Blue Men called this place of limbo between virtual locations, as its branches resembled the inside of a brain. No, not a real brain. Drawings for children, animations, the ones made of tangled, color-coded connections. Threads of several hues fired between nodes until they drew, by chance, shapes that appeared to form planes and twist. A black widow built her nest the same way—enough thread and nothing will get through. Lux could not move. Spheres of eyes don’t move.

That was right; Aubrey had allowed Lux nothing with which to control the machine. He had nothing to speak with, even. If he had foreseen this hyperbolic dominance Aubrey would assert over him here, he would never have submitted himself to it in the first place. There will be revenge, he thought. Thought, the only thing that was still his. He thought loudly, wringing everything mote of control out of thought that he could and throwing his inner voice into that cosmic brain with all his might. You only get to look down on me once, you fat bastard. Like everyone else!

Right on cue: “You are an adaptive one.” Aubrey’s voice came from every direction, like a god’s. “Most new immersive users are throbbing with panic symptoms by now. I was prepared to console you.”

Die.

“This machine surprises me, too—how subtly it reads your bodily signs. Anger?” For the first time, Lux heard Aubrey laugh. He had no need to keep Lux here, just gloating now, taking advantage of Lux’s harmless state to let go of the politeness people showed their superiors to keep from getting hurt. “As a narcissist, this must be difficult for you, but one of my most initially uncomfortable visitors came to enjoy it quite intensely. I confess to the awkwardness of standing beside that."

A new, bright blue thread shot past Lux, coming from over the horizon and going over the horizon. Someone else—someone lucky—was getting somewhere.

Aubrey purred on, “The Fates have a program that will allow you a pseudo-physical avatar and a measure of free will when you arrive. After all, oracles are useless unless you can ask them your questions. I won’t ask what you want from them, but then, I can take you back out here effortlessly.“

Lux seethed. He had will, but nothing but will. He had enough free will to remember how diseased the man he had killed up in the bar had looked, to imagine slashing Aubrey’s face with the same bottle so that if he didn’t bleed out, he would have a chance of a slower death…you can’t seee thiiis…

“You may find the journey a bit uncomfortable, now. I’ll spare you a mistake I made with the last one and give your consciousness another rest if I’m notified your stomach is contracting.”

So it could get worse. Lux was tipsy. This would not last long. Another thread came—a red one, and it stopped with him. A node slid on it toward him like an opaque red bead on a string. It came from above; gravity impelled it, and it fell faster as it approached. It was bigger than his ball of eyes. Oh, shit.

edited 4th Apr '10 10:27:55 PM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

Oh, holy shit, girl. That's a hell of a world you've created there. I kinda want to try it and kinda am scared witless by it.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

...

Even if I'll never be publishable, it only takes one person connecting to this to make continuing feel worth it. That's not attention whoring...right?

Also, thanks to a link from Hilarity Ensues, this story now has a title:

The Dark Triad

Firstly, because it's deceptive as all hell, sounding like a generic fantasy title that refers to the Sauron Triplets instead of personality deficiencies. Secondly, because "narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy" could be the Langley family motto—we'll find out what messed them up so badly in due time.

Would it be too much to ask to...um...put the title in the thread name...? Sorry; I know it's been changed before.

edited 3rd Jan '10 11:04:25 PM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

Oh yes, and please, please tell me if you see any of these things, which are criticisms I am getting from various sources/concerns of my own:

• Flat characters that can't be connected with
• Lack of characterization/people you know nothing about but are expected to care for
• No emotional tension
• Humorous where it's not supposed to be
• Inconsistent, random perspective
• Generally unrefined work
• Level of writing that is below where a 20-year-old with plenty of practice should be working at (IMPORTANT)
• Overusing anything
• Failure to adequately convey what is going on
• Purposeless imagery
• Sense of intellectual weakness behind the writing or the writer's general unfamiliarity/inexperience with their own language/world

Nothing new tonight; maybe tomorrow. Generating confidence takes time.

edited 3rd Jan '10 11:40:37 PM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

• Flat characters that can't be connected with

Not so far.

• Lack of characterization/people you know nothing about but are expected to care for

Not so far.

• No emotional tension

See earlier post about "Wanna try it/scared witless by it"

• Humorous where it's not supposed to be

Humor sneaks up in the oddest places. I laughed at the "Like a dentist's chair, but meaner" line. Doesn't mean it was out of place.

• Inconsistent, random perspective

Once in a while, usually due to pronouns with fuzzy antecedants, but nothing that can't be dealt with in the polishing stages.

• Generally unrefined work

You said this is first draft, so "refined" shouldn't even be a consideration.

• Level of writing that is below where a 20-year-old with plenty of practice should be working at (IMPORTANT)

Impossible to tell.

• Overusing anything

Not so far.

• Failure to adequately convey what is going on

Sometimes — see comments above about "first draft" and "not something to worry about now."

• Purposeless imagery

Incredible imagery, yes. Purposeless? No, not as far as I can tell.

• Sense of intellectual weakness behind the writing or the writer's general unfamiliarity/inexperience with their own language/world

Oh, hell no.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I just want you to know that the reason I'm not singing your praises is because I'm incredibly jealous.

Oh, this is fine. I mean at parts that are pretty obviously supposed to be sad, nightmare fuel, etc. But it shouldn't be much of a problem here because everything is over-the-top and can have an amusing side.

@Imagery: Sometimes I wonder if I should have gone into costume or set design, thus leaving characterization/plot/sense-making to people better at it and doing what I do best, but there are just no classes on that here, and while I tried in high school, my offers were kind of ignored. If you couldn't act, you were forgettable to the theater department. Sadly, without a job, you're nothing but a person insufferably obsessed with style.

The prospect of being unlikely to ever, ever have a hand in designing costumes for a science fiction film makes me sad. That stuff is like...my entire sketchbooks.

edited 4th Jan '10 3:03:19 PM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

I did write an update tonight...but the wrong one. Sorry. Soon, though, I'll be able to post two in one night.

I'll be back to working on this is the correct order as soon as I can.

Some writing.

This post is short and did not take long to edit.

Also, though it might not be clear now, I've realized that I am trying to say something with this story. As it goes on, it would be great if someone could let me know if it's coming through clearly. And while warped power dynamics aren't it (sorry, Haven), that's probably because they're just all over the place in all of my writing.

---

Once more, the track of Lux’s awareness skipped, and like a repeatedly skipping record, it annoyed him.

Just when he had started growing accustomed to having no body…well, damn; those were feet his eyes pointed at. Like a thing that had just been switched on, he was posed neutrally, his feet a measured distance apart and his hands flat at his sides. Physical it wasn’t, but it felt fine. Maybe even a bit better. Definitely better, though he could not put words to how, as if this were the only self he knew. His clothes were the same. He touched his face and got a black bruise of lipstick on his hand, as always.

He looked up and discovered by laughing that he had a voice. The Fates lived in the most cliché dwelling he had ever seen. If people were going to start living in digital homes, someone had to do it. Somebody had to get the black-and-lime number themed setting over with, and the Fates had taken on the trouble. The curved lines that traced the peaked ceiling of the hallway Aubrey had dropped him into still had their axes and their labels attached, which spanned the empty space beneath like very thin supports. Each could have impaled three of the Langley skyscraper and gone out the other side with length to spare. The walls—line after line dropped straight down; undefined, undefined, undefined. In the perpendicular direction, his feet rested on nothing. And of course, both directions before him appeared to extend infinitely. “Enough, London! Which way?”

His demand was shouted back to him from all directions, but nowhere among the echoes of his own voice did he hear Aubrey’s.

“Found a new way to screw with me, eh?” But it failed this time. Lux did not feel helpless, but confidant. Standing between two identical wrong directions, he had never before felt he possessed himself so completely. He felt himself running only after the wave of elation calmed, in the direction he had been facing initially, assuming Aubrey was too sophisticated in his teasing to settle for pointing him the wrong way. If Lux encountered a subtler trick, he could jump out of it—he ran along the wall for a few paces just because he felt that light.

The hall only grew from here in size and intricacy. Why not build a city in here, or two? It would be safe from the rain. As Lux stuck to the wall on his right, he could see the angelic gargoyles every mile and slowed to squint through the axes that nearly smothered their traced images. He should have been tired after the number of miles it took to get to the end, but not here.

Still, he filled the hall—or was it a planet?—with echoes of his curses when he hit a wall with no door. It reached skyward, cutting through the semitransparent ceiling like something more than a wall in a palace, like the outer wall of a reality. The Fates were not here, but either behind this wall or all the way back through and beyond where he had begun running. Finding the door or retracing his footsteps, both ways involved a lot more time. By his reckoning, he had been connected to the immersive for hours, most of it spent running. By Aubrey’s reckoning, longer, counting the blackouts. “Why do you make it so damn hard? Come ‘ere to talk to me if I’m so welcome here!”

Two of three things responded to his call. The Fates did not. His own voice did. The door did. An axis with numbers extending into the thousands blinked into existence on the wall above him at a height of half the skyscraper, and then the door slid along it to him from the other end of the sanctuary as if suspended on a wire.

Lux clapped his hands once with another surge of his limitless energy, but if only he could see the door’s designs. They might have been more intricate than anything that could be produced in the physical realm, but the axes blotted out the details with straight green lines, giving few glimpses of the curves that rested on them and drew their pictures. The effect was of scribbles; only one shape was clear—a doorknob, insulting him by being at the level of his forehead.

After yelling at the doorknob to move down and waiting a moment with his arms crossed, his impatience overtook his pride, and he turned it.

---

(Who's been able to stand it so far?)

edited 5th Apr '10 11:39:06 AM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

I'm still here. And everything I've said about it so far still stands. It's fascinating, it's rough in spots, and I'm still hooked.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Tomorrow, this will have another entry. Time will be made. This is to make myself do it.

Yeah, no. School, android things, etc.

edited 13th Jan '10 1:15:54 AM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

This post has been edited with the stick of blunt and unrefined editing.

The abomination continues and gets more abomination-ish. The problem may be Freudian; after all, this is everything I've ever been afraid to write about. It has to sound like child's work at first because the writer is moving to a new phase of maturity, and a starting point is needed. In that case, I must work through it.

---

The new room closed back in on him, still featureless, but smaller, and in it, they had been waiting at the door. Right at the door, and he walked through the sensation of icy water, but inside and out. He recoiled, freezing, expecting his upper body to be wet. It wasn’t.

“Sorry, Lux,” said the source of the cold, a cloud of mist, in a stilted male voice.

No…no, not mist. Mist does not come shaped like a human head, especially not a human head the size of an entire small child. The sight made the will to scold the head for talking to Lux like his mother drop out of Lux’s head and pool in his feet unused. As did most of his blood, or so it felt. Lux stepped away from the chill the head emanated, having to try to remain standing.

Aubrey spoke—“I didn’t want to intervene, but your blood pressure has dropped suddenly. Compose yourself.”

Lux's face heated. His restrictive clothing gave him a tendency to faint easily, and he preferred to keep that as secret as possible.

The fact of what he looked at had just hit him, though he had known of its nature since he had first heard legends of the three Blue Men who had ascended to spirithood and called themselves the Fates. That head, one of them, was the digital imprint of a human’s consciousness. Whether the life in the grooves of the imprint was the same as the one that had been in the head of the obsolete body was as much the Fate’s question as Lux’s. Either way, however they had done it, he looked at a being that had never existed before, and now only three of it did exist, in here. Someone had uploaded their mind. Really. This was the nature of the godlike Fates, the future Aubrey risked his life to protect.

The secret practice could have become commonplace by now, as the M6 had discovered a means of abandoning one’s body thusly either nine or ten years ago—Lux’s sources had disagreed on the date. The agency’s reasons for abandoning the idea he had never found out, but it had been locked away where not even the darkest Blue Man could detect it, no less salvage it. No one in the world but the three in this room.

The omniscience, perhaps, was what made Lux's head throb. Near omniscience, nearer than anyone had ever come. Most Snofflandish citizens had access to most online information, but could only recall and synthesize bits at a time, limited by their physical capacities. The Fates had merged with the whole of it—all was as much part of their minds now as memories. They had the capacities of computers with the sentience of humans, a combination that had only ever been faked. If oracles existed, here were oracles.

The one Lux had walked into drifted backwards, and he got a better look. The surface of the hairless, floating head was, rather than smooth, composed of the outer tips of streams of colorless light that emanated from a central node inside.They shifted like beams of light in dark water as the form moved its mouth in speech. “If it isn’t apparent, I was waiting for you. I’m Alexi.”

Lux had been expecting something less anticlimactic, like Thor or Lord Thunderhead. No, he hadn’t. He hadn’t known what to expect. He reined in his breath. Losing consciousness would ruin everything, and Aubrey would be so amused.

Alexi waited through Lux’s silence. “Your reaction is nothing to be ashamed of. Take your time. We made plenty for you.”

And that is how one gets Lux Langley II to speak immediately. “No need, Lex,” he snapped, composure returning instantly.

Two voices giggled at him gently, the sound one makes when they see a kitten falling over. They had known that would make him speak...didn’t you? This made Lux too uncomfortable to be angry. He had never heard such an affectionate sound directed at him before. They likely knew this, too. Public information on him had much to say on his morbid father and absent prostitute mother, and his own manner did not suggest a man who had ever been loved any more than one who could love. Did these two Fates love him?

Two…two of them. There was the other, a woman like none Lux had ever seen before. Her adult face and understated features looked too old on her body, and her head too large. Ideals never seem eerie until seen in practice, especially naked ideals. She had monochromatic outlines of breasts that lacked visible areolas, and down below, couldn’t see a thing. Her nearly human features activated no attraction to her in Lux, and she carried herself like she knew and liked this.

“Annecy.” She looked up and down his body. “You look just as you do in our sources from many years—you never change.”

Annecy sounded like a human female, but there were breaks in her voice where there should not have been, between words. As if the sounds assembled themselves from recorded material that her lips had made when she had still had a physical face. That was likely it, and Lux’s voice, now that he looked for it when he spoke, sounded even choppier. They had read immense amounts of material into microphones to prepare for their uploading. All his voice could be drawn from in cyberspace were many videos with him mumbling in the background among the Lords and a few, mercilessly reproduced, of him calling the Prime Minister a string of unmentionables that Lux had never seen the humor in. The Prime Minister was a string of unmentionables.

He spoke, and the sound grated on his ears. “But you’re different than I imagined...” He could hear the static of the video’s degeneration in quality over copies and would have been annoyed on any other occasion. “Do you guys have titles?”

“Annecy. We prefer one name each; it’s simple. What would you prefer we call you?”

“Your Grace works fine. Why do you ask? That uppity lard arsed flirt tell you my name?”

“From his reports, Mr. London saved our lives four times this week. In between that, he did, Lux Langley II,” said Annecy flatly. “And I ask because you have neither primary nor secondary sexual characteristics. Alexi, neither. This place read you that way—you’re smiling like it read you correctly. With what should we refer to you?”

So that was what felt better than normal.

“I would prefer that you don’t pay it any mention,” said Lux, glowing somewhere in his chest. He hoped it was not visible; this was too serious a meeting. The remembrance of what he was here to discuss with the Fates produced, wrapped in the glowing feeling, a colder twinge that was unfamiliar to him. Whatever it was trying to become, it died trying. He did smile at Annecy, for once not with the usual narcissictic shark's grin. “I’m not here for me, but for you.” He looked between the two Fates for something that was on the tip of his tongue, something that felt off about Annecy and Alexi. Besides the transparency, one of them only being a head, and the like. “Wait…wait…there were supposed to be three of you.” He looked around… “Where’s the other—“ …finishing with up, where his nose went icy going through the smooth ghost face of a young man his age, who stood upside down in the air with his face downturned, observing him. A mirror image of Lux but for black hair that whipped icily across his eyes and an ectomorphic frame.

Annecy explained. “It’s Fang.”

He didn’t look like a Fang, thought Lux, and released a wordless scream into Fang's face for hurting his eyes. Fang reacted only by rising several meters, continuing to look down serenely.

“He’s new; he isn’t used to his voice yet.” Annecy met eyes with Fang and smiled; he returned the smile, and their gaze lasted long enough to make Lux suspect that some other kind of communication flowed between the two. “When Alexi and I were new, we flew all the time, too. So would you, he says.”

edited 6th Apr '10 12:03:24 PM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

I

I...

I have no words.

Affy, I don't know what it is, but there is something incredibly powerful in this, something that is simply spellbinding.I know that part of it is the little things like "giggled at him gently, the sound one makes when they see a kitten falling over." But there's something else, too, something that I can't name or even describe.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

@Madrugada: Powerful sleep deprivation? I wouldn't know. I'm usually horrified when I read my stuff over, so if there's something neat to it, I couldn't explain it. Is it in the imagery and design? Maybe the dynamics? People?

Oh yeah, and some drawings. You don't know anything about these two at all. The first is Lux III, though, so you are free to wonder how that happened and if you want to know. You'll find out anyway. The second is guard Captain Kenichi Zeppelin, who doesn't reflect the ill temper of his employer, Lux II, and definitely not now, because he doesn't even work for Lux until after a timeskip.

[1]◊ [2]◊

EDIT: Or it could be me totally giving restraint a break for this story and laying bare the mind of a writer person who writes stuff growing up. It has its ill effects, too, but perhaps the release can be sensed.

edited 18th Jan '10 9:14:24 AM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

I think this is my favorite part of the whole thing so far, but admittedly that's just because it appeals to abstraction and light, the sorts of things I love.

I'm really looking forward to where it goes from here.

Productivity is for people without internet connections. -Count Dorku

Hold that thought.

edited 18th Jan '10 9:50:20 AM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

I've just caught up with this.

I'm afraid I don't have any criticism to offer. I just thought I'd let you know that I enjoyed it a lot, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text-Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The Staff

I'm getting caught up with homework today, but later, that will mean more opportunity to work on this.

Some writing.

Another picture for you in lieu of an actual update, young Vox Langley at age 18.◊ He had very long hair until he moved out—no one cared about him enough to remind him to cut it, and he was too stressed to remember himself, what with live bears running around the skyscraper, officially appointed as watchmen. They didn't take well to him, and his father, Lux I, and his older brother, Lux II, thought it was hilarious.

Nonetheless, Vox incessantly made the two of them gifts, small mechanical devices that got more colorful and time-consuming the more desperate he became for their nonexistant appreciation.

The worst bits of his appearance, like deep set eyes that look bruised and low, hollow cheekbones, get even more prominent in adulthood when he fucks with it. He also has an awfully long nose that does not show up from this perspective—not a conventionally sexy person. His pinprick pupils, a fixture of his appearance I've never mentioned, are either due to fear or being on something. Not because he enjoys drugs, but in hopes that if someone saw him freaking the hell out or having some grotesque allergic reaction (happens a lot), they might hold him until it wears off. This has never happened; usually he just ended up in an alley or on the lobby floor with his brother's name written several times on his face.

He looks especially bad here because it's five in the morning; his brother got his portrait done first, and he dragged it out for four hours by throwing stuff at the artist.

"Do you understand what I mean when I say to keep still?"

"No...bitch."

Teal deer: this◊, except with a boat.

edited 20th Jan '10 11:38:17 PM by AFGNCAAP

Some writing.

For some reason, this reminds me a lot of Gankutsuou.

edited 21st Jan '10 3:12:57 AM by EnglishIvy

...holy shit. The Future: check. Manipulated noblemen: check. Premise on drugs: check. Design porn: check. Odd blue-skinned chaps: check. Gender/sexuality mashup: check. Mythical trickster: check.

I swear I have never encountered that series before. Reassuringly, though, it appears to come from a different angle, and they're going to diverge faster than you know.

Some writing.