(From this image, which is a "would you push the button"- Pushing the button grants you the ability to shapeshift into any form you choose, but people will always know it's you.

Well, it certainly made D&D sessions more entertaining showing up as the character I was playing, although I would have to sit either on the floor or on a stool until I got used to the tail. It did get hard on the clothing budget, as most of the characters were not the same size as my human form, and while I could make clothing appear as part of the shift, it made things more difficult and harder to keep a concentration on, and I couldn't remove the clothing either.

Showing up to work in an alternate form lasted all of two or three days, at which point I was dragged into a meeting with HR and my bosses and told that I needed to match the picture on my badge, even though whatever gave me this ability also included an aura or something that made people know it was still me.

[Hi there- the owner of this journal here with some administrative non-sense.

The 'usual' places that I would normally upload fiction to are.... no longer exactly friendly for straight up text entries. DA, FA notably; there's no way on this planet, galaxy, or dimension that I'm going to submit it to Failbook or Tumblr. (I tried the latter with the 'Through the Gate' setting; it did not go well.)

So, I've caved in and got an AO3 account. It's going to take a couple months to reformat everything out of Scrivener and upload it (There is no good way to bulk upload the existing body, sadly), but everything will eventually show up there. Comments, critiques, etc. are welcome either here or there. ]

December 22nd, 2013, 19:07

I was in the back room lab working on the latest revision to one of the WorldNet bridge controller when I heard a semi-muffled BOOOM!! from elsewhere in the neighborhood, followed by a short Mrp! of surprise and then muttered cursing in Trr'th.

Following the cursing and noting the more original combinations out to the back yard, I saw Sh'Meral clad only in slippers, tail swishing back and forth rapidly. I came to a dead stop when I heard her mutter "you want a big boom? Here's the biggest boom!" and then felt the surge of magic as she pulsed the spell upwards into the air. She twirled around, embraced me, and cast a light filtering shield around the two of us just as the night sky turned to daylight 300 meters above us. The ensuing boom shattered every window in a three mile radius, which them un-shattered a fraction of a second later.

Five minutes later, we were explaining the concept of diplomatic immunity to the nice police Sargent and the fire battalion chief.

We didn't have any problems with people setting off fireworks before new years eve for years afterwards. The FAA, on the other hand....

Author's note: posts with the tag 'through_the_gate' are essentially out of order, lightly edited cross-posting of a bunch of stuff from my tumblr, which apparently can't do tags to save it's own soul.
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( Every story has a beginning... )

(Owner/Author's note: Still alive, I've just snowed under from work, and life in general. It didn't help the the well of creativity ran dry for a couple years, but ideas are starting to percolate back up. Enjoy! )

Selected transliterated* notes from Tigra's lectures regarding The Hidden Society, common mythos, and other odds and ends.

Regarding Undead:
They really do exist, but are incredibly rare. Among the undead, the most common are what D&D gamers would know as lichs and vampires.

Undead are not inherently evil, most are either neutral or even good. evil undead don't last terribly long before getting whacked.

Zombies don't feed on brains; true to stereotype, they have no cognitive brain functions. They don't last very long either, and are damn near impossible to make.

Making any undead for that matter is damn near impossible. you need three things:

1. A dead body, preferably fresh and undamaged. comatose patients in a permanent vegetative state who's owners 'have left thing building' would probably work best.


2. A willing soul- Most souls without a body are not exactly willing to inhabit a body that isn't OE, primarily because of:


3. the willingness to stand a shite-tonne** of pain and suffering until the body or soul fails. DO NOT ASK HOW THE MAGI KNOW THIS. That's the other reason most unattached souls won't try it- there's a good chance that they will perma-die during the process, or shortly thereafter. You die like that, and you don't come back EVER. You are destroyed and the universe is made less from it.

Necromancy is largely banned for that reason, except for exceptional and extreme situations.

VAMPIRES DO. NOT. SPARKLE!! (unless they sparkle which is something entirely different.)
Also, Ann Rice was wrong, they can tolerate sunlight. most don't drink blood either, that's directly related to blood magic and certain forms of necromancy. Most vampires are energy vampires, and they feed off of sunlight, truth be told. Yeah, it totally ruins the 'goth' look and aura that's been built up over a couple centuries, but hey, appearances, right?

Lichs are not for licking, are not quite created like the D&D monster manual specifies, but they do have this doo-hickey that powers them. It is different for each lich, but it has to stay with the body, otherwise it's game over.

Blood Magic and Necromancy
both are forbidden by the Order, although the knowledge is kept, mainly because blood magic is very, very powerful. A blood mage grows stronger as he bleeds, and unless your first attack kills them outright, it will make them almost impossible to kill, similar to vehemic energy. There are exactly two known blood mages at present, and both are on a short leash.

Necromancy is largely banned, although some forms are needed, but only in certain circumstances.

* the notes were written in t'rrth glyphs, but in english.
** Not to be confused with a fuck tonne, which is a lot less.

... Because I've been a horrible, horrible person and have kept my writing all to myself lately. No cut, it's pretty short, and as usual, web-enhanced for your amusement.

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October 8th, 2011

It’s never fun shopping for new furniture, unless the reason is because a certain 8 foot tall furry butthead accidentally set the old furniture on fire whilst showing off with his telekinesis. So, all four of us piled into the blue beast after the certain someone had cleaned up the ashes of the old, crappy sofa and my bright red chair were cleaned up, and we headed to the local Ikea to go shopping for something that would possibly hold everyone. Plus, we had finally gotten some of the currency exchange stuff sorted out*, so I didn’t have to worry about their ability to pay.

As usual, we almost immediately had a small crowd following us as we walked into the front entrance. Fortunately, I had called ahead when we left, so the store was well prepared for the crowd as we made our way inside and up to the showroom. They even had a shopping assistant for us, which saved me the burden (and massive bandwidth spike) of having to use the internet to look up the myriad references that I didn’t know. The only thing that was odd was that of the furniture we tried, all of it had a thin plastic cover on it to keep any fur from getting in the fabric, in the event that someone was allergic to their fur**.

While the small chair that I had would fit my furred mates, it was not exactly comfortable for them. And while the low back was certainly stylish, it didn’t make for the best experience for me, either. So, we were looking for something that matched, something that was comfortable with both things on two legs and a tail, and two legs and tall, and would hold roughly 400-500 pounds without collapsing in a heap of broken parts. Obviously, their signature POÄNG chair was out, but they had several others which were decent, and fit my motley crew quite nicely.

As luck had it, they had everything in stock, so as it was also just after one in the afternoon, we had a very yummy lunch in the restaurant before heading downstairs and getting the stuff we wanted onto a bevy of carts. They were happy to help with getting the sofa, chairs, and a couple other shiny items on the carts, and even had us go through a separate checkout, but we were still on our own with getting the couple grand worth of assorted furniture, decorations, cooking supplies, and lights into the bed of the blue beast. Fortunately, between the flat-pack nature of some of the furniture and clever use of tie-downs, The four of us managed to get everything loaded on the truck. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go very far, just over to an empty office park where I could create a gate to the garage at the house.

I still cannot understand their wisdom, however, in picking out the cover with stripes on it.

* The Archmage finally said ‘fuck it!’ one day and founded a bank expressly to handle the gemstone/precious metals to paper currency exchange mess that he had been handling with some help from some of his assistants for the past year for the Tigereans to allow them to pay the local staff and other projects with monetary units we could use without needing an armed escort all the time.

** Oddly enough, Sh’Meral and Ch’Mrr were perfectly fine with it.

April 29th, 2011 6:58 AM

Being mated to a pair of creatures that like to sleep in, and also having a habit of sleeping in is generally a bad combination. Especially when the only alarm clock one has makes a noise that is the exact same noise as the hull integrity failure alarm on their spacecraft. Even worse, most of the other alarm clocks have the same exact noise, which made for a problem. My attempts to work around it sort of worked once I got the puppet online, but more often then not, Kath generally slept as a resident in my head, or she took over the meat body and made me resident. It really freaked me out when I discovered the hard way that she knew a spell to gender-morph the meat body, and we had a rather long and embarrassing (for both of us) talk about pregnancy afterward.

So, I was in the market, one might say, for an alarm clock that: a) could wake the semi-dead; b) didn’t sound like a ‘hull breach in progress’ alarm and didn’t have a lame ‘wake to radio’ feature; and c) wasn’t a couple million bucks worth of mage-created hullmetal, titanium, and assorted plastics and organics. (Sure, the puppet functioned quite well as a reliable alarm clock, but it looked... creepy sitting in the chair next to the bed, looking over the conglomeration of fur and assorted body parts that comprised a typical night’s sleep for the three/four of us.) So, I was poking at the internet, and found something that might work- a Clocky. (for those that don’t know, it’s an alarm clock on wheels, and with a sound that resembles R2D2 on an overdose of heroin. And forces you to chase it down to shut it the fuck up. demo) It arrived a couple days later, and I got it ready to go after verifying with Ch’Mrr and Sh’Meral that it didn’t resemble some other alarm on their ships. I was expecting the alarm to go off at 7, and the thing was even keeping close to the atomic clock’s time. I had no idea what my two insane companions would do, so I was lying awake in anticipation for almost five minutes when the hour of seven hit and the clocky kicked off to signal that it was time to wake up.

It made it’s noise, went to spin it’s wheels, and Ch’Mrr shifted suddenly in the bed. I felt a massive spike of magic from him, and then I heard a noise that sounded like an expensive alarm clock being crushed in a 5 ton hydraulic press. Once that noise stopped, Ch’Mrr rolled over, chuffed, and went back to the semi-snore that he was used to.

A short piece that I found amusing.


May 25th
"Are you sure this is such a good idea? I've seen how much you can eat." Sh'Meral gave me an odd look at my suggestion of going to one of the local Chinese buffets for lunch. My laughter was not helping much either; My main concern was rather the opposite. While it would have been good for Katholos to come with us, it would have looked funny bringing a fourth person with us who neither ate nor drank anything. So, she rode along inside my head as we all climbed into the Big Blue Bus and headed over to one of the local buffet restaurants.

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The staff at the front counter were initially shocked as two large felinoids and a human walked up to the door; the shock turned into amusement as the human opened the door and ushered the two in before him. They were conversing in their own language, with it's mewling, grunts, and occasional hiss/spit. They all fell silent as they approached the counter, and the human pushed his way between the two and asked for a booth and three for the buffet in English. They shrugged, range them up on the register, and as they directed the group to a booth, the human explained what the place was, how it operated, and how to get food.

---

We got shown to our booths, and I ordered iced tea for the three of us. Fortunately, I knew that they could handle it, as long as lemons did not approach the glass. I was just getting over the shudders of that ill-fated tea party when Ch'Mrr got my attention back by asking me what to do next. "Well, I would wait until the waitress brings the tea over, then we’ll go over to the line and get some food."

I spent a minute or two explaining how additional helpings worked, plate etiquette, and so on until the drinks arrived. I asked for three sets of chopsticks, proceeded to sweeten my tea, and then I led them over to the buffet line and we got a heaping plate each of food. As we sat down, I noticed that the chopsticks had been dropped off, and I handed a pair to each of them. Ch'Mrr gave me a nasty look as he pulled a slim container from inside his coat pocket, and handed one of the two pairs of sticks inside to Sh'Meral and replaced the empty case inside his pocket. I shrugged and started plowing through the giant pile of lo-mien and crab puffs on my plate.

It was a good hour and a half and about five-six plates apiece later that management asked how we were doing, and just where we were putting all that food. I looked at my two fuzzy companions, winked, and told the manager the truth regarding a thereianthrope's mass reserves. He didn't buy it, strangely, enough, and said that there was a limit of sorts to just how much food we could eat, and that we had reached it. He was very polite about it, but was unwilling to allow us to continue our dining experience. Sh'Meral, not wanting to make it a bigger scene, thanked the manager for being as generous as he had been, and stated that we would leave. She withdrew a couple small gemstones from a pouch in one of her pockets, and told him that she hoped that these would be a small compensation for any trouble we had caused before we left.

I later found out two additional things- the gemstones were worth probably my old yearly salary at the casino, and when I went back myself several days later with some human friends that they would not let me or my friends in- I had been blacklisted from that restaurant, much to my friends amusement and my embarrassment.

Y'all are super lucky- tonight's a twofer, although both are somewhat intertwined.

( This one's about as long )

I was in the kitchen late one Caturday morning making breakfast: toasted bagels with Nutella spread on them. While it really sucked that I could no longer enjoy chocolate in anything but my human form, the added sense input I got in mid-form made it definitely worthwhile, and Nutella was just damn tasty, regardless of the form I took.

Ch'Mrr came in in the middle of prep and asked for a sample after I explained what it was. I didn't know if the ingredients would cause them problems, so the sample was very small. Fortunately, it didn't, and so I made up another bagel for him to eat. The emotional response I got from him telepathically was... well, off the scale.

We surprised Sh'Meral with it when she arrived home from a meeting with T'Grlf, and things went... well, in an interesting direction after that. I ended up sleeping for a couple hours afterwards, though. Oy. Those two wore me plum out.