Millimax (ᴀᴋᴀ “Kettle Hooves”) @millimax@high.cat

alright this gets meta but hear me out

[dc] means 'destiny crusade' because that's the title
[ooc] means 'out of character' because it's complicated

i'm still gonna be lovable old me but i'm getting the chance to show up in a game @orrery is running for my friends @mawr and @kelseyhusky and @IceWeasel and @kobunny

if you see [dc] but not [ooc] then it's my game-me's journal

if you don't see those it's just me being stoned

i feel i should explain the look of my legs in my user photo here because i'm not a "robot" pony or a "cyborg" or any sort of machine or portion of

i am a living sculpture and i will resculpt myself in copper and porcelain until i am whole even if i have to get there one piece at a time

the big difference here is that the first is a mind-meltingly complicated system of logic circuits and actuators and code

the second is just me haunting a pony-shaped teapot

i must have hit a nerve because that's when he got up and stormed out of the h&h

spark and relic chased after him to make sure he wouldn't be wandering around alone

and that brings us to now

i've been working with bell on ideas to help him make the necessary leap of self-acceptance but right now i'm frustrated because he's the one blocking his own progress

so brilliant but so bucking stubborn

he dismissed my current forelegs as not even being a worthy proof of concept

i told him i knew that but i made them to ease my internal disquiet before i left the everglow precisely so i wouldn't rush and make the same kind of mistake he had

he said his work was absolutely perfect and dared me to explain what was missing

i said "you don't love that arm like part of you and from the look of it you don't even love yourself and that's what's missing"

it's like he went down the checklist of every motion he needed it to be capable of but never put a single thought toward aesthetics or expression

he went on about how there was nothing wrong with his design and then in the same breath he'd complain about how it wouldn't do what he wanted

he said "the mana bleed is just feedback from the failing emotional response" as though that were just a symptom and not the root cause

anyhow a good night's rest brings me to this morning

apparently transom came by to ask if the h&h was hiring and the answer was yes so now we have an administrative assistant who's learning the basics of forged renewal under bell

meanwhile i sat with morran to study the arm he made for himself

the good part? it's the very model of precision and functionality

the bad part? that's all it is

bell said it best when she said "i feel like i'm putting together a jigsaw puzzle and i just found a fifth corner piece”

the manuals we found in eston were helpful but for anything to do with the core directly they reference "the whitehearth manuals"

"whitehearth" was the cannith family workshop in some other part of what is now the mournland

i wonder how many more puzzle pieces we'll find there

given her journals and what we learned in cinnabar's autopsy i think dust makes sense now

she wanted the stuff to be a gift of comfort to her fellow forged in the same way glitterreed is to ponies

but she may have wanted that primarily to spite the grown who would be attracted to the stuff and then become addicted to a painful poison

i'm glad whatever possessed her to do that is gone

i wish her life hadn't been defined by cruelty

i could ramble about cinnabar's shell and metamatrix for days but i'll skip to the most important part

zer' identified her core as being made of "mabaran obsidian"

"mabar" is the plane of night and the blacker-than-black crystal sure gave that impression

it was clearly the source of the "raw" cinnabar referred to in her journals and her core's casing still had some of the same purple glow

it felt like she was designed to operate entirely on spite

brief digression here since morran explained

d'cannith merrix 1 is widely credited for creating the "warforged"

what he actually did was take an existing schema he couldn't fully understand and fill in the gaps with awkward work-arounds

where'd he get that schema? he reverse-cast it from his son aaren's work on what he called a "forgeborn"

morran knew this forgeborn from his youth but couldn't bring himself to talk about that

more mysteries

it seemed like a good time to autopsy cinnabar's remains

first i quietly apologized and thanked her because we obviously couldn't ask permission but she'd be helping us learn a lot

leali and lem took notes while morran shared his knowledge and bell and i set to it

she was at most twenty years old and morran was unfamiliar with some of the methods in her metamatrix but he said it looked like his grandfather's custom work

when we shared the note the others agreed that it was worrying but the h&h was well protected so that counts as careful

when we described the messenger lem was reminded of a daask lieutenant named "takren" but she's dead so probably not? unless necromancy?

anyhow leali was there with morran's dissertation and she had to dig it out of a sealed archive so someone really wanted it not to be seen

probably merrix 1 – morran's grandfather

what a family

after visiting every apothecary in the "everbright" district – and getting the "trying to pretend one isn't surprised by the sight of a unicorn and a gryphon" reaction from all but one – we managed to fill the list

we were enjoying a quick meal on the way back when medya noticed we'd been followed

they walked past us and dropped a note which read "you have friends; be careful"

and with that so-simple-it's-baffling statement we decided to hurry home

i was extremely looking forward to studying it once we got back but while we were gone lem and morran worked up another list of supplies

back when morran crafted his spells he didn't have to worry about the practicality of such a shopping list because he had free access to much of house cannith's resources

nowhere is it easy or inexpensive to get actual salamander bile

nowhere

medya and i spent several hours struggling to fill that list

relic and i revisited that healer who needed our help with the epidemic of dust-related injury

oh we certainly did staunch the flow of dust into the hands of the grown

in fact dust might not exist anymore if lem can't work out how to synthesize the component cinnabar was supplying but we didn't share that detail

anyhow she provided the book on house jorasco's healing spellcraft as promised so that's one more hurdle cleared out of the way

lem and morran needed someplace to stay safe and hidden for at least until they could arrange something more long-term so zer' got to work psychically manifesting a temporary pocket-space that opens within the heart and hammer

morran required a few things so we ran some errands

spark and bell went to visit leali and ask if she could dig up morran's dissertation – his arcane healing schemata – out of the morgrave university library

i considered morran's situation a bit more then talked with him then did some more thinking and the anger passed quickly enough

sure he's made some decisions in ways that baffle me and some of his behaviors are nerve-wracking but he's doing the best he can with circumstances somewhat worse than mine

for one thing he's been in hiding because announcing his presence would invite several different parties to take actions not in his best interest

he didn't even find a way to form a real interface

he implanted a glowing nodule on the back of his neck to forcibly control it like it's not him but just some machine he stapled on

nothing lines up right and the mana bleed is visible along his arm

does it make sense to be angry?

of all the things to be angry at

now i have to look at failure and try not to be afraid

morran

i'm angry at what you did to yourself and i will be until we can do it right

with lem freed from cinnabar's grip he was ready to leave the sewer but he said he'd need our help to find a safehouse

turns out he was down there because it was the only place he felt safe enough to do that first job which involved taking care of someone

we promised to help

guess what? that someone is "morran decannith" – most of a sickly human with a forged forearm

he tried to do what i'm trying to do but he did it wrong

there's no harmony there and it's killing him