"Be respectful to your elders."

Even if they have silly prejudices. Even if they won't give things a chance because it sounds stupid to them. Even if they don't, can't, and won't understand. Even if they're wrong. Even if they have no evidence for their silly "factual" claims. Even if they're terribly restrictive in ways that make no sense. Even if they say what they do from secondhand or even third-hand perspective.

It's a pretty fair guess that it was the elders who came up with that mantra in the first place.

Needless to say, I have an irritating grand-aunt with no personality. She's the kind of person who puts "anything but country!" on the spot where you're supposed to put music preferences on Facebook. The kind of person who will argue with you forever on why "people who use curse words have limited vocabulary and aren't very smart."

I'm just... tired of being the person who has to deal with all of that stereotypist elitist bullshit. But I guess I'm not the only one.

I need inspiration, and need it now.

It's odd. I can't remember a moment in my life that I haven't had an amazing idea for a story in my head, sustaining me with characters and plot and setting like mental lifeblood. And now... nothing. I have enough characters, sure, but... they're so meaningless. All of them feel the same to me, not because they're similar at all, just because they're old. Why? Why do I feel so creatively exhausted, like I won't be able to come up with anything new, like I've exhausted all of my ideas?

I need to feel that rush. It is seriously like a drug to me. I feel like there are people out there, characters, waiting for me to summon them up. But I can't. I can't come up with anything new or original. I can't create anything that hasn't been created by me. I've had the faerie shapeshifters, the weird deformed people, the steampunk dark romance, the guardian created to protect a magic girl, the girl and her robot, the cute little kid coloring book story about kids and their giant plushy dragons, various demons and roleplay characters, superheroes, humanoid stars. Why isn't there anything new?

Why does it seem like I've done everything there is to do?!

One-Shot: Fire and Lightning (tbe)

Avalesq was made to be a carnivore, to be clever, to be cunning and crafty and conniving, to hunt down little delectable rats like this... hellhound. Hellhounds in Rannigthein, the lightning world, were the most common of the common, barring nymphs. And nymphs were... well, usually, either stupid, or downright irritatingly difficult to catch. And the stupid ones were never satisfying, didn't give him an adrenaline rush, just like eating a steak doesn't give anyone an adrenaline rush. Unless you were forced to eat it off the back of a loosely bound rabid tiger. Usually, however, that wasn't the case.
    But this one. Short and skinny, as pale as the moon with hair as red as the paint on a stop sign. And that face. He could always remember a pretty face. It wasn't the prettiness that ever caught his eye, when he became transfixed with his prey. It was the intelligence. Some people say that you can identify intelligence - it's a certain gleam in the eye, a quickness to the movement. He disagreed. You had to meet someone, make eye contact with them, watch them for more than a moment. She had seen this one in the marketplace before, had spoken with her briefly. He could see that something in her had registered his wrongness, that she was fighting an instinctive urge to run away from him. That was intelligence.
    And here she was again, as if placed here to give him a satisfying object for the chase. There were some cyrei, hellhounds, who would fight to the death in their... relatively human... form, simply because that was the one they were comfortable in. He knew, somehow, that she would do no such thing. It had to be a psychological clue - it was only ever the cyrei loyal to their hellhound shape that loped across the hills like that, that knew exactly how to take cover under trees and in the underbrush.
    He swiftly, silently, bounded up to a ridge slightly above his vantage point, in order to continue following her with his eyes. His body was much like a stag's; the legs, the body, the neck, the skull, the horns. He would have been the ultimate predator animal, completely fooling its prey, if not for the jagged carnivorous teeth that could rip a shark in half or the long, muscled serpentine tail that whipped behind him, he would have just been a deer. Just a huge, badass deer.
    He backed up quickly when she seemed to detect something through the limbs that were his cover, and he closed his glowing yellow eyes, trusting nature to camouflage everything else on his body. When he opened them again several long seconds later, she was gone.
    He picked up her scent again. She had gone... into the thinner woods. He huffed and followed, knowing that it would be more difficult to simply watch there.
    Finally, he spotted her again. She had briefly come to a kneel, examining something on the ground. He could see her eyes moving, her fingers in a fluid motion across the thin, dry grass, could practically see her heartbeat in her neck.
    He paced around her brief resting spot. When she seemed to have stopped paying attention - when she sat down, he sprung from the thickest of cover he could find.
    His teeth were so close, his hooves inches from colliding with her slight skeletal frame - she was almost too easy -
    But no. She was suddenly standing, with a long, thin iron knife in each hand, one flying and one instantly up where his throat would shortly be. He pulled back with alarm, avoiding the fatal throat slice, but not fast enough to dodge the first cut, which slid deeply into his right front leg.
    Fighting obscene curse words - he never spoke in this shape, especially during the hunt - he made a cheap shot toward her stomach, that unprotected stomach with only a single layer of white cotton between his sharp hooves and some seriously vulnerable vital organs - but again she dodged, swinging out of his reach, and made another quick jab at him, this time only two shallow cuts across his ribs which hurt nonetheless. He lunged with his teeth once again, but caught only hair, red hair that tasted like the phosphorous on the ends of matches.
    But then she was running. She seemed to have decided that a fight wasn't worth it, and off she sprinted, taking only five good steps before shedding her skin and becoming a powerful, muscular dog, exactly as Avalesq had predicted only minutes before.
    Now was the chase. His heart pounded satisfyingly as he heard his breath get heavy, his feet pound the ground. Hellhounds ran fast, but they were terrible jumpers. He simply had to corner her, or, better yet, jump just right...
    And there, he saw, in midair. He had her.
    His front hooves collided sharply with her lower back, and he heard something crack as she half-collapsed, rolled over, scrambled with her front feet, clawed the earth.
    He reached down, ready to rip her throat out. He could smell her blood from inches above her neck.
    She lit on fire, consuming the grass around her, and igniting his nose.
    He put it out quickly, but the fiery grass spread around, and he couldn't stop it. He could only try to avoid her body, which was covered in flame.
    When he reached a safe distance away, he watched the flames die out. Cyrei flames always died out - they only began at all because of the phosphorous in their hair. Not many of them could do it.
    Her hair was a pale, ashen brown now, tousled and thin. Avalesq stepped forward cautiously, leaned down to examine her face. Her eyes were shut, her breathing heavy; she was helpless, having exhausted her last line of defense. But there was something... wrong.
    He couldn't bite.
    It wasn't a matter of physical limitation. He knew that he could close his jaw on her throat and rip it out, right then and there, gracefully and deliciously. He knew he was hungry. He hadn't had a meal in a long time. He needed at least a big meal a month, and it'd been a while.
    Why couldn't he make himself do it?
    There were little voices in the back of his head, murmuring, Don't kill this girl. You need this girl. Don't kill this girl. You need this girl... Don't kill this girl. It's dangerous...
    He'd never had intuition before. These voices certainly weren't his... and he didn't trust them. There were too many powerful mental magicians in the fairy lands for him to trust an intuition he'd never had before.
    Hesitantly, he leaned forward once more and pricked the flesh just once, a little bit, with the largest and strongest of his teeth.
    An electric shock ran through him, painful and immediate. His head pounded. He felt the little bit of skin go down his esophagus and settle on the bottom of his stomach. The magic of his species took hold, immediately consuming that little bit of skin. He felt his muscular and skeletal systems grind together briefly...
    There he was - she was - a redhead cyrei, identical to his/her prey. He examined his pale fingers, his perfectly round fingernails in the shape of half-moons, his skinny ribs and his painfully dislocated pelvis, a pelvis which he immediately righted through sheer force of will. When the change finally stopped, he groaned and reverted. Always this happened, every time he ate someone. He had billions of shapes inside, ready for him to use.
    He tried again. Teeth on skin, single scrape - fierce, painful shock. He whimpered - whimpered! - and took a small step back.
    Nothing to do then. He began to walk away.
    Don't walk away, you stupid snake, the voice said. You wait for her to wake up.
    He turned back toward her, disinclined to disobey the "voice" again.

Renaissance felt the red phosphorous in her hair regenerating itself, felt her entire lower body out of alignment. She concentrated hard enough that it slid back into place. That was one of the things she had mastered, while teaching herself magic. She could fix almost any sprain or dislocation, mend any mild bruises or light cuts.
    When it was done, she registered the mild breathing by her side. Memories came rushing back - seeing an emerald-green sianach tail in the woods, trying to take it down, failing, running, firing up. She rolled onto her back and scrabbled back a foot or two, panicking, panicking, trying to will her fire phosphorous to return right then and there, but it was physically impossible...
    But no. It was the man she'd seen in the marketplace, the man who had given her the weird feeling that she had to run and hide from him.
    Sianach, she thought, connecting the dots; This man is a shapeshifter.
    "Good morning," he said. "Let's not bullshit each other. I'm Avalesq. And you are?"
    She stared at him blankly.
    "...excellent name. Now, let's get down to business: I've decided not to eat you... for now."

A little B&W treat for everybody

Play Black and White on Kongregate.

One-Shot: Carbon Soul (may be extended)

 

Humanity despises a creature it cannot see, and so it despised Carbon. One who looked upon Carbon went slowly insane, but not before they could relate what they'd seen to others. And those, too, would explore the earthy depths of the world and find the oldest living life form, born before this universe began; a privileged few heard her speak to them, listened for hours, and passed the knowledge she had related to them on. But eventually, when those who knew of her existence began to notice the insanity of Carbon's viewers, they wore blindfolds to protect themselves. As more of these people survived and remained sane, they gained a following. A local newspaper had a field day when a reporter spotted a group of blindfolded men and women descending into a dark cave beneath the ground, but no one reads small-town rags, anyway.

Carbon was kind to the life forms whose distant ancestors she had also known when they were little more than prokaryotic cells on the face of a waterless, treeless planet. Long ago, she had found this hunk of useless space rock and forced it to create life, because that is what those of Carbon's like were meant to do. They knew no higher authority - they were as gods, to spread the concept of existence through this universe, and all universes that would ever be.

Maybe they were gods.

The blindfolded men and women had become a culture, a family in and of themselves. They began to worship Carbon; they wrote a book on Carbon's accounts of the universe. She told them that she always had been, and always would be. She told them that not only did she maintain the natural laws as humanity knew them, but she was the natural laws, incarnate; her death, though impossible, would destroy all gravity, all physics, all processes of evolution. She had not caused the creatures of this world to become as they were - only enabled it.

Carbon could be more human than her followers could imagine, but she was also so completely something else that they could never forget who or what she was. Her "cult" had long forgotten what she looked like. She told them that she was everything and nothing, all at once; but that didn't satisfy anyone, so she simply said, "I have six arms, two legs, four wings and three tails." They were satisfied with that, to a point.

Centuries passed before one of her followers found a reason to doubt her authority, to challenge her. His name was Alix Caughneight, and the year 2500 CE had come and gone.

"Carbon," he asked, his blue blindfold wrapped tight, "you told us, long ago, that you could not be killed, but were it to be so, the natural laws of... evolution... would be a moot point, yes?"

"That and other things."

"But what if we were to... remove your soul?"

"It cannot be done."

"Break it, then?"

She paused. "One only wonders where your curiosity stems from, my child."

"I simply wonder about how the world works," he replied.

Carbon would not answer. But Alix knew it to be true. He researched all sorts of old records in the books where Carbon's wisdom had been recorded; he studied the texts of old religions from centuries before. And eventually he discovered how to shatter a soul.

Carbon discovered his plans and ripped away his blindfold as he greeted her, staring into his eyes. She was a sight to behold. Indeed, her description of herself had been true enough, but it didn't describe her as she truly was. She did, indeed, have six arms and two legs. As she moved, she was like a centipede, each finger scraping across the ground until she reared back on her legs and one pair of arms, her other two pairs reaching out to grab or push things aside. The pair closest to her head had four fingers; the next pair, five; the next, four; and she had six toes on each foot. In each limb, and on her sides, her skeletal structure was very distinctive and clear - her middle two pairs of arms had two more joints than any natural earth creature's.

She did, in fact, have three tails, all branching off of her spine; they were long and muscled, like snakes, but a dim, washed-out green comprised of not scales, but some other... skin sort of thing. They whipped around, slicing through tiny rocks as they would collide. And she did, in fact, have two sets of wings - feathered, but indescribably, completely unlike any bird's. Spines ran down her back, horns curled up from in front of her ears; her skull was halfway between a human's and a cat's; her mouth was like an owl's beak, but as she spoke, four rows of teeth on the top and bottom of her mouth glistened threateningly. But worst, oh, worst were her eyes, the flat yellow eyes of an old, decaying god.

Alix Caughneight killed himself that night, while the noises of the early spring crickets sang everyone else to sleep.

But his ideas refused to die. His father, mother, wife, and only child - all blindfolded followers of Carbon - discovered him, discovered his studies, and figured out what must have happened. A miniature battle went on between his family and those who still believed in Carbon, trusted her - but the Caughneight family gained supporters and sympathizers.

There was a brief struggle on the surface of the Earth, eventually - and the Caughtneights won.

On the last day of April, they approached Carbon in her underground dwelling, and Alix's widow stepped forward.

"Creature," she said, "considering your revelations and my husband's untimely insanity and death, we have come to break your soul. We no longer want your natural laws. Were they gone... we would evolve. Become that of which humanity dreams: grow wings, gills, rid ourselves of life-altering genetic illnesses. Alix only wanted what was best for our species, and you were selfish enough to kill him to spare your own life."

Carbon responded, "You do not want to do this."

"I do."

"You don't. You do not understand that to kill a god is to kill yourself ninety times over. That the laws that I hold power over keep you safe. That manipulating them is not so easy as you make it sound. Barring that, child, I can never truly die."

She only said, "I know." And she took a deep breath and removed her blindfold and stepped forward, and before Carbon could even look at her, she drew a hidden gun from her coat pocket and shot it into her skull, feeling the spells that Carbon herself had given them centuries before take effect.

Carbon felt the spells, felt Alix's widow die. And then, as she knew it would, she felt the force of the girl's soul rushing from her body puncture her own spirit, shatter it into pieces.

"I promise you," she murmured, "that you will regret this. A rubber band only stretches so far before it snaps."

And with a last glance at the corpse of the widow, she collapsed to the ground - unthinking, unmoving - a soulless creature, put into a deep sleep caused by a distinct lack of a quality of being that every living creature has.

Her soul had broken into billions of tiny pieces, yes - but they congealed as if magnetized to each other. Forced to vacate Carbon's body, they searched for another vessel... but what on earth could fit the soul of a god? They were forced to divide themselves.

Across the continent, six deformed newborns opened their dull, yellow eyes...

Stress, stress, stress.

Important semester-grade Biology tests on Monday and History that I didn't study and Geometry that I didn't even pay attention to this chapter on Wednesday. I don't have time to get on the computer, or let my rabbits out, or anything. I'd like to do a Let's Play of Majora's Mask for kicks or Alice: Madness Returns when it comes out in June, but I simply don't have time. Classes are spiraling into a horrible downward slide at a hundred and seventy degrees toward breakdown mode, by which I mean that it's getting to me.

I don't want to read Romeo and Juliet for the third time in as many years. I don't want to study ecosystems. I don't want to have obligations, responsibilities.

But I do. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

"Rio" and "Hop"

Rio was good mostly for the character design (i.e. the cockatoo villain, the crazy ornithologist, the awkward blue macaw Blu) and the very nice use of music and ambience. The variety of colors and the Black Eyed Peas actually worked very well for this movie. They didn't explore a lot of avenues that they probably should have (for instance, what kind of relationship were the woman, the ornithologist, and the little boy in at the end? I don't have a clear answer, even in retrospect). A lot of it felt very rushed - the premise in Minnesota (why did Blu's owner change her mind about letting him go to Rio de Janeiro?), the escape scene from the plane (Jewel giving up hope and Blu suddenly getting confident). But the rest... very fun. I loved the way they designed the people - large heads, skinny bodies, which made for good expression - and the blue macaws especially, because they had bodies that hadn't been anthropomorphized in the least, and they never once used their feathers as fingers, which has been a big thing for me for a while - call it a pet peeve. The script, while slightly rushed, as I said, was, overall, very entertaining, and delivered a lot of character development in effective, tiny packages, which made me actually cheer on the characters on occasion. I'm a person of plot and while it lacked a bit in that area, it also didn't completely make me go insane... so kudos!

However, Hop, like I very widely suspected it was going to be, and was dragged along to see with my family, was... frankly, agonizing. Think Alvin and the Chipmunks meets coming-of-age story meets... well, holiday-themed movie. If anyone's ever seen an animated film on the premise of a holiday that wasn't awful, please do tell what it was, because I want to prove you wrong. Frankly, for one, the music usage in this movie was horrible. The characters were supposed to be sympathetic, but I just ended up hating them for being stupid and complaining too much. (For instance: rabbit seeks shelter in playboy bunny mansion. Gets rejected after brief misunderstanding. Launch into loud, badly timed Guns 'n' Roses - "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," no less - then cut to "how could this day get any worse?!" Yeah, sure, your single homeless night in Hollywood has been awful, especially since you're a rabbit, and god forbid you sleep outdoors). People made decisions for little to no reason ("I've known I'm going to be the Easter bunny for, what, twenty years - never mind that rabbits apparently live for upwards of forty years, that bit's not important as long as the human timeline is kept consistent - and now that my dad's called my drumming thing a hobby, I suppose I'll run away with no forethought!"). And the writer(s) did a very bad thing in telling us how it was going to end at the very ending. At the very beginning, the narrator says, "I was the first Easter bunny! Here's how it happened." And so, I spent the entire movie, not wondering what was going to happen next, but instead thinking, When, WHEN is this story finally going to advance a little and this guy'll have his Easter bunny epiphany or whatever and the drumming rabbit will achieve his dreams blah blah blah? That was probably the biggest downfall of the film... no matter how nice it looked. To all those reviewers out there who said, "it sucked, but it's a kid movie, so whatever": for one, wouldn't you like your future generations to be allowed to view something more stimulating than this shit? And for two, not even children would like this movie.