"millimax" by millimax @millimax@high.cat

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

if you're interested in the whole "destiny crusade" story

the official site of the campaign is here:
https://www.worldanvil.com/w/the-destiny-crusade-literorrery

my full profile (well, partial for now) is here:
https://www.worldanvil.com/hero/40f92760-ec9b-45fb-ba31-8c9cc0112693

my full journal starts here:
https://www.worldanvil.com/hero/journal/2247a60c-e6bc-4ecd-84e9-727ec2a4cec0/view

but i'll still post and respond to folks here because you're all wonderful!

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

when packing the bowl

be careful not to let even a single stray hair or feather get into it

i just experienced the nastiest smoke of my life

off to go cough and gag some more

on top of all this there's the march and rally a little later today to elect crucible

medya will be with a few other musicians prepping for the rally

the route goes from the red hammer to 6T2 ... and this includes the lift in cogsgate

that's where i'll be

trying to explain to impatient cart drivers why they're being delayed and then convincing them not to disrupt the march

i really hope this goes smoothly

some time back bell and spark and relic were leaving shamukaar when they met a kobold named "kaba"

at the time they didn't know that was her name but we all found out today when she arrived at the h&h wanting to be bell's assistant?

i'm told kobolds have a strong affinity for dragons and sometimes feel driven to serve a particular one

kaba says bell is her dragon so she is bell's kobold

i hope this will be a healthier relationship than it appears

my grandparent "soft light" sometimes talks to grandma signal flare with a necklace she wore as a proxy

it shouldn't seem odd that relic is doing similar for kyo

now that i think about it i feel bad for simply leaving cinnabar's core on a shelf like a bookend because even if her core is inert she is still connected to it in spirit

i may start talking to her once in a while

until i can revive her she should at least know she won't be forgotten or abandoned

since our encounter with hollow relic's been caring for their core

i asked him about that

he explained that hundreds of years ago he had a friend "kyo" who he later found had been murdering people so he had to kill them

kyo's spirit possessed hollow so their core is the most recent home of a friend relic hopes to save

so he set up a little nook to make his "honored guest" comfortable and he plans to read to them from some books on their favorite subjects

at rakela's advice bell and zer' and i spoke with her commanding officer – commissioner "gerthi lanarak" – who suspects the reidrans have been manipulating the minds of high-ranking officials

with everything going on she doesn't have the resources to investigate the tower directly unless we bring her proof of criminal intent

we also have the option of dealing with the problem ourselves which means we will probably have to

but we can call on some folks to assist

some mornings start with sunbeams through the window

some mornings start with gentle nudges from my favorite gryphon

yesterday morning started with a psychic shriek from zer and a warning from atesh that the reidrans' new tower will let them invade every unshielded mind in sharn and will be activated in three days unless we do something about it

...

some mornings start with the urge to ignore breakfast and get very glittered and hide under a blanket

aejar visited to discuss restoring his lost arm

i explained that my research is blocked on getting into whitehearth and he said he'll try to dislodge the delays on the morgrave university side of things

i really hope he can manage it

i asked him to start thinking about who he wants to be and how his new arm could reflect that

meanwhile i'll be thinking about how i now officially have a queue for folks interested in harmonization!

i wondered when i'd hear back from the king's son aejar – and he visited today!

there's a lot to like about him but i'll start with his business cards because he gave me two

the obligatory one is a decorated mess of royal titles that don't interest him

his preferred one is crisp and straightforward and revealed him to be a historian and linguist

also his assistant "9" is a huge friendly forged and a fan of spark so she signed a flyer for them

still no word on getting to whitehearth because that would require merrix 2 and zorlan to speak to one another

morran explained that zorlan isn't in the cannith family by heredity but because he has a strong dragonmark which he feels earns him a place there

merrix 1 disagreed

merrix 2 never got to know zorlan so relations between them are cold at best

so i'm still waiting but at least i know what i'm waiting for

... house cannith is such a mess

morran spoke of veora's project to start an artificing school independent of house cannith – "3 primes academy" is nearly ready for their first class!

i'm certain some of the forged in my magecraft class will be interested

they're willing to put the effort into learning my way of magic with its unusual terminology spoken in what i'm told is a very unique accent

they'll definitely want to learn more from local experts!

we did our best but relic had to remove hollow's core to give them peace

it's a bitter sort of success

on the way back to the h&h i felt like i walked in a fog that numbed emotion and muddled thought

only a little of that was from the lingering scent of sewage

when we got in morran was waiting to talk with me but we decided to wait until dinner so i could clean up and clear my head with the help of a gentle puff of glitterreed and a short nap

hollow had been shivering for so long that we all felt frozen while they spoke

they were created as an experiment ... which left them alive but without a complete soul?

i can't imagine what that's like – living without feeling connected with the world – but i could see and hear how much it hurt them

it also opened them up to be possessed just the same as cinnabar and codex were so we had to fight them while they struggled against the evil spirit controlling them

the quiet folk had set up chimes to make a constant stream of small noises to serve as early warning – they said that "when the sounds stop the hollow comes"

so we bought a couple chimes from them for safety's sake

as we trudged through the sewers relic explained his own history in relation to hollow

so we were all thinking about this when we came across a fungus-overrun cistern and our chimes went silent

and a huge wrought-iron forged stepped up out of the pool

a proverb from home: "one shivers – all freeze"

if anybody is doing poorly it's on everybody to help them or find someone who can

i never turned away from anyone who needed help ... but back home that was possible and even practical

there are so many constant problems here that there's no way to fix it all even with the help of all my friends so i've had to turn away from an awful lot and i've still managed to over-commit

but i'll accomplish what i can

last time we talked with the quiet folk we said we'd try to look into the dream-eaters in precarious and the little black cubes in the wounded dragon apothecary

but right after that we met cinnabar and morran then faced cazha then harmonization then fairhaven then arcanix then the winterwolf then ...

they ended up stuck nearer the bottom of my task list than they deserve

i feel extra terrible because "stuck at the bottom" sums up a lot of their tragedy

boots and goggles and headlamps

another reminder to avoid feverdance fungus or suffer salty bile

the familiar will-sapping odor that only a maze of poorly ventilated waste channels can offer

i considered using my gravity shoes to stay above the muck but instead i waded alongside medya because i haven't made a set for her yet

so that's on my to-do list now

sometime before our next trip into sharn's sewers because it's starting to feel inevitable that we end up down there

fortunately today was slightly less confusing though also less fun

we met "va'beorn of aless" – writer of yesterday's newspaper article about the sewer reclamation project – and chatted about the sewer issues

va'beorn wants to report on it

since bell has a gift for steering conversations toward crucible's run for council she convinced va'beorn to promise to write about the campaign if we could help him see for himself what was going on in the sewer

a worthy exchange!

medya helped me understand at least a little more about why bell and zer' put so much effort into toying with those peeping reidrans yesterday

the reidrans represent rigid state power attempting to intimidate us

actively confusing them wastes their resources and slows their progress down

i'm not much good at acting or deception or bluffing or even telling a misleading half-truth so it's probably best i let the others handle such tactics

it's lovely to think about but there are also urgent practical matters

another article in today's paper is about the sewer reclamation project and how the loss of so many workers' lives is calling the city's budget and priorities into question

i'd say their priority one is to reprioritize if they think the budget is the bigger concern here

tomorrow our priority is to go down there to find hollow

... i hope relic can do for them what he did for codex