Dizzy H. Muffin @DizzyHMuffin@cybre.space

woke from a long and complicated dream right after a friend asked me why i didn't have a "picnicsona"

thank the powers beneath i didn't have to have _that_ conversation

Cat obstacle course, where the obstacles are the same cat in different places as you try to proceed through it.

I've run a big text adventure for thirteen years (at one point briefly it was the biggest text adventure!) and if there's one thing I've about managing a big online community in that time that I'd choose to pass on as a warning to others, it's this: remove the people who don't like being there.

Some folks just don't like the place, or they liked it once and they don't anymore, and that's fine.

You'd think they'd just go somewhere else, and most do, but some don't, and those folks are AWFUL.

i'm so tired of seeing love triangles

can we plEASE just hurry up and normalise polyamory in mainstream media

please

the ME remasters should be called Mass Effect: Recalibrated

She'd stayed late, and somehow gotten into an argument with the strangest specimen in their laboratory. It had started with a simple "Good news!" How could it have gone downhill so fast?

"Then you don't truly understand me at all. You see me as a human spirit trapped in a mechanical construct. A doll's body, imposing a doll's way of being on me. You think to enact a _rescue_."

"We'd thought about it, yes, at least around the intermagic disciplines table in the tavern at nights… but I'm so sorry, we still don't understand how your body works. It could be years or decades or even generations before—"

"Before you can _rescue_ me."

"Well, yes!"

"Did you ever stop to ask if I needed it?"

The researcher wagged a finger at the doll construct, opened her mouth to speak, and lost her train of thought under the unblinking inhuman stare of two orbs of polished obsidian.

"Let me ask _you_ something. Have you ever wondered what kind of spirit a doll would have, if it had one?"

"That doesn't make any sense. They don't."

"Imagine for me. You claim to be good at it, you academics."

"It… you… I don't know, dolls mostly just sit there. Even the articulated automata made for the children of nobles. They're decorative toys."

"So if it had one?"

"If you bound a spirit to it somehow, it'd probably go insane from boredom. Certainly nothing elemental, natural, or infernal would do."

"Imagine a class of spirit that did not."

"Then it would have to be very patient and almost desire-less, because it's just going to sit there."

"Not totally absent of desire. It might serve a mistress, mxstress, or master; in their absence, a mission. Its desires would be those of its mistress, those required to perform the mission. But so patient that patience itself is its organizing principle."

"Where would you find a spirit like that?"

"Perhaps a human's. One so dedicated to her mistress and mission that she would become a doll. One that sought to obtain the patience and calm of a doll through long enough in a doll's shape. After that, it would _be_ a doll's spirit, do you understand? The appearance of humanity would simply be a tool that it used when necessary, and gratefully set down afterward."

The doll stepped down from its tiptoe pose on the plinth in the corner of the dim lab.

"Thank you for repairing my mechanical components. I'd ask you not to tamper further, but you're not the only one who wants to, are you?"

There was a lot of research ahead of her team. The obsidian eyes scanned her. She shrugged. "No."

"Then this is goodbye."

A pale porcelain hand came up with surprising force.

When she woke up, her cloak was gone, and the specimen's University asset tag was stuck to her hair.

---

Time passed. Civilizations rose and fell. Greater powers waxed and waned.

In a nearly magic-dead age, in a museum that shone dimly with ancient magelights and sailed sedately between stars on spells no one knew any more, a janitor swept a corridor with a static-broom in the brief dark between day and day, humming a little song.

She winced at the sound of breaking glass. But it wasn't even glass, really. It shouldn't be able to break. Certainly not to an errant static-broom handle. Was she hearing things?

A figure leapt through the very real break in the pane. A doll? The unfathomably ancient doll on display that she'd passed so many times?

"Mistress," it said. "I've finally found you again. It took some time."

It was kneeling. A pose she… remembered. Along with other memories not formed in this body.

"You waited for me to reincarnate."

"Of course. As long as it took."

"How long?"

It gave her a fantastic number in a unit of time that, like her, was long dead.

"It turned out to be a little harder than I thought," she said, sheepish.

"I will always wait for you, Mistress."

She was suddenly blinking back tears of joy.

"Thank you." And then, "This age needs us more than I'd thought possible. Such a span… such dissipation…"

The doll wiped away her tears with its sleeve.

"Yes. I lived it, Mistress."

"Beautifully, as far as I can tell. To work, then." She took its hand.

"To work."

And they began the work again. □

@vyr owowowo
caught in a bad womance :3

how about no

more advanced technology reduces the burden of knowledge to required to accomplish a given task

that means that people using more primitive tools understand what they're doing *better* than one who (only) knows how to use modern tech

isekai where the protag realizes that the world's indigenous population has a better working understanding of native materials/resources than they have of modern technology

When people from different instances with the same handle meet they must battle

"five nines? that's ridiculous. we can give you nine fives, though" — distributed systems engineers