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Oct/19/2020 wrap-up: \\ War in Artsakh (Karabakh) \\ the Syrian jihadists \\ battlefield & analysis \\ videos \\ north and south fronts remain active, but civilian bombings have reduced \\ casualty report \\ international response & humanitarian aid \\ Pashinyan gives details \\ Levon Aronyan
Prior events
: October 18,
October 17,
October 16,
October 15,
October 14,
October 13,
October 12,
October 11 ,
October 10,
October 9 ,
October 8 ,
October 7,
October 6,
October 5,
October 4,
October 3,
October 2,
October 1,
September 30,
September 29,
September 28,
September 27.
2-minute video explaining the conflict.
https://youtu.be/sqc8jmgriyo?t=9 about jihadists recruited by Turkey and Azerbaijan
134 jihadists are confirmed dead now, according to a Middle East reporter from Al Mayadeen. Bodies of 92 have already been transported back to Syria.
https://twitter.com/KevorkAlmassian/status/1317925295412908035 Russian Ria Novosti has learned that Turkey sent another group of 1,000 Syrian jihadists to Azerbaijan last week.
https://ria.ru/20201019/karabakh-1580094071.html https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032051.html Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has learned about the presence of 2050 Syrian militants in the Karabakh front. The transfer of 400 militants, consisted of Al Hamza, Sultan Murad, and other cells, was paused when the recent ceasefire agreement was reached.
SOHR reports that the militants who are in the front lines have found themselves under serious pressure. Some have refused to fight and went back to Syria without getting paid.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032104.html Armenians met Donald Trump in Los Angeles yesterday
Los Angeles Armenians, holding Artsakh signs, gathered near the building attended by President Trump. They were mainly Trump supporters waving Armenian and the U.S. flags. Trump showed "thumbs up" from his car
https://youtu.be/W9IGVisVcBU https://youtu.be/7sbqXhgp4fo https://t.me/reartsakh/5139 During his speech to the crowd, Trump saw an Armenian fan and mentioned meeting Armenians in Los Angeles, saying "They're great business people. We're working on something [about Artsakh]. People in Armenia have a great spirit for their country."
https://youtu.be/f5N_XcyLZ9I https://youtu.be/n-mhvSsOX8M https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032038.html Bloomberg: Erdogan Does What He Can Get Away With
"Erdogan has again avoided barbs at Putin, but he has name-checked Russia in his attacks against the international community for failing to hand the Armenian-majority Nagorno-Karabakh region over to Azerbaijan.
And for the first time, Turkey is intervening in what Moscow regards as its sphere of influence: the Caucasus is closer to Russia — not just geographically but also in historical, cultural, strategic and economic terms — than Syria or Libya."
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-19/turkey-s-erdogan-gets-away-with-foreign-policy-adventurism [text in square brackets are comments added by me]
Pashinyan gives context and lists the options:
1) What is this war for? For the status of Nagorno-Karabakh.
2) Could we have avoided this war? Yes, if we agreed to give the [7] regions to Azerbaijan and receive an unclear status for Nagorno-Karabakh [no independence], an unclear time-frame for resolving its status [possibly another war], and no mechanisms to clarify its future.
3) Could we have achieved any "status" for Nagorno-Karabakh through negotiations? No, because the last chance was in 2011 in Kazan [where Armenian president Serj Sargsyan agreed to give away the 7 regions in exchange for keeping the remaining Nagorno-Karabakh out of Azeri control. Ilham Aliyev rejected the offer because he wants everything, including the lands historically inhabited by Armenians].
4) Can we stop this war now through negotiations? Theoretically yes, if we agree to the Point-2 above but with worse conditions [no autonomy for remaining Nagorno-Karabakh].
5) Can this war resolve the issue of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh? Yes, if we make successes in this war.
6) Can we succeed in this war? Yes, if we focus our national potential around that goal and selflessly commit to that goal.
https://news.am/arm/news/608664.html October 19 events / battlefied / international response / humanitarian aid
1:10: MFA Mnatsakanyan spoke with MFAs of Canada and France.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032030.html ,
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032029.html 1:56 army spokesman: our Lieutenants and Generals stand shoulder to shoulder with 18-year-old conscripts to stop the enemy tanks at the cost of their lives.
https://t.me/infocomm/23734 9:11 MoD: on October 18th, Azeris launched an attack in the south with the use of seven tanks, including one T-90, and five BTR armored vehicles. Their goal was to rapidly advance at an important section of a frontline to assume firing position and to apply psychological pressure.
Thanks to the professionalism and high morale of Colonels
Stepan Gevorgyan and Stanislav Yeremin, and anti-tank Private Garik Arakelyan, the Azeri advancement was stopped and they were thrown several kilometers back.
This morning, despite the ceasefire agreement, Azeris resumed the artillery strikes in the north and south. The army took measures to suppress the fire and is in control of the situation.
https://t.me/ShushanStepanyan/23 ,
https://t.me/ShushanStepanyan/24 ,
https://t.me/infocomm/23736 ,
10:20: LHK Party has sent a letter to the UN Security Council urging them to declare a no-fly zone above Artsakh to prevent a humanitarian crisis, citing the Azeri-Turkish airstrikes against civilian settlements and infrastructure.
https://factor.am/297050.html 10:33: the army gave medals to several Majors, Captains, Lieutenants, and Privates, for destroying enemy personnel, capturing their position, planting mines, then leaving the area.
Others were awarded for shooting 4 drones.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032036.html 10:41 President Sarkissian to Kommersant: for the Armenian side, victory means preserving their home. Even if Azerbaijan succeeds and occupies some territories, it will not end the conflict. The war of thoughts, the war of stories, the war of human emotions will continue. There is only one way for all parties to agree on how to continue living.
Full:
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032037.html 11:03: Azerbaijan bombed the civilian settlements Martuni, Aygehovit, Ishkhanadzor, Vurgavan.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032040.html 11:42: in the past few days, the Azeri drone explosions struck two schools in Armenia's Gegarquniq province. Windows were shattered and walls were cracked. No injuries.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032045.html 11:26: the Emergency Ministry has also been gathering and sending aid to Artsakh residents and refugees. 147 trucks were sent in the past few weeks. The donation volumes have increased.
https://youtu.be/X41NWEJ3qlk https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032043.html 11:44: Greek-Armenian demonstrators condemned the aggression against Artsakh. They marched from Alexandroupolis to the Turkey-Greece border checkpoint and shut it down.
https://youtu.be/nHjxR-yeexk https://youtu.be/S4Lqm70R3Qo https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032044.html Armenians in Aleppo gathered in support of Artsakh and Armenia:
https://twitter.com/Arouydz76/status/1317950849860001792 11:47: "Don't be blind" was the message that Artsakh refugees had while protesting in front of the UN office in Yerevan. "Your silence is a new genocide." "Erdogan terrorist."
https://youtu.be/huAqGTMEKN4 https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032046.html 11:51 Canadian CTV News: Montrealers call for independence for The Republic of Artsakh amid conflict with Azerbaijan
https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/montrealers-call-for-independence-for-the-republic-of-artsakh-amid-conflict-with-azerbaijan-1.5150491 https://news.am/arm/news/608703.html 12:09: Iran says they'll respond if bombs fall in their territory and harm civilians again. The prohibited the civilians from sitting near the borders to watch military actions in Artsakh.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032050.html ,
https://t.me/infoteka24/9424 12:20: Armenians organized a demonstration with a car caravan in Varna, Bulgaria.
https://youtu.be/_u-ItuLnuV4 12:21 WarGonzo reporter: since the govt of Azerbaijan keeps their casualties secret and there are many parents who're unable to reach their sons and haven't heard from them in a while, there is a Telegram channel that collects and posts the names and photos of identified deceased Azeri soldiers.
https://t.me/wargonzo/3790 12:29 army: the heavy battles continue in the south. Our soldiers are "wearing out" the enemy.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032052.html 12:32: volunteer QP MP Sasun Mikaelyan received a shrapnel wound in his foot and back. His condition is stable.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032053.html 12:50 army spokesman: Nari Syuni and Nare Khlgatyan have formed a female unit. Our daughters and sisters are our honor. We will win with their help.
Female fighters released a video:
https://youtu.be/aKvlcjg3eiE?t=27 https://factor.am/297154.html 13:08: female LHK MP Srbuhi Grigoryan will volunteer to join the army. She will appear in the military commissariat in Syunik.
https://news.am/arm/news/608715.html 13:11: a plane with humanitarian aid was sent from Los Angeles to Yerevan with the help of
www.ArmeniaFund.org .
Video:
https://youtu.be/qQwYxMY69fc https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032057.html 13:23: Sean Combs (Puff Diddy) has joined his fellow rappers The Game and Xzhibit and shared a note of support for Armenia with his 17m Instagram fans.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032060.html 13:27 army spokesman: the heavy battles continue in the south.
https://factor.am/297176.html 13:28: the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo says Francophone organization will donate $50,000 to Artsakh residents. They are in touch with the TUMO tech school's branch in Stepanakert. She will visit Yerevan in a few months.
"Baku, with the help of Turkey, is the obvious aggressor in this conflict. France, USA, and Russia should help to immediately end the war and decide the fate of Karabakh and its residents."
"The law prohibits Paris from recognizing objects not recognized by France, so we can't do what Milan and Geneva have done, but we'll send a group of young French observers who will travel to Karabakh and document the events."
"Erdogan is encouraging the ethnic cleansings of Karabakh residents."
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032061.html ,
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032063.html ,
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032064.html ,
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032069.html 13:47: world-famous violinist Sergey Khachatryan donated the revenues from his La Scala concert to Artsakh's children.
https://www.facebook.com/armphilharmonic/posts/3665689976788470 https://www.panarmenian.net/arm/news/286751/ 13:48: Azerbaijan has lost 6,259 soldiers, 4 TOS-1 "Solntzepyok" missile units, 2 Smerch missile units, 566 tanks and armored vehicles, 22 aircraft, 16 helicopters, 195 drones, etc.
In the latest battles, they also lost 9 drones, 12 armored vehicles, 150 soldiers.
Unofficial sources have calculated >$1.5b in known damages to the equipment.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032065.html ,
https://t.me/SputnikArmenia/8785 ,
https://t.me/infocomm/23770 13:58: Artsakh President Arayik met the four German MPs who arrived yesterday, and thanked them for their efforts.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1203167443410028 https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032067.html 14:14: Armenia has filed a report with the European Court for Human Rights about the videos in which Azeri soldiers are seen executing prisoners of war, and the photos of beheadings.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032070.html ,
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032078.html 14:33: U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has introduced a resolution urging the White House to begin the process of terminating Turkey's NATO membership, citing its cooperation with Al-Qaida, ISIS, and other terrorist cells.
The document also mentions Turkey's hostile actions in the Karabakh conflict, its "blockade of Armenia which has friendly relations with the U.S.", and Turkey's use of F-16 jets against Armenia and Karabakh.
Copy:
https://factor.am/297197.html https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032075.html 14:41: demonstrators gathered in front of the U.S. embassy in Yerevan and called for the official recognition of the Artsakh Republic. An embassy official promised to send a letter to Washington.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032074.html ,
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032084.html https://factor.am/297225.html 15:13: Armenian MoD refuted the Azeri claims of targeting the Baky-Novorossiysk oil pipeline.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032081.html 15:35: Turkish intellectual and journalist Ali Ertem, who has recognized the Armenian Genocide in the past, has called for the world to recognize the independence of the Artsakh Republic.
https://infoteka24.ru/2020/10/19/72887/ 15:39: here are photos showing the destruction to civilian buildings in Stepanakert, caused by Azeri Polonez missiles.
https://t.me/infoteka24/9358 15:40 president Sarkissian to POLITICO: NATO should explain Turkey's involvement in the Karabakh conflict. Turkey's actions in the Caucasus could also pose threat to the EU.
I understand that Europe is busy with COVID-19. While the Karabakh conflict is not a biological virus, it is a virus of instability and war.
https://www.politico.eu/article/armenia-president-armen-sarkissian-nato-turkey-involvement-nagorno-karabakh/ https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032086.html 15:41: Azeri Haqqin outlet circulated fake news about Iran downing an Armenian drone. Armenian social media spread fake video claiming to show a missile strike at an Azeri soldier while he sings; the video is from another conflict.
https://t.me/infoteka24/9369 ,
https://t.me/infoteka24/9370 15:42: American MMA fighter Dillon Denis wore a shirt with "Artsakh Strong" logo.
https://twitter.com/dillondanis/status/1317159039676092422?s=20 15:46: Stepanakert residents are having a party in a bomb shelter.
https://t.me/infoteka24/9389 15:47 Russian MFA Lavrov: both sides of the conflict, and third countries, should end the divisive rhetoric. There needs to be a system to monitor the ceasefire on the ground because the last two ceasefire agreements made no difference.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032088.html 16:27 economist: Turkey's foreign exchange reserves have depleted by $10b already, from $51b to $41b. There is a 37% inflation; 8% in the past 7 weeks.
https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/199032 16:58: the membership of Gyumri's Aeromodeling Club went from 20 to 1,500. Students learn how to build and operate drones, use computer software to control them, flight training, etc.
https://factor.am/297274.html https://hy.armradio.am/2020/10/14/աթս-ների-կառավարման-դասընթացներ-երիտ/ 17:00: the army has identified the names of 19 more soldiers who died. The known death toll is 729. Among them is a judoist from Armenia's youth team, and BHK MP Sergey Bagratyan's nephew.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032099.html ,
https://factor.am/297410.html ,
https://news.am/arm/news/608732.html 17:58: Pashinyan, the President, the church leader, and Parliamentary parties held a Security Council session.
Later, Pashinyan met non-Parliamentary political parties.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032107.html ,
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032118.html 18:05: the Armenian Bar Association has asked the Vatican to recognize the Artsakh Republic.
https://t.me/reartsakh/5168 18:37 Pashinyan to Russian TASS outlet: "Russia has the legal right to carry out anti-terror operations in Karabakh because the Syrian militants, imported by Azerbaijan, pose a direct threat to Russia. These [northern Syrian, anti-Assad, anti-Russia] militants view Russia as their enemy. The question is, will Russia wait until these groups infiltrate southern Russia before taking action against them?"
"Turkey is the main reason why there is no ceasefire. Its main goal is to end Russia's influence and reputation in the south Caucasus."
https://youtu.be/_yawGQ_izpI https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032110.html ,
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032112.html ,
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032117.html 18:43: Martakert city was bombed earlier. It still doesn't have electricity and gas but some infrastructure was lately repaired, say the journalists from the scene.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032111.html 18:48: the army released footage showing the destruction of Azeri positions and vehicles.
https://youtu.be/IDJo1NQqUMA?t=4 19:40: soldiers sent a video from the front lines
https://youtu.be/yMOpuK5or9s 20:00: volunteers are converting (220V) and putting together Uninterrupted Power Supplies for soldiers. "We've sent 1,500 units so far in the past week."
https://youtu.be/oyLdbiIxntc 20:07: Turkish soccer player Umut Bulut has urged the government of Azerbaijan to collect the dead bodies from battlefields after a video was circulated showing how wild boars eat the Azeri bodies.
https://t.me/infoteka24/9401 20:11: Norwegian-Armenians held a demonstration against the Azeri aggression.
https://youtu.be/rIHGDLLu2TQ https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032124.html 21:00 CivilNet's Tatul: the skies above Stepanakert and Shushi are relatively calm. Many civilians have left the bomb shelters and slowly returned to their daily lives during the daytime. This happens every time the bombs stop falling for a day.
From Stepanakert:
https://youtu.be/9ZhaGiidtUA 21:10: the leader of Italy's Forza Italia
(Berlusconi) party Mariastella Gelmini has expressed her support to the Armenian people.
"We stand with the Armenian people, with whom we share a European and Christian identity, and urge the Italian government and the entire international community to make clear efforts to ensure that Armenia is not attacked."
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032130.html 21:13: A group of Armenians in Moscow removed a highway-side poster installed by Azerbaijan that read "Karabakh is Azerbaijan."
https://youtu.be/kmSM7HvS7cQ 21:14: Armenians organized a demonstration with a car caravan in Montevideo, Uruguay.
https://news.am/arm/news/608802.html 21:15: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet MFAs of Armenia and Azerbaijan in Washington on October 23rd.
https://armenpress.am/arm/news/1032131.html 21:28: an interview with Israeli photojournalist Gilad Sade who visited Artsakh to document the situation:
https://youtu.be/0dzasFM9ycQ 21:30: Iranian journalist Pooya Hosseini shared photos showing a Libya-based ISIS fighter Mahdi al-Harat, the third man in command, kissing the forehead of president Erdogan for his support against Libyan General Haftar's army. (Turkey supports the western fraction and terrorist cells, while France and others support Haftar's army in the east.)
The closes ties between Erdogan and the terrorist have long been known:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/28092017-mahdi-al-harati-a-libyan-force-multiplier-oped/ https://www.facebook.com/pooya799/posts/10218097518455050 https://t.me/infoteka24/9402 21:33: Which U.S. states have recognized Artsakh or its right for self-determination so far?
Rhode Island House, Massachusetts House, Maine House, Louisiana Senate, California House and Senate, Georgia House, Hawaii House, Michigan Senate, Colorado Senate.
https://news.am/arm/news/608749.html 21:35 interview w/army spokesman Artsrun: What percentage of Azeri armored vehicles have been destroyed? It's hard to say. Sometimes they can advance and take some of their destroyed vehicles for repairs. Sometimes they import new ones. But the main portion of their armored vehicle fleet is destroyed.
What's the monetary damage to their army? Billions of dollars. I've seen complaints from Azerbaijan stating that those funds could have helped the economy instead, especially since the oil prices and oil reserves are only going to get lower.
The last time the world has seen a war with this intensity was in 2003 in Iraq. Over 600 tanks and armored vehicles, thousands of artillery units, over a thousand drones, dozens of thousands of bombs.
https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/199054 22:00 army spokesman's briefing: the battles resumed in the morning. Azeris tried to attack in north and south.
They were thrown back in the north after two attempts. In the south, the battles continued throughout the day without significant positional changes by either side. The southern battles are milder at the moment.
[He then presents Artsak Hovhannisyan, the father of the fallen hero Albert Hovhannisyan, that famous artillery guy on billboards.]
Our unity is important. Your donations to
www.HimnaDram.org or
www.1000plus.am are important.
https://youtu.be/Nace8NqAm0U 23:29: lil' Vahe sells nuts for 100 Drams on Northern Avenue. His family has collected 2mln for donations to Artsakh.
https://youtu.be/4dfhU-EFcy0?t=28 23:43: the army released a video showing the remnants of a downed Azeri drone.
https://youtu.be/Hz86Fl9jITo Levon Aronyan defeats the world champion
Altibox Norway Chess competition was held. Grandmaster Aronyan won the matches against Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana and improved his FIDE ranking by moving from 9th to 6th position.
He finished third in the Altibox Norway Chess competition.
"Now the war is the main topic for every Armenian in the world. I will return to my homeland and do everything I can to help my country."
https://www.armtimes.com/hy/article/199046 ,
https://factor.am/297465.html You've read 2770 words.
Donations to Artsakh:
www.HimnaDram.org or
www.ArmeniaFund.org (tax-deductible)
The Testament of Solomon
WHO WAS KING SOLOMON? Solomon is known for his wisdom, wealth, and his writings. Son of King David and Bathsheba, Solomon was the third and last king in the ancient United Kingdom of Israel. Despite not being the eldest, David promised Bathsheba that Solomon would be the next king, and he was anointed by a priest in secret while David was still alive after David’s eldest son declared himself king.
David’s closest advisors as well as the priest opposed this ordeal, siding with David’s eldest, Adonijah. As the eldest, it was tradition that he would become the next king, and yet Solomon was given that role instead of him. When Adonijah came to Solomon to request the king’s servant as a wife, Solomon saw it as a threat to thwart his kingship, and sent a messenger to kill Adonijah. He then banished one of the advisors who supported Adonijah (Abiathar) and killed the second (Joab). Solomon then went on to kill the last enemies of his father and appointed his friends into positions of power within the kingdom.
King Solomon is described as enormously wealthy, ruling over a rich and peaceful kingdom, (many people today believe this to be an exaggeration). Once he had ensured his kingdom's success, he began to build the Holy Temple. Sources go on to say, “He received wood from King Hiram of Tyre and imposed a compulsory labor service on both the Israelites and the foreign nations that were under his control. His workers built the structure of the Temple, its decorations and its vessels.” Said temple took 7 years to complete. Solomon is renowned for his other building accomplishments, of which he used slave labor from the Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites.
He had many foreign wives whom he allowed to worship other gods. It is said that, “Outside Solomon’s kingdom, Hadad, of the royal family of Edom, rose up as an adversary of Israel.” Hadad the Edomite is a character mentioned in the First Book of Kings who was an adversary of King Solomon after Solomon turned to idols. Moreover,
Edom is described as one of the petty kingdoms in Transjordan that forced Moses to circle east of them during the Exodus of Egypt.
The name Hadad is also mentioned under “Ba’al-Hadad”, (Baal translating to mean “Lord”).
Baal-Hadad, Hadda or even Haddu, is said to have been the god of fertility, rain, thunder and lightning in ancient Canaanite and
Mesopotamian religions. Baal-Hadad is mentioned numerous times in the Hebrew bible as
Yahweh's chief rival deity, often simply referred to as "
Ba'al". (See my summary of Ba’al for more details). The connection between the royal figure and the deity is unclear. Solomon died in Jerusalem and was buried in the City of David.
THE TESTAMENT OF SOLOMON The testament of Solomon begins with the mention of the demon
Ornias, in that he would steal food and money from the “chief-devisers little boy”, who was very much loved by Solomon. Ornias is said to suck the boy's soul from his right thumb each night, until Solomon questions the boy on why he looks so unwell. The boy confesses to Solomon what is going on, and Solomon is said to have prayed day and night within his temple of God with the hope that this demon would be delivered into his hands, and that he may rule over him. The archangel Michael then brings Solomon a ring and tells him to wear it alongside the seal of God. He claims that Solomon can use this ring to lock up all of the demons of the earth and that he could use the help from these demons to build up Jerusalem. On the ring is described the marking of a Pentalpha, which is another word for Pentagram.
Solomon gives the ring to the boy and tells him to throw it at the chest of Ornias to capture him, which the boy does, and promptly brings the now captured demon to Solomon’s palace court gates. Ornias is described as a shapeshifting demon under the zodiacal sign of Aquarius. In the Testament of Solomon, he claims to be the offspring of Uriel. After interrogating him, Solomon binds Ornias before giving him the ring and ordering him to fetch the prince of all demons: Beelzebub, (Another name for the pagan god Ba’al, Baalzebul, Beelzeboul; the equivalent of the greek god Zeus). Ba’al is the king of gods and storms, one of many worshipped by the people of Canaan during this time period.
Solomon uses Beelzebub to bring all other demons unto him, the first being a female demon called
Onoskelis. She is described as living in caves and ravines, with the fair body of a woman, but with the legs of a mule. She goes on to say, ("I am [subjected] to thee, O king, by the wisdom of God given to thee, and by the angel Joel."), in that she is subservient to the authority running through Solomon given by God, and is described as consorting with men in the semblance of a woman. Solomon forces her to stand day and night, spinning hemp for the ropes used in building his holy temple. Her appearance in itself could be a reference to Pan in the sense that she is portrayed as a female satyr. The name Onoskelis is also associated with the hobgoblin Empusa, who is credited as the first vampire-like creature in western mythology. Between that and the sexual nature of the god Pan, she could very well be one of the first mentions of what today is called a succubus. (Any female based entity that feeds on humans in a sexual nature, usually during their sleep). In Greek traditions, Empusa fed on blood by seducing young men. See source quotes, “After climax, her victims would fall deep asleep and she would drink their blood and eat their flesh.” and “Because the empusae fed while her victims sleep, they were credited with producing the sleep paralysis phenomena, and in medieval times, they became associated with the Succubus, as depraved entities that liked to prey on innocent sleeping men.”
The next demon that Solomon faces is that of
Asmodeus, who he binds and orders to make clay for his temple by treading it down with his feet, all while carrying jars of water, “ "As the Lord God of my fathers liveth, I will lay iron on thee to wear. But thou shalt also make the clay for the entire construction of the Temple, treading it down with thy feet." And I ordered them to give him ten water-jars to carry water in. “. Asmodeus himself is a demon of lust, described to prevent intercourse between husband and wife, destroy new marriages, and compel husbands to commit adultery. The book of Tobit tells how Asmodeus lusted after a young woman named Sarah and killed each of her seven husbands before the marriages could be consummated. Other takes on the story however state that Asmodeus was in love with Sarah, and that he would kill the men who lusted after her due their impure intentions. He is later bested by Sarah’s husband Tobias when he plots with the archangel Raphael to drive Asmodeus away using the smell of a glanos fish, which Asmodeus apparently hates. Raphael is said to have tracked him down when he fled and bound him. In the testament of Solomon, Asmodeus tells Solomon that he can predict the future, and that he is the offspring of a human mother and an angel father. Asmodeus states that he is afraid of water, and that Solomon’s hold over the demons will be short. Solomon has further encounters with Asmodeus after the temple is built, but that story will be discussed in a future post.
Solomon then brings forth the demon
Tephras (demon of ashes), of which the demon claims that he is thwarted by the archangel Azael (not to be confused with Azrael). This causes confusion in the sense that Azael is another name for Azazel, one of the angels cast from heaven during the story of the Watchers, in which the angels bred with human women and took them as their wives, essentially being corrupted by the humans they were meant to watch over. The offspring were called nephilim, or “giants”, and were portrayed as evil. This story takes place before Solomon’s time, meaning that Azael should have already been a fallen angel. That being said, if many angels were cast down from heaven as punishment for procreating with humans, why then was Uriel left untouched when he produced the offspring Ornias, the first demon that Solomon encounters? Ornias, like Asmodeus, is said to have been created from the seed of an angel and a human mother. These questions appear to have no answer.
Solomon goes on to summon a variety of other demons, of which appear to be alterations of the pagan gods of Canaan during that time period, with Solomon mentioning several Greek deities by name. He summons 7 female demons, one of which states, “We change our place all and together, and together we live, sometimes in Lydia, sometimes in Olympus, sometimes in a great mountain." This is referring to the
Pleiades, with the 7th demon stating during Solomon’s interrogation, “I am the worst, and I make thee worse off than thou wast; because I will impose the bonds of Artemis.” The Pleiades Constellation is known as the Seven Sisters, and in Greek lore are said to have been the daughters of Atlas and Pleione, nymphs in the train of Artemis. The rest of his encounters appear to feature both Medusa and Poseidon, with the rest of the encounters being brief and without much detail.
It becomes clear that this is taking place during or around the religious slaughter of the people of Canaan, because Solomon is said to have lusted after a Canaan woman who he wished to marry. She however refuses to sleep with him unless he paid tribute to their gods of worship, which he does. As mentioned previously, he does take many foreign wives and does allow them to worship their gods of choice despite calling them idols. The text quotes, “And after that I was obliged by her to build a temple of idols to Baal [1], and to Rapha, and to Moloch, and to the other idols. “, all of which were gods of worship to the people of Canaan. Other sources state, “One theory takes literally the statement in I Kings 6:1 that the
Exodus from Egypt occurred 480 years before
Solomon began building the Temple in
Jerusalem. This occurred in the fourth year of his reign, about 960 BCE; therefore, the Exodus would date about 1440 BCE.” It is clear the story of Solomon takes place some time after the Exodus, but the exact dates appear to be unclear.
Furthermore, Solomon takes slaves from a variety of Canaan tribes to work on his buildings. One of these tribes was that of the Amorites, who were also called “Giants”. (The height and strength mentioned in Amos 2:9 has led some Christian scholars, including Orville J. Nave, who wrote the
Nave's Topical Bible, to refer to the Amorites as "giants".) This is relevant because as mentioned before, the offspring of the fallen angels and humans were also called Giants. (“The hybrids born from this unnatural union were no ordinary children. (
Genesis 6:4) The Nephilim were giant bullies, tyrants who filled the earth with violence. “) The Nephilim Giants were said to have been wiped out during the Great Flood, but that they also still remained afterwards. The identity of the nephilim themselves is largely debated even today. Similarly enough, The Book of Joshua speaks of the Amorites being slaughtered by Joshua, and that their kings were defeated at the waters of Merom by Joshua as well. For those who did not know already, Moses was the one who initiated the Israelite conquest into the “promised land” of Canaan. Joshua was
Moses' assistant and became the leader of the
Israelite tribes after the death of Moses, allocating the land to the tribes. In conclusion, it is my personal belief that the Testament of Solomon itself is not a testament at all, but a story with ties into what was historically happening in that area during that time.
SOURCES
https://www.ancient.eu/solomon/ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/king-solomon https://mythology.wikia.org/wiki/Baal-Hadad https://genies.fandom.com/wiki/Ornias https://www.deliriumsrealm.com/onoskelis/ https://occult-world.com/onoskelis/ https://www.mythicalcreaturescatalogue.com/post/2016/06/17/empusa-greece-italy https://occult-world.com/asmodeus-asmoday/ https://guardianangelguide.com/angel-azael/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorites#:~:text=The%20term%20Amorites%20is%20used,10%3A16).
https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/nephilim-giants/ https://answersingenesis.org/bible-characters/who-were-the-nephilim/ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Moses-Hebrew-prophet http://www.tonyburke.ca/wp-content/uploads/test_solomon.pdf https://archive.org/stream/cu31924028957400?ref=ol#page/n139/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/jstor-1450398/1450398_djvu.txt submitted by resussun_official to pantheonsplayground [link] [comments]
The Meaning of Divinity: My Issues With the Church of Seiros From the Perspective of my Faith as a Catholic
Alternatively titled: "My 95 Theses on Why The Church of Seiros Fucking Sucks"
So, obviously this game has resulted in a
little bit of controversy ever since its release, mostly revolving around Edelgard's actions and her feelings on the Church of Seiros. Now, as a disclaimer: I am an Edelgard supporter, I think her actions are ultimately for the greater good and in terms of the actual quality of her writing she's the best character in Fire Emblem history. So if you were waiting for a sign to click off from here and ignore everything else I'm about to say, that was it.
Now, there has been a lot of debate on whether or not the Church did anything, everything, or only some things wrong, and the comparisons to both the historical and modern-day Catholic Church are inevitable, with people's religious views obviously having a pretty large influence on how they view this issue, one way or another. What originally resonated with me so much when playing Crimson Flower was that Edelgard's ideals on meritocracy and humanity resonated with my views as an individualist, and her thoughts on nobility and monarchies resonated with my political beliefs, but there's already been a hundred different threads about that, this isn't a thread about my moral or political views, this is about my religious views. Today I'm here to talk about why I, as a Catholic (albeit not the most devout one), believe that the Church of Seiros is completely, fundamentally, broken and needs to fucking
go.
Also, another important disclaimer:
Someone's faith is a very personal thing, and each person's relationship with God varies depending on various factors such as how they were raised, how they interpret their faith, their feelings on religion, and so on. I am not a theological scholar nor am I any sort of authority on religion, I am not telling anyone that they can't be pro-Catholic and also pro-Church of Seiros, like I said, I'm not even especially devout for a Catholic. However, I do believe in a loving God, and I do identify with the Catholic faith, so I have a lot of thoughts on this matter that I haven't seen expressed elsewhere, at least not as comprehensively as I would like. If at any point it seems like I am trying to pass my opinion off as fact, it's just because I don't feel the need to write "in my opinion" before every sentence, but all of this is purely my own thoughts and opinions. Depiction of Religion in Video Games
So, to preface all this, I wanna address the elephant in the room, which is that it's not at all uncommon for religious organizations in JRPGs to be portrayed as villainous, and usually with a lot less nuance than Three Houses gives to the Church of Seiros. There are a lot of reasons for this:
- The Catholic Church was historically pretty fucked up and as most fantasy settings tend to borrow from medieval Europe, this carries over.
- Lots of stories will go for the basic narrative subversion of having an organization associated with "light" and "virtue" secretly being corrupt and sinful.
- Catholic imagery looks really fucking cool, especially when applied to JRPG final bosses.
The list goes on and on for a while. But I think one of the most
relevant reasons for this is the cultural view on what constitutes a "god". To a lot of religions, gods, demons, angels, etc. are essentially just
really powerful magical beings, and this makes them prime material for JRPG enemies and bosses (hell, SMT has an entire franchise and several spinoffs based entirely around this concept).
Notably, what I
don't consider to be a very prominent point on this list is "political commentary on modern day religion". That is to say that while the Church of Seiros undeniably draws influence from Christianity and the Catholic Church, I don't think that the writers of this game were trying to say that Pope Francis is secretly a lizard man who's been controlling world politics for the past thousand years, nor do I think that hating the Church of Seiros and hating the Catholic Church is the same thing. What I'm getting at here is that, for me, what tips the Church of Seiros from just "bad" to "absolutely worth starting a war over" isn't its similarities to the Catholic Church, but its
differences.
What Is a God? (A miserable pile of secrets!)
So, one of the points I wanted to emphasize when going on that tangent is that the nature of divinity varies from religion to religion. In a lot of cultures, gods are an entire race of superbeings or personifications of abstract concepts, with varying personalities and, most importantly,
flaws. The Greek pantheon is probably the most notable example of this, having an entire body of religious mythology based around how the gods are all a bunch of raging assholes and how humans have to deal with the consequences, but Japanese mythology is also no stranger to this, which probably has some influence on how religious organizations tend to be portrayed in JRPGs, if you'll excuse my reaching.
The reason I'm wasting your time with my religious musings in a thread about the Church of Seiros is because when it comes to Christianity, this is very much
not how God works. The Judeo-Christian Capital G YHWH God is defined by being
perfect. He is both omnipotent and omniscient, He can do anything and knows everything ever. He created
everything. A particularly poetic religious philosopher might even go so far as to describe him as "The father of all life, and arbiter of every soul." And I think that in today's modern society, this is something that's taken for granted by a lot of people, even though it's the cornerstone of the entire Christian faith. If you were to ask a priest in Ancient Greece why you should listen to the gods, and a priest in Medieval England why you should listen to God, they'd probably both tell you something along the lines of "Because they're gods!/ Because He's God!" But the former would mean "Because they're incredibly powerful beings who have lived for far longer than any of us have and are more power than we do,'' while the latter would mean "Because He, by
definition, knows better than us."
And
that is what divinity means within the context of the Christian faith.
That is why the Divine Right of Kings existed, that is why kings and the Pope had to get along, that is why King Henry VIII had to invent a new branch of religion just so he could get a divorce, that is why wars have been fought over religious disagreements and why heretics were burned at the stake, that is why the Catholic Church earned the reputation that led to it's look-alikes becoming stereotypical fantasy villains, that is why, to this day, people will argue tooth and nail that politicians should adhere to their political beliefs, even in countries based on separation of Church and State. Because if you believe in the basic, core tenet of the Christian faith, then "Because God said so," is
the most ironclad argument in existence. You can interpret what God said differently, you can deny that God actually said anything, you can call the other person a liar, you can claim that they're twisting God's words to suit their own agenda, but if you're a Christian, and you actually believe in the core beliefs of Christianity, then you cannot say "God is wrong," because that's completely counter to what Christianity is about. Within the context of the Christian faith "God is right" isn't a matter of debate, it's like saying 2+2=4. It's a
fact.
And this is
very relevant because the Faith of Seiros is based on the
exact same thing. Yes, the Crests ARE to Blame
So, let's think for a bit about how much influence Christianity has had on western society. How many of you reading this tend to say "Oh my god" or some variation thereof? How many of you will say "
Christ" or "
Sweet Jesus" in casual conversation? And how many of you do this despite not being particularly devout, followers of a different religion, or even atheists? Now imagine how much more influence Christianity had on the normal, day-to-day lives of your average everyday peasant in medieval times, back when most of the population was illiterate, life expectancy was
way shorter, social movement was even
more difficult than it is for people nowadays (which is saying something), priests and churches were often at the center of most communities, Kings sat on their throne because God said so and lords ruled over lands because
they said so, and by extension so did God.
Now imagine that this also took place in a world where priests and bishops can heal wounds or smite their enemies with divine light through the power of their faith, mages can rain fiery death on their enemies or summon bolts of lightning, and a
very small subset of the population is born with special magic blood that lets them wield extremely powerful magic weapons and also makes them strong enough to snap a lance in half by sneezing.
A common argument that I see floating around is "Why does Edelgard blame the Church for Crests when they were created by the Agarthans?" This is a
really annoying
really misinformed argument which is
really missing the point, but it's also one that the writing itself does a poor job at explaining, since Edelgard (and most of the in-game writing and characters) constantly use "Crests" to refer to both "Crests as a tangible magical phenomenon" and "Crests as a social system." The former was created by the Agarthans (or, I guess stolen from Nabateans and given to humans by the Agarthans) while the
latter was created by the Church, and is what Edelgard actually takes issue with.
The problem with Crests isn't "a small subset of the population is just born with superpowers that are inherited seemingly at random." The problem with Crests is that "a small subset of the population is just born with superpowers because the Goddess decided to bless them, and because the Goddess is perfect and all-knowing her deciding to bless these people with her power means that they're better than everyone else and deserve to be rulers", because after all, if the Goddess didn't want the nobles to rule anymore why would she keep blessing them with Crests? The Goddess is always right, remember? She never makes any mistakes.
And that is why the Crests are so terrible. That's what leads to large swathes of the population being basically second-class citizens, what lead to Fodlan's society being based on
literal actual eugenics, what lead to Hanneman's sister being raped and abused to death (which is, according to Hanneman himself,
the Father of Crestology, not particularly uncommon among nobility), what lead to Miklan being disinherited, basically destroying his life and very nearly Sylvain's too, what allowed Thales to convince Duke Aegir and the rest of the nobles to hand over the
entire Imperial family to them over for inhumane blood experiments so that they could produce an Emperor with two crests, which also lead to Lysithea and many other innocent people being tortured and experimented on as guinea pigs.
And all this is directly or indirectly caused by the Church's doctrine. Now, in fairness, for a time I might've accepted the argument that "Okay yeah the Church of Seiros borrows very heavily from the Catholic Church but there's no
actual evidence that they preach that Sothis is an omnipotent omniscient deity akin to the Christian God", and I would've said that that was arguing in bad faith, and that just by seeing all the Christian influence in the Church of Seiros and just the way that Rhea and other believers (both from the Central and Western churches) talk about the Goddess, it should be pretty clear that that's how they
treat her, but maybe they don't actually come right out and say that. However, I then went into the library, read the Book of Seiros, and
nope. The Church of Seiros
does in fact preach that Sothis is an all-powerful and all-knowing deity. They even explicitly use the word "omnipotence." (They don't straight up say "omniscience" but they do day she "hears all and sees all" or something along those lines which in practical terms is the exact same thing.)
So, I'm sure by now a lot of people reading this (assuming anyone's stuck around this long) are getting a distinctly anti-religious vibe from this thread, even though this is supposed to be about how my views as a Catholic lead me to believe that the Church of Seiros is full of shit. If I believe that "God is right" really
is an ironclad argument, then why do I think a religion where you have physical proof of a Goddess that you interact with in-game is so terrible? The difference is that she
isn't a Goddess. Naga Did Literally Nothing Wrong
Three Houses is a game that does a lot to "subvert expectations", and unlike many, many,
many other modern attempts at this, I'd say it does this very well. Three Houses works on its own as a standalone story, but it is
enhanced by the references and tributes to the lore of previous Fire Emblem games, with the most obvious inspiration being Jugdral (and the rest of Archanea, by extension). People have already made
tons of threads on how the Three Lords are all parallels to both past villains and past lords, the similarities between Nemesis and the Ten (actually Eleven) Elites and the Twelve Crusaders, the similarities between Holy Blood and Crests, hell, I even predicted as soon as the timeskip designs were revealed that the Relics would turn out to be bones because aside from their very fossilized appearance, Falchion, the archetypical Holy Weapon, is made out of Naga's
fang.
So, let's talk about Naga for a bit. As the OG Dragon Goddess and still the most archetypical and iconic example of an object of worship in the Fire Emblem series, the similarities between her and Sothis (and Seiros) are obvious and certainly deliberate (In particular, I'm a huge fan of how Sothis, the green-haired loli girl is actually the Goddess, while Rhea, the green haired milf lady is actually the
daughter of the Goddess, in a complete reversal of Naga/Tiki).
So, I'm assuming most people reading this don't need to have Naga's lore spelled out for them so I'll keep it short. Naga was the leader of the Divine Dragon tribe, she realized that dragons were degenerating so she ordered them to seal their powers in dragonstones and coexist with humans, some dragons disagreed with her pro-human attitude, so she kicked their asses, and also periodically gave her blessing and a sword carved from her fang to various different humans throughout history for when dragons came back and started causing trouble again. The version of history that the Church gives is an obvious parallel to this, with the big twist being that Nemesis worked with the Agarthans to kill Sothis and the other dragons, then stole their blood and bones to gain their Crests and create the Relics.
Now, the reason I'm bringing up Naga here is to showcase how Naga behaves and how the game's writing treats her, compared to how the Church of Seiros portrays Sothis (as, sadly, we have very little to go on regarding what Sothis was actually like in life and what she actually thinks of all this). While past Fire Emblem games generally haven't put as much care into the worldbuilding of the religious aspects or the moral conundrums that come with the Church of Seiros, there's still some things we can go on: she is worshipped by humans and the clergy in the games where she is mentioned seem to typically worship her, the actual doctrine of her faith is never actually explained in detail (or if it is, I've never come across it), the only time we see her worshippers actually do something evil (that I can recall) would be when Chrom's late father starts a crusade against Plegia for worshipping Grima, something which we can be reasonably certain Naga had no hand in. How can we be reasonably certain? Well, I'm glad you asked, because the quote that answers this question is what this entire segment on Naga has been building up to:
"But know this: I am no god. [...] So do sons of man name me. But I am no creator. I possess not the powers of making or unmaking." And there you have it. Naga,
the quintessential Good Dragon Goddess in the series,
the Capital-Double-D Divine Dragon is unambiguously saying that she is
not a god, and denies being omnipotent, and goes on to deny Grima's claims of divinity, just for good measure. Divine Dragon is a title that
humans made up for her, and she just never bothered to correct them. Given how heavily Three Houses draws upon the lore of previous Fire Emblem games, and
especially how Sothis draws from Naga, I believe that this is a very relevant point. Aside from denying divinity, Naga's attitude towards humanity is also generally much more hands-off. She steps in to help or guide when needed, but she generally lets humans rule themselves, and only really steps in when other dragons go around calling themselves Gods, starting empires, and oppressing humans (hint hint). Her quotes in
Heroes elaborate some more on this, and I'm particularly fond of this line:
"The world needs a guiding hand. My role is to steady that hand." Now, having said all that, it's certainly fair to say that Naga denying divinity doesn't automatically disprove Sothis', but even solely within the context of Three Houses, there's plenty of evidence that Sothis is "just" a very powerful dragon rather than an omnipotent deity. Most obviously, the fact that she even
has a physical body, which needs to hibernate after using up too much power, and which can be
killed, along with blood, bones, and a heart-stone-thing that can be stolen and made into a weapon is a pretty clear sign against omnipotence. On top of that, none of her feats really go beyond the scale of what's been seen in other FE games, or even other JRPGs. The Divine Pulse is certainly powerful, but Mila's Turnwheel is a thing (even if it's not
quite the same thing) and Naga herself demonstrates the power to travel through time and to different timelines in Awakening. Sothis claims that Byleth would need the power of a god to get out of Zaharas but, again, we've seen dimensional travel in other FE games and, frankly, the fact that Solon is able to
send Byleth to Zaharas in the first place sorta disproves the notion that dimensional travel is limited to gods. Creating an entire continent
is pretty impressive and beyond the scope of what we've seen other divine dragons accomplish in FE, but aside from the fact that I think
that particular feat was fictionalized and that Sothis didn't
literally create an entire continent out of nothing, even if it were true, that would just make Sothis a
really powerful dragon. Like I said earlier, there's a very significant difference between a lowercase-g god, and a Capital-G God, and while Sothis would likely qualify for the former I think the game makes it pretty clear that she is
not the latter.
Now, with all that said, yeah, maybe Sothis isn't actually a Goddess and this misunderstanding has caused a lot of trouble, but faith can also be a very powerful force for good, and the Church of Seiros
has done a lot of good things, so even if the faith is a sham, the Church
does have redeeming qualities. I won't deny this (and for that matter neither does Edelgard, nor the writing of CF, where the Church is reformed and restored after the war), but there is still
one more point which pushes the Church of Seiros from simply "bad" to "unacceptable" in my eyes.
Rhea Howard, CEO of Bethesda
So, I've already established why I don't believe that Sothis is a Goddess, but it's also important to note that aside from that one scene in Zaharas we don't actually get any real perspective from Sothis on what
she thinks of all this. The Church of Seiros was founded by Seiros, Sothis's daughter, who was claiming to be a Saint and Prophet blessed by the Goddess and chosen to strike down her enemies. Truthfully, this was all just a cover story so that she could gather an army to kill Nemesis and his followers, get revenge for her mother and the genocide of her people, and then unite the continent. Now, to be clear, what Nemesis did was undeniably terrible and Rhea was
fully justified in wanting him dead, and I'd even say that her uniting the continent was more-or-less a good thing, it's everything she did
after that which I take issue with.
Not trusting humans to keep the peace on their own, Seiros established a system of ruling that placed her most trusted supporters at the top, and left the descendants of her enemies under her thumb, as their authority to rule was now granted to them by the Goddess, and by extension, the Church, especially as the Heroes Relics were now essentially granted to them by the Church. Additionally, while Seiros did not declare
herself a Goddess, she did declare her mother a Goddess and placed herself at the head of the Church built around her, fully aware of the authority and power this implies, and she used and abused this with impunity. Most damningly, Seiros maintained and perpetuated this lie for
nearly one thousand years. Rhea didn't just trip over herself and go "oh fuck I accidentally established an oppressive theocracy!" she consciously made those decisions and then
actively continued making them for one thousand years, leading to all the above mentioned consequences. There's been a lot of debate over precisely
how much power and influence the Church actually has, but I think that it's pretty obvious that the Church at least has
some degree of influence, and more importantly, Rhea had
more than enough time to try and enact social change and fix her mistakes, and the fact that she did not shows that she either didn't know about all the fucked up shit that was happening because of her teachings (which I find highly unlikely) or she just didn't care enough to do anything about it on a large scale, either scenario paints a very poor picture of her. Instead, she decided to spend her free time on necromantic experiments to revive her mother by creating a body for her to inhabit (and by all appearances these bodies had their own minds, wills, personalities, and souls, mind you) and then shoving her soul into the body and hoping she'd possess them.
In spite of all this, the game does make an argument for there being good elements to the Faith of Seiros, even if it is all a lie, and I can see that, but here's where I take issue:
Seiros and the other surviving Nabateans
knew Sothis (ok so there's some debate on this point and that entire period of history is a big blank spot but I'm operating under the assumption that Seiros isn't
completely delusional and that Sothis
is her literal mother), and would therefore know that she wasn't actually a Goddess and that the religion they were preaching was based on a lie. Throughout history religion has been used to excuse a great number of atrocities, however, even if it's pretty obvious that they're just twisting the religion to justify their own terrible actions, you can at least,
ostensibly, say that they genuinely believe in what they're doing, in some twisted way. Rhea does
not have this excuse. The entire religion of Seiros is built upon a lie that Rhea knowingly and intentionally invented, and she
repeatedly used this lie to justify herself and her actions. This lie may have been made with good intentions, but as Rhea herself admits, this led to a ton of terrible consequences, and the lie also
conveniently happened to place her in a position of very high authority.
If a local priest were to confide in me and say that he doesn't actually believe in a lot of what he preaches, but he believes that faith is important to a lot of people and he likes that his position allows him to help people, I'd be fine with that. If the
Pope came up to me and told me that he didn't believe in God and it was all just a lie that he was riding out as a career choice,
I'd be much more pissed off.
TL/DR: The fact that the entire Church of Seiros is based on a lie, the
immense consequences of that lie, and the fact that Seiros
knew this was a lie, and had to actively
keep lying to people for one thousand years is why I firmly believe that the Church of Seiros, in its current state
cannot be allowed to continue to exist without very heavy reforms.
So yeah if you actually bothered to read all this thanks for listening to me rant about this fictional religion from a videogame and my thoughts on Catholicism and the Christian faith.
[Fiction]: Strangers without Names Section 3
Victims (2): Place of Death: No. 11 Conrad Street Time of Death: 10:48pm Name: Miss Emily Ellison Age: 12 Height: 4 Feet, 10 Inches Weight: 103 lbs. Nationallity: British Citizen Phenotype: Northern Euroid Blood Type: O Negative Eyes: Green Hair: Blonde Occupation: None Home Address: No. 11 Conrad Street Siblings (1): Mary Ellison
Name: Miss Mary Ellison Age: 12 Height: 4 Feet, 5 Inches Weight: 97 lbs. Nationallity: British Citizen Phenotype: Northern Euroid Prescription: Left +3, Right +3 Blood Type: O Negative Eyes: Green Hair: Blonde Occupation: None Home Address: No. 11 Conrad Street Siblings (1): Emily Ellison
The next address was a terraced house among terraced houses. It was in a small set of short crooked brown buildings with shaky red tiles near the centre of the hamlet. We wandered around the area for a short while, weaving through little winding streets whose spontaneous shapes gave the impression that the of town more grown than built, never moving in any overall direction but simply shooting off to wherever had been immediately convenient lifetimes ago. The rain had ceased and the wind was becoming little more than disturbed murmur. It seemed that in only a matter of that everything went from being swamped in grey to being swallowed by black. It became easier for me to the girl by listening out for the sound of her breathing amidst the relative silence that to pick out a mostly colourless shape from a totally colourless background. It was hard to tell which house was each, eventually I was reduced to indignantly groping around the front of each building until I felt the unmistakable form of the number eleven. I looked down; I could barely make out the time on the watch face, 11:47. We now stood outside the house. It would happen soon, the very next minute in fact. I looked up to the building’s first floor. There were two souls in that house about to sleep through what would be the most interesting event of their lives, their theatrical and unexplainable deaths. So quiet as too be barely audible, not that it was of much consequence, I asked, “Can you hear the victims.” There was the sound of human hair scuffing against tweed when she shook he head in negation, “Not a thing, they’re either dead or asleep.” “Is anyone around thinking about doing them any harm?” I heard another shake of the head. The watch, the minute had arrived. Everything remained still, quiet and still. No commotion of any sort. Three quarters of a minute had passed I refused to leave empty handed once more, and so repeatedly began ringing the rubber doorbell. Eventually a carpet of light slipped out from beneath the doorframe, followed by the stomping of indignantly awoken feet. The door was angrily flung open. A man of middling height, with once raven black hair sprouting flickers of grey and a nose that fell just short of the mark of being hooked. Behind him perched warily on the stares was his wife, a pretty blonde in a pink dressing gown. Before he could say anything I asked him, “Have you checked on your children tonight, Sir.” He snarled back at me, “What is this, who are you?” “I really think you should, two girls isn’t it. One’s got a prescription for I believe +3, +3 glasses.” The woman gasped and began scrambling up the staircase. “Ethel, don’t” the man called out as she left. Turning back towards me he asked suspicious, “How did you know that?” This was not an uncommon scenario, well at least in part it was not an uncommon scenario “We’re with the police I’m detective Melville” I was unable to think of something clever, Melville was the alias from our last job “and this is detective Melville. Now won’t you let us in?” He eyed us warily, “I came from home, I just a got a telephone call that your family is in danger. You should let us in.” I felt two fingers quickly jab the back of my ribs. The man thought I sounded too calm about so dire a situation, putting some urgency into my voice, “Sir, you need to let us in. Now.” One quick sharp jab from a single finger, he eyed me wearily for a short moment that could not have lasted longer. The woman’s scream from far up the staircase was so blaring and so shrill I could swear I actually felt the air around me shake somewhat. The man immediately lost interest in me and rushed in the direction of his wailing wife. He also lost interest in his open front door, which we took as an invitation to come inside. Before we entered there was a tug at my jumper, “I heard him.” She told me. “Where is he, did you recognise him.” I asked hopefully. “I’m not sure, it was briefest moment, maybe even less than a second. Then it just disappeared” “What did you get from it?” “Not much of anything really, way too brief, but I’m almost certain he was focusing on this area and that it wasn’t any normal person. Wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise.” Well, this was confirmation we weren’t simply chasing after shadows, there was indeed a man to be found. The interior of the house was much more modern than the exterior, the family was evidently a fan of white, the walls and ceiling were plastered white, the floor was carpeted white and turning into the living room revealed, a white sofa and two white chairs. There was of course variation among the white, the carpet had yellowed slightly from use and so felt a little less lifeless than the walls and ceiling. The furniture had the grace of not being white in of itself, they were in fact quite handsome mahogany frames simply stuffed with large chalky white cushions. The sofa looked the least bulbous of the three so I chose there to sit, the girl followed. I could just about hear a conversation happening above me, but it was too far distnat to make out the contents. The girl spoke, “She’s begging him not to look inside, but he’s not going to listen.” There was the sound of running up above, then a pregnant pause. That man made one of the most horrible sounds I have ever heard. It began as a low sort of moaning. Failed attempts at speech began trying to bubble their way through the moan, but either because he could find the words or hadn’t the heart to articulate them, his moaning and his babbling then gave way to a most visceral scream, that made me feel so vitally aware of so very deep a cavern in the pit of my stomach. It was not helped by the girl’s impulse to attempt a narration of the garbled stream of consciousness flowing from upstairs, “…They’re on the walls, They’re on the walls.” “Stop it.” I snapped. She looked dumbfounded for a moment, and then she smiled. It was obviously meant to be a playful gesture but there was a hint of malice in it. “You’re starting to get squeamish, detective.” When the husband returned downstairs, he glowered at me and raising an unstable finger demanded to know “You, what did you have do with this.” I felt I should stand in order to speak to him. “Sir, I need to ask you a few questions.” “Go to Hell.” “I’m sorry this had to happen to you Mr Ellison, really I am. But regardless of that the immutable fact remains that it is very likely that something very similar is going to happen again very shortly unless you answer every single one of my questions to utmost of your ability. If, and only if, you can do that for me we might be able to prevent some other man in some other house waking up in the middle of the night to check on some other loved one only to discover that they’ve also become a part of the wall paper. If you don’t help us I assure what has happened here will happen again somewhere else, and it will be at least in part your fault.” At first he did not speak, his eyes simply regarded me with a deep co-mingling of hatred and curiosity until eventually he simply fell backwards into one of the chalky chairs, he answered my request with a vigourless, “Fine.” “Good, good. Now I’m going to need you to get your wife.” A bit of his spirit returned to him when he firmly told me, “No.” “Sir, it would be very helpful to our investigation.” A little more temper, “I said No.” I turned to the girl wondering if there was anyway to convince him to let me speak to his wife. She shook her head at me. “Alright Sir, tell me about your girls.” “What you mean?” “Just tell me about them. If someone had asked you yesterday what are your girls like tell me what you would tell them.” He let out a long breath; “Well their twins, not identical, but you can tell their sisters just by looking. Emily’s quite boisterous but she’s kind to everyone she meets; I’ve never met anyone who said they didn’t adore her. Mary, the one with the glasses, isn’t quite so energetic and she isn’t very talkative but she’s quite sensible for her age and you know when she does say something its usually worth listening to, they have all more or less the same friends, there’s Marsha, Lucy and Honey, that’s quite a name isn’t it I can never believe they a friend like that, Honey. We know them pretty well because you know when the kids are talking about whose house they wanna go to, well we’ve got twice as many votes don’t we.” I nodded to indicate I was listening, “I see, are you daughters enrolled in an all-girls school.” “No, no they go to St. Oswald’s it’s the only prep school round here, so its co-ed.” He sounded a little suspicious of my lack of local knowledge. “I see, did your girls ever talk about any boys.” “What do you mean?” “Boys at the school, ones they liked, ones that liked them or perhaps maybe disliked?” “Uh, no they just play with other girls, you know what they’re like at that age.” “Of course, did they ever misbehave at school?” “No, no very good manners, I remember their English Teacher was just telling me yesterday telling me that even back when he was a boy little girls weren’t so polite.” “Have your daughters mentioned any fights or any falling out with friends recently, or even not recently?” “No. None whatsoever.” That seemed a little idyllic, “Not ever?” He doubled down, “No.” “Do you know a man named Daniel Trevelyan?” “Uh no, that doesn’t ring a bell.” We carried on for as long as we could grasping after any kind of information that might be useful, when finally he looked physically unable to carry I told him, “Alright that should be enough, thank you.” I turned to leave when he asked softly, “should we call the police?” “They’re already on their way Mr Ellison.” I lied to the grieving man.
The hotel had something of a living area, liberally decorated with an assortment of colourful antiques. A sprawling anachronism of a world map; porcelain plates with colourful illustrations of scenes from ancient Greece and Palestine; medals from long forgotten wars bestowed by now dead dynasties, Prussian, Russian, Austrian. I wondered if these were worth anything but given that they had ended up out here I reckoned probably not. Aside from the heavy set, slightly rusty looking, bronze chandelier dandling from the centre of the ceiling there was hardly a thing that looked to be from before the turn of the century. One very notable exception was the inexpensive plastic kettle placed on a table drowsed in a large satin covering, sitting next to an old cigar case which now carried supermarket teabags and those small one use pots of milk. I stood over by this table, searching for a cup when I directed a question to a magnanimous old armchair that had been turned to face the window, “I take everyone around here is asleep?” There was an affirmative grunt from behind the chair. There weren’t any cups on the table itself, maybe in that cabinet over there. “Tell me Eva what is it you’ve been thinking about since we arrived here.” Not the cabinet, would they perhpas be somewhere else in the room? She let out an annoyed sigh, “If you’re going to talk me could you at least focus on the conversation. It’s a pain if you don’t.” “Answer the question its important.” I swept past under the table clothe of to view what was beneath. “What do you mean what’ve I been thinking about?” There was a crate beneath the table. “Generally what’s been occupying your mind?” The cups were in the crate of all things, what a strange place to put them. Hidden underneath the table. I can only assume that they were moved somewhere more conspicuous during the day. “Well I think you know … its been on your mind quite a bit as well.” She answered listlessly, making the attempt to sound tactful. I sat across from her, I must been more occupied with finding those cups than I realised, “That wasn’t the sort of thing I had in mind.” She gave me a look of shame that turned quickly to anger, “The machine, why didn’t you just ask about that in the first place?” She wasn’t meant to talk to me like that. “Well have you thought about it all?” She toyed with the hair around her left ear, “Not really, I mean maybe a little after you fixed it up I wondered why they couldn’t make it run a little smoother, but after you mentioning it later on I don’t remember paying it any mind.” “And you certainly weren’t wondering about any its more specific details?” “I wouldn’t know what to wonder about.” That was worrying, before there was a chance we might be able to know what he knows and how he know it, but now. ‘What do you mean?” I told her, “With the machine wound up you have a range of eighty metres.” Her face scrunched up awkwardly as she tried to remember what eighty metres looked like. I tried, uncreatively, to picture a metre rule. Without much confidence she concluded, “That sounds about right.” “No not about right, exactly right. You can’t read anyone more than eighty metres away from you. Seventy nine metres are as good a one metre, but eighty one, they might as well be in Hokkaido.” “Yeah, I guess, but why is that important.” “Do you know why your range to limited to eighty metres?” “Well, it’s like you said it’s hard to concentrate on too many people.” “Yes, but why eighty metres, even then you can still get quite a crowd in a diameter of one hundred and sixty metres.” “I didn’t now there’s a reason.” I was honestly amazed she’d never picked up on it all this time or that no one had ever explained it to her, “Well you see a girls range once she,” there wasn’t a technical term for it, “goes off, her range never stops growing. The boys on the other hand it grows for maybe a month and then just stops. Your range is limited to eighty metres because you’d never had to hunt anyone down who had a range of more than seventy-five.” She looked like she understood. I continued, “You said you heard him for maybe half a second and then he just disappeared, right?” “Yes, that’s right.” Then she understood the problem, though I doubte dit had much to do with her own intuition. “So you reckon he just rushed in close enough to do what he needed and then dashed out almost immediately.” I nodded; it was the only thing that made any sense, “Oh. That’s worrying. How does he know to do that?” I had absolutely no idea, granted I suppose our sort were not particularly subtle in our work, but how many mysterious acts of senseless violence were there over the years, we should just blend in with all the rest. “Maybe he was just lucky.” She offered me. I didn’t see how that was possible. “Maybe he doesn’t know that he has to stay eighty metre away, he could have just happened to wonder in when he …” “No,” I interrupted her, “that’s not how people like him kill accidently, do you remember York,” The name of the city obviously meant nothing to her going by the blank stare I received in answer to my question. I carried on, “those deaths were accidental, he said he just wanted to stop hearing their voices, then he discovered that neither his wife nor his father were breathing any more. Just stopped right in the middle of lunch.” Recognition flashed in her eyes. “Every accidental looks something like that, when they’re as theatrical as the deaths going on here they can’t be unintentional.” “I see.” She said, “So he knows what he’s doing.” It could not be doubted, he knew what he was doing and he knew how to avoid getting caught, which led to the unsettling conclusion that he knew he had someone to hide from. He knew about us. That was something he should not have known. Unfortunately it begged the question. Why kill an old man and a pair of sisters seemingly completely unconnected to one another? I didn’t have a good answer.
Place of Death: Falwick Museum of Natural History Time of Death: 9:34 am Victims (1): Name: Julia Wheeler Age: 28 Height: 5 Feet, 12 Inches Weight: 176 lbs. Nationallity: British Citizen Phenotype: Northern Euroid Blood Type: O Positive Eyes: Brown Hair: Black Status: Married (Alexander Wheeler) Children: None Occupation: Shopping Assistant Home Address: Celestine Cottage, Mendicant’s Way Siblings (1): Marcus Miller
We got up at 7am, the receptionist was now awake and told us to have a pleasant day and asked us when we’d like to check out. We were scheduled to leave at Seven, the place we’d arrived at had been about a two hour walk away, “we’ll want to leave around four” I told the receptionist on the way out. On the way to the charity shop at which our next victim worked, we just so happened to pass the restaurant we had spent all of yesterday afternoon. It was a grim site, there was yellow police tape strung over the door and the view through the window had been completely obscured by black paint. To be perfectly honest I was floundering as what it was we should do. I hadn’t been heartbroken over little slip up at the restaurant there was a relatively large number of witnesses to the actual event, a level headed culprit can sometimes slip through the hysterics that tended to run through the normal witnesses heads, but the second killing was a textbook example of a incident that should pointed us straight to our man. There were no witnesses to the act itself the culprit should have stuck out like sore thumb, which he did however briefly, but the problem was that he seemed to know that, I have no idea how or why but he did. Someone had found out about us, whether through investigation or indiscretion. Whoever that was might not even have been our man, there’s every possibility he just read it off some stranger he passed in the streets one day. Would explain why he chose to move out literally to the middle of nowhere, but doesn’t explain why he’d start killing out of nowhere, it was not as though anything especially interesting had started to happen. The place had probably never even been mentioned in a National Newspaper, and from what I’d skimmed in the last few issues of the local paper before we arrived nothing remotely interesting happening around here. I couldn’t what reason he had for this sudden change of behaviour. Maybe he just got bored of this sleepy little place and wanted some drama to watch. They say familiarity breeds contempt, and a man such as he would be familiar with this town in way quite unlike any of its other residents. The place wasn’t open when we arrived. It was a fairly standard charity sat on the corner of a street, it occupied a much older building indicating that It once been something far more interesting than the depository of unwanted clothes and VHS’ it had now become. The girl seemed unimpressed with me. “You can’t seriously plan on just waiting around again. That hasn’t really been working so far.” “We don’t know where our man is right now, we only know where he’s going to be. And that’s somewhere around here. If you heard the same sound as you did last night would you recognise it?” “I don’t know, probably.” A probably was better than a no. “When you hear, run in its direction.” We loitered outside for a while, it had snowed again last night, and the street was covered in a, save for own shoe prints, totally undisturbed sheet of snow. Eventually a older looking fair haired woman arrived at the shop who regarded the two of us with great suspicion. “Who might the two of you be?” “We’re interested in one of your staff, a young woman, Mrs Julia Wheeler.” She looked incredulous, “Who are you people?” “We’re with the police.” I attempted to give my voice the quality of authority, but even I heard the slight tone of panic that was creeping into my words. “You don’t look like policemen, go away before I call the real police.” There was a forced cough from behind me, “Let’s go Melville.” I decided to leave it at that. I stopped us as soon as we turned the corner. Is she calling the police? “Maybe” the girl answered, “she definitely would have if we’d stuck around, but it seems she doesn’t really want to bother with the whole thing… oh wait, wait” She stopped to listen for a moment “Looks like she’ll be asking the victim about us when she shows up for work, which will be… she didn’t say.” Two of hours of waiting, wasted in less than a minute, cantankerous old wench. The museum was just a short distance down the corner we had already turned, almost a literal hop, skip and a jump. On our way we passed only one other human being. However that human being was a woman, with brown eyes, and dark hair and was very possibly five feet and twelve inches in height. There was no reason not to ask, so putting on my most amiable expression, “Mrs Wheeler isn’t it?” She stopped in her tracks, “Oh yes, I’m sorry I’m afraid I don’t recognise you.” “That’s perfectly fine, I just hoping to ask you a question if you don’t mind?” She seemed to relax a little at the friendly tone, “I don’t see why not, what do you need help with?” “I was only wondering is there anyone you know who might want to kill you?” She didn’t seem to understand the question, “What?” “Is there anyone you know who would like you dead? Don’t worry about the logistics, let’s say for the sake of argument they knew they wouldn’t be caught. Is there anyone who given that opportunity would take it?” “I, I don’t, who are you?” “You needn’t be so flustered it’s just a hypothetical.” “Well I don’t want to answer it.” She stormed off in the direction of the shop. The museum was impossible to miss. A pseudo-classical façade among the group of far more modest pieces of erratic Elizabethan brickwork, that it was no bigger than its neighbours made the look somewhat megalomaniacal. I approached the door of solid glass with some trepidation. The museum looked open enough, there was no one inside, but the door was unlocked. Where was everyone? “There’s just one volunteer she’s in the back right know looking for some document,” The girl told me, then added “That woman’s following us.” “Really why’s that?” Before the girl could answer me a distressed voice form the doorway called over, “Are you going to kill me?” I was not sure why but something in her tone offended me, “I’ve never killed anyone.” That was a blatant lie, but in my defence I had never really had any say in the matter. Her clock was ticking, not much reason for caution at this point, “You were already planning on coming here round about now, why is that?” She gave me a look, “What you mean, I don’t even know what this place is.” That couldn’t right, “You mean you’ve never noticed that attempted little slice of Corinth outside.” “Well I guessed it wasn’t anyone’s house, I just assumed it was a fancy looking sweet shop or something?” I looked to the girl. Had she never at all thought of visiting this place? The girl shook her head, also looking confused. The woman then addressed me, “Miss Aldershot said you asked about me. Why, what’s going to happen to me?” Maybe if I was blunt she would tell me something useful. Attempting to assume a disposition that gave the impression I knew exactly what was going on I told her in a manner almost condescending, “Your going to die very soon, we were hoping we might be able to stop it but seeing as neither you nor your employer were either willing or able to tell us anything useful that’s going to be very unlikely.” The woman just stood there dumbfounded. Without much feeling, the girl asked “Howard, what time is it?” I looked down at my watch not paying it much attention, “it’s a little over nine thirty.” It took me a moment to realise the significance of what I had just said. Seizing Wheeler by the shoulders I began shouting at her, “You only came in here because you followed us, is that right?” Whimpering, she nodded. “And you never would have come here otherwise.” She nodded again. “Are you one-hundred per cent sure of that.” “Yes, yes what’s going to happen.” I let go of the terrified woman, “Nothing you’ll be fine.” I lied. Attempting to feign a total lack of interest in the walking dead woman I pointed to the door to the museum’s first exhibit Rocks beyond this World! And exclaimed, “Eva, let’s look in there shall we.” And we hurried over into the darkened room, leaving behind a confused and very distraught Mrs Wheeler. The room was almost totally dark save for the polychromatic spotlights focused on various cases of extra-geographic geology around the room, the wall felt like it was made of felt. One terrible silent moment passed both for those certain and uncertain of the impending course of fate, then from the other room a faint pop. As soon she had heard the sound the girl was sprinting out of the exhibit and through the lobby. As I followed, I tried not to pay too much mind the scene through which I passed, though I was unable to ignore the way my boots slid along the floor, or the abominable scent of the bile and the red iron liquid mingling with one another in the air. At first, following the girl was easy as she left a meandering trail of red dots behind her. I managed to dash round the corner on which the charity shop sat just in time to catch sight of her slip down a nearby alley. The trail of red was beginning to dry out. Down the alleys there was a chain of footprints, in snow fast becoming sleet, to follow but when the path eventually spat me out onto a broader road I discovered that exposure to the midday sun had destroyed my method of tracking, the girl was nowhere to be seen, there were at least seven nearby roads she could have disappeared down, I was lost. For the next half an hour I ran from hither to thither throughout the town all the while wondering: to wither will I find that girl? I eventually found her wandering around an old Georgian fountain, decorated with some malign looking putti, panting like steam engine while she stretched her vacant gaze to the sky as though straining to sea something just beyond the edge of visibility. She must have noticed me. When I moved towards her she fell onto a wooden bench flanking the fountain. I sat down next to her, still chugging like the Orient Express, eyes rolling about in their sockets like marbles in a spinning barrel breathing out between violent inhalations, “I never want to do that again.” “I see that you lost him then.” She didn’t answer me. “If you’re going to be sick again, do it in the fountain.” At my prompt she perched herself over the bench to stare down at her own queasy reflection, In hindsight expecting a person who barely ate anything and spent most of her time in a room barely large enough to lie down in to successfully chase after anyone was, well it was certainly wishful thinking.
We were back in the hotel room. I could not help but restlessly tap my fingers against the side table, though this slowly started to escalate to actually hitting the guiltless piece of furniture. There were a few words that could’ve adequately described this situation, none of them conducive to polite conversation. Strictly speaking the notes weren’t incorrect, as a matter of fact they were more accurate than our usual material. Yet herein lay the problem, they were accurate in a way they really shouldn’t have been, really couldn’t have been. I couldn’t begin to fathom how something like this happens, there was nowhere for my speculation to even begin, they only ever tell you what it is you need to know, and more often than not I didn’t need to know. Maybe this is just what happens if the target expects you. I wasn’t sure, I’d never heard of something of that nature happening before. I noticed the girl get up from her bed and begin to move in the direction of the door. “Where do you think your going?” I asked. “I’m definitely not going back.” She stated. “You obviously have no idea how to find this guy.” I couldn’t deny it there was no point in doing so. “I’m leaving while I’ve got a head start.” Half-heartedly I informed her “I’m meant to shoot you if you try to run off.” “Yes, but you don’t have the stomach for it.” The girl then quite leisurely, without any visible sign of worry that I might try to obstruct her path, walked over to the door and left me alone in our room. Losing a girl accidently would go over poorly, exceedingly so in fact. Losing a girl without even trying to stop her would have been completely unforgivable, and it was not as though I had the option of simply lying, telling them I shot her and she’d been buried somewhere on the outskirts of town. She had effectively made the decision for both of us when she chose to leave. Emerging from the room, I found her leaning against the corridor’s immodest crimson wallpaper. “You wouldn’t be able to survive for more two days by yourself.” I told her flatly, not mockingly. It was after all something of a brute fact. “That’s true.” She admitted with visible reluctance. I carried on, “No one’s ever …” “Lasted more than three weeks.” She finished the omen for me, attempting to ward off my tone of foreboding with a casual wave of the hand. Nothing else was said as we continued down the hotel corridor. I handed back our keys to the woman manning the reception. Knowing where the bus station was I only needed to ask her, “Excuse me Miss, do you know when the next bus will be leaving Falwick?”
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[PI] A freak accident during your final battle mortally wounds your arch-nemesis. As you rush to their side, they shakily pull out of their pocket a USB and say, "At least I knew what I was fighting for. Do you?"
Warning: Rather Long Read
Original WP: A freak accident during your final battle mortally wounds your arch-nemesis. As you rush to their side, they shakily pull out of their pocket a USB and say, "At least I knew what I was fighting for. Do you?"(
https://www.reddit.com/WritingPrompts/comments/dstbn8/wp_a_freak_accident_during_your_final_battle/)WPWP):
"Human, Infused": I sat back down in the office we’d used as our staging point, and plugged the USB stick that I'd taken from the ruined, shattered hands of the immortal. Everyone else in Epsilon Squad was now dead, and when the thing had finally been reduced to nothing but a head, torso, and an arm, it had started laughing. It then held open its hand, and the usb drive had slid out of the synthetic flesh of its palm. I only glanced at it briefly, keeping the rifle- held together now with barely a prayer- aimed at its head
"At least I knew what I was fighting for." It croaked, its black, oily blood pouring from its mouth with each uttered syllable. I'd shot it twice, then- once to completely obliterate the head, and again to put a nice, basketball-sized hole through the torso, obliterating its hearts, lungs, and whatever other organs were growing in there that nature never intended. The three shots finally shattered the weapon, scattering the piece on the ground in front of me.
My entire body ached on the walk back. The combat armor had been barely better than nothing, and the pain that was now shooting up my right arm told me that I probably had a fracture somewhere from the constant, unforgiving recoil of my gun.
I'd dragged the desktop out of storage, and had disassembled the thing, disconnecting anything that it could possibly use to leap onto the base's network. Even if the stick didn't leave behind some kind of virus or rogue A.I., I planned to scrap the entire the entire rig and burn the pieces afterwards to make absolutely sure.
I opened the folder, and saw met with a large number of files, mostly pdf's and videos, with names that meant little to me save for certain dates.
The first was a pdf file,
U-2ED-99 Schem Base I clicked it open and was met with the familiar sight of a synthetic- much like the one the rest of the team had died to kill- without all of the cybernetic bells and whistles hooked up to it. Under all the armor and upgrades, even I couldn't deny how mockingly human it looked in shape. But as everyone knew by now, there was nothing human about them.
I looked at the first video file. The name was a random jumble of letters and numbers, save for what appeared to be a date at the end. Whether it was because the file was somehow corrupted or if the USB simply disagreed with whatever the original file format had been, I couldn't tell.
55d6&7&A-11-7-09 The video appeared to be from a security camera of some kind. Around a large table were a number of people. Most of them had to be scientists and researchers from various fields, judging from how most of their formal attire seemed to be barely broken-in. Likely most of these men and woman were used to wearing lab coats or cleansuits and preferred time in a lab or work bay, as opposed to sitting awkwardly in a meeting room in business coats and neckties.
A few of them I could actually recognize- General Kaulman, when he had been younger. Although the stress lines and white hair at the age of 41 dispelled that illusion. I noticed Professors Karl Ihoff and Bedini Minje, emeritus of genetics and cybernetics, respectively. Kaulman was standing up from his chair at the head of his seat, hunched forward, bracing his weight with his hands against the large table. The other men and women seemed frightened, moreso by him than by the fact that they all seemed out of their element, away from the comfortable familiarity of their computers and machines.
"Just tell me- does. It. Work?" Kaulman boomed.
There were a few tense moments of silence, before Ihoff finally regained enough of his composure to reply.
"Yes. But the process- it causes severe-"
"Dammit, Karl! This is not the time for morals!" Kaulman cut him off as Karl shrank away in his chair.
"All of us here have blood on our hands. What we've done is monstrous- and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. You and I and everyone else involved is going to burn in Hell just for what we've already done!"
Silence. A few people's glanced towards each other, but none of them dared to move- as though Kaulman was some sort of predator whose sight was based on movement, and even the slightest twitch would give them away and mean certain death.
"But if this works...if this succeeds, then at least the rest of humanity doesn't have to."
There was a few more seconds of dead silence. A soft blowing sound began as the air-conditioner in the room kicked in from somewhere out of view from the camera.
"Gentlemen. I know that none of you are comfortable with what we're doing here. I'd be incredibly worried if any of you weren't absolutely disgusted with your work here. But there's no time left to explore any alternatives. Whatever happens after all of this," Kaulman said as he waved his arm behind him, "We'll just have to deal with as it comes."
The image stopped moving and darkened a bit as the video ended.
1-4-10 This one was an excerpt from a TIME article. The central photo showed a
thing- something that was humanoid in stature and stood upright, like a man would, but was otherwise different in almost every other aspect. Instead of skin, it was made of- or encased in- some kind of odd, plasticy substance, like a highly flexible carapace, with curves and angles in the limbs that suggested greatly enhanced musculature beneath. Each hand was too large, with an extra opposable thumb-like digit on the opposite side of where it should be, and the legs were built all wrong, with an extra joint that made it look like some intermittent species of some evolutionary line of alien beast. One that was currently at some mid-way point from moving around on all-fours to walking upright.
The head was slightly elongated, reminding me of how I read once where ancient Egyption royal families would tie ropes and sticks around infants heads to make them grow in odd shapes, seeing it as some indication of divine lineage. Or vaguely of something I’d seen once in an old, old horror movie I once watched as a kid. Where there should have been a face, however, there was a slightly rounded and semi-convex, metallic surface, from which seven pinpricks of light gleamed- six organized in two rows of three each, and the seventh, slightly larger one set in between the rows and towards the forehead, above where the ridge of the nose would meet the brow ridge, had the plate only been a mask.
But of course, it wasn’t a mask. At least, not for this one, anyway.
I looked at the headline title:
The War Against the Nanite Swarm: A look at the G.D.F.s new weapon in combating the nanite plague. I finally noticed the small caption set into the photograph.
Unit ODN-03. The world’s first intelligent synthetic by Kelso Labs, and the G.D.F.’s new weapon in the fight against the nanite scourge. “After the successful defence of the Albertian Wall, and the decisive victory in eliminating the nanite swarms from New Macedonia and Northern Greece, there were countless rumours surrounding what methods the G.D.F. had actually used to pull off such a sudden, stunning victory within the eight days of the Greek offensive. After numerous videos leaked onto the internet, the G.D.F. released an official statement three months ago, confirming a new weapon being used in the fight against the nanite swarms. During a press conference last month- I’d lost interest in it already. No way was I going to read the entire thing- nothing new here.
5-3-12 A date everyone remembered, I clicked and the player opened up. It was footage from an old news cast 39 years ago. The footage was of a city square in New Andreas, where the enormous, dead mass of the enormous nanite leviathan lay on the pavement, its body slowly breaking down and melting into a tarry, black sludge. A number of men and women dressed in hazmat suits stood around it, collecting samples, meanwhile other who were likewise dressed and were carrying various guns and kinetic shields stood by to make sure nobody got too close.
And of course, standing among them were at least a handful of the Synthetics.
A woman's voice began speaking.
"We've just now received an update out of Chile. The G.D.F. has confirmed that the nanite swarm in New Andreas has been completely neutralized. The G.D.F. official has informed media that the city will remain under quarantine until they've ensured that all contaminated matter has been located and properly disposed of."
The video came to an end. This hadn't been anything knew. I had been old enough back then to remember seeing that footage myself, along with other reports like it out of Moscow, Dresden, Whales, D.C., and a bunch of other cities and towns I couldn't be bothered to remember.
I clicked on the next video after that.
5-22-12-UEN Another date we all knew. General Kaulman, Professors Ihoff and Nakigawa, and Chairman Paulson a sat along a table opposite from the camera, the familiar logo of the UEN- the globe of Earth set atop a pasillade shield.
Kaulman was pointing to someone from off-camera. I could hear the rapid cascade of clicks and soft flashes of light as numerous camera-drones went off.
“General Kaufman,” A woman’s voice asked from off-camera. “With the nanite crisis now over, what will happen to the synthetics.
Just before he answered, I paused the video, and rewound it a few seconds.
“-to the synthetics.”
There. Kaulman’s face, something was off. He looked...not sad, or angry.
Resigned seemed more accurate. The expression had only lasted for just a few seconds, and that brick-wall facade of officiality and can-neither-confirm-nor-deny that all servicemen carry about them in front of the camera returned.
“Given that they proved essential in finally ending the nanite plagues, most governments have agreed to keep them in service for the foreseeable future.”
Professor Nakigawa quickly raised his hand as Kaluman finished his brief, terse answer.
“It’s our hope that the technology used to create synthetics can be applied to a large variety of other applications.”
As he spoke, I could see Professor Ihoff quickly roll his eyes. Kaulman looked mildly annoyed as the professor launched into one of those spiels that happens when a man of science is sat before the press and is eager to explain everything in detail so succinct and refined that it comes off as absolute nonsense to anyone who has less than three P.H.D’s and at least five years tenure.
“The discoveries we made have a wide variety of other uses- advanced A.I. learning, artificial tissue and organ manufacturing, potential life-saving medications. The list goes on, as you can imagine.
A chorus of voices rose up to a deafening crescendo before General Kaulman pointed to someone else behind where the camera hovered.
“Are there any plans to expand on our current force of synthetics? To produce new ones.”
I caught it again, that brief moment of resignation of General Kaulman’s face, this time coupled with...regret?
“As you can imagine,” Kaulman responded as his face returned to its usual stoic expression, “At the time of the nanite crisis, a vast amount of resources and material was used in producing what synthetics we have. Given that we now need time to rebuild recover, it’s very unlikely that any sort of new mass manufacture of synthetics will occur any time soon.”
The image froze and darkened once more as the clip finished playing.
The next was a PDF file, a page from a dossier of some sort, showing a Latino man with a thousand-yard stare that I recognized all too well from veterans of the Nanite plague, who had watched as their families and comrades-in-arms were devoured, mangled, their bodies and even their brains twisted into horrific forms and repurposed for the nanite swarms to grow larger and spread further.
Name: Ambrose [REDACTED] Age: 28 ([REDACTED]-[REDACTED]) Rank: Captain, New Patagonia Nat. Def., [REDACTED], [REDACTED], [REDACTED] Merits: Mark of the Galiant Order G.D.F. Cross of Honor N.A. Heart of Valor [REDACTED] E.U. Wreath of Honor [REDACTED] Status: KIA Cause: Killed during [REDACTED] offensive in [REDACTED] [REDACTED] on [REDACTED]. Body was subsequently consumed and assimilated by local nanite swarms. KelsoLabsA1 The next file I thought was yet another video, but instead the screen just remained blank while the audio of some kind of phone call played. There wasn’t anything like a date or timestamp anywhere that I could see throughout the entire call.
“Hello?” “Hey, Bennings? It’s Mike. Can you lend us one of the on-site sec troops?” “Huh? What the hell for? Is there some kind of emergency?” “Uhh...not really, but there’s a bit of a problem.” “Well if it’s not an emergency, then you’ll have to run it by Michonne first.” “Seriously, we just a guy out here for like, five minutes, tops.” “What the hell do you need him for anyway?” “You remember that Synth Dow’s guys were testing on?” “Uh...yeah…” “Well, it’s out of the building now and-” “Hold up! It got out?!” “It’s in the parking lot!” “Huh?” “It’s been out there for almost eight minutes now.” “Doing what?” “I don’t know, just standing there?” “Just...standing there?” “Yeah, it’s just been standing out in the middle of the parking lot looking out at the across the street.” “What, you mean the factory?” “Yeah, the scrap-heap. It’s been staring at it and hasn’t made a move since.” “Shit. Alright, give me a minute, Where are the techs right now?” “They’re all just standing around near the entrance lookin’ at the thing, waiting for sec to show up.” “Alright, give me a moment. I’ll have a team meet you there.” The audio abruptly cut off as the call was ended.
The file name had actually piqued my interest. Kelso labs had been the world’s leading developer of cybernetics for over a century. And, in the time between the end of the nanite war and...well, now- as the world was going to shit all over again- had been the only game in town when it came to creating the synthetics, thanks to the lucrative contracts they were so generously granted by the G.D.F. and basically every government on the planet (that was left by then, anyway) as a way of saying thank you.
“Thanks for saving the human species from its own rogue creation. Totally no way these things will do the exact same thing and go rogue too, somewhere down the line. Please take my money and get obscenely rich and make our shit!” I was gently rocking my head side to side as I spoke the words in my head, my inner voice taking on the most condescending and mocking tone I could imagine. Of course, mocking them wouldn’t have changed anything then, and they sure as hell deserved worse. Or would have, if any of them were still alive.
Another file caught my attention, mainly because of how odd the title seemed in comparison to all the others.
LateNightLangley_9_31_22 I clicked on it, and a clip from the Late Show, back when Dahlia Langley was hosting- hot damn! Even now, in her 50’s a look from her could probably pitch a tent in a horny teen’s pants. But she had been an absolute knock-down, knock-out bombshell back in her twenties.
The man sitting next to her desk was none other than Professor Menje, although his hair had gone from simply greying to nearly the color of fresh-fallen snow, and the sudden bagginess of his face, riddled with creases and worry lines was much more than just what the ten years between that security camera footage I’d watched early and when this was filmed could possibly account for- even with the horrors of a genocidal conflict that had completely sterilized entire regions of the world.
On the screen underneath was: “Professor Emeritus Bedini Menje, Kelso Industries, Author of
The First Synthetic.”
From off camera, I could here the lovely Dahlia Langley speaking.
“So you’re saying that it was a new type of A.I. that made the synths incorruptible?”
“It was more than just an A.I., although that was part of it.” Menje began, “We had to create an entirely new type of hardware as well. Making synthetic skin and muscle and the like wasn’t that hard to do- the technology’s been around since the 50’s. But you couldn’t just stick a harddrive and processors in it, because then it’s just another machine- just as easy to corrupt and convert as bots and mechs were back then. And you couldn’t have it piloted remotely, because then the swarms would eventually hack the signal.”
“So did take a brain in a jar and stick one in?” Langley said from off-screen.
There was a light chuckle from the studio audience, and Menje grinned as he tried and failed to suppress laughter of his own.
“You joke, but…” Menje started, then trailed off into silence before grinning again. The audience laughed some more, a bit louder this time. The screen cut away to darling Dahlia with her hand over her mouth, trying to suppress her own laughter.
After the audience had finally quieted down a bit, Menje resumed.
“But seriously, though. That was actually one of the very earliest ideas we had- growing cultures of brain matter and nerves and integrating them into a mech’s frame but it was quickly dismissed. We had to come up with something that the nanties couldn’t eat or infiltrate.”
“And that’s where the synths came in?”
“Exactly. You had the synthetic brain- kind of like an enormous hard-drive, but arranged and functioning exactly like a human brain, without any of the fleshy bits. And so finally had something that the nanites couldn’t touch- with no organic components, they were indigestible, and since they weren’t like any other kind of digital storage at the time, they couldn’t hijack it either. Give it a body that the nanites can’t even put a scratch in, and you get a soldier that the swarm simply couldn’t touch.”
I was expecting the conversation to go on for a while longer, but the video ended, once more freezing in the last frame of the old network footage.
KelsoLabsM2 Another audio recording of a phone call. Judging from the voices, it was the same two people as the last time.
“Sec office, this is Bennings.” “Benning’s, it’s Mike. Hey so I did some poking around about the factory.” “Across the street?” “Yeah.” “Is your synth still doing...that thing?” “Yeah, last week when you were out. At the least the lab boys don’t whine for a guard detail anymore.” “Jesus.” “So apparently when the whole building was still R&D during the war, Kelso was using the place to make its own parts in-house.” “What, on the synths?” “Yeah. Things were so hectic that they couldn’t afford to just sit around waiting for all the red tape to clear with contracts, so they brought in their own people and manufactured parts there.” “What kind of parts?” “Apparently that one was where they made the brain cases for-” “You mean the synth brains?” “Yeah. Apparently they were making the parts and putting them together in the factory, and then just carried them over here.” “Huh. Makes sense, though.” “That they’d make the brains themselves?” “Yeah, I mean, given its the most important component, you wouldn’t want to just sub it out to some other company to a bunch of people in some worn-out, underfunded plant down South where the floor workers barely even speak English.” “Plus you’d actually want everyone involved to know exactly what it is they’re working on.” “Yeah, something as complex as that- NDA’s an all wouldn’t be the problem. When you got something that has to be absolutely perfect from start to finish, you need quality control for the whole process.” “Hmm. So any ideas why you’re synth keeps doing it? Just staring at it, I mean?” “Dunno. Maybe it just misses home. Place was abandoned before we worked here.” “Yeah, but that’s like finding your childhood home is gone. I wonder if that’s what it is? Sad?” “Who knows what goes on in their heads?” The next file was a series of screenshots from some old media sharing site I’d never heard of, although I couldn’t find a date or timestamp anywhere. At the top of the page, were the letters:
t/BestBots the title read:
2.3M NK-33 and His New Puppy, Gomert (Gold x 102) posted by
v/iamsaltsamon8 Below it was a photo taken amongst some old city ruins, where another one of the synths stood- this one shorter and more lean than the one I’d killed, with its whole head encased by some kind of weird helmet with reflective face plate, and form-fitting armor that looked as though it had glued a bunch of plastic, animal ribs along the sides of the torso, arms and legs. An absurdly long rifle hung from a sling on its right arm, and in its left it was cradling an adorable little German Shepard puppy- a little dirty but apparently in good health otherwise. The thing was smiling, its little tongue lolling out happily and its ears perked up- completely oblivious it was in the hands of the deadliest thing man had ever created.
Underneath the image were a string of comments:
896296
v/arsebagelfilling Some context:
After the big drug lab raid in Old Manhattan Tuesday, they were cleaning out the building a found a kennel where the little guy was being kept, with the name tag Gomert, and it ran out when they opened the door. One of the cops said the thing ran up to where Nicky was standing and was trying to hide between his legs. Apparently it was scared and freaking out until Nicky leaned down and started petting it, which surprised everyone.
Edit: Update From the N.M.P.D. Twitter:
>Followers and fans of Nicky will be happy to know that little Gomert is happy and now has a new forever home here at the New Manhattan Police Department.
96137
v/fishsock4 OMG thank you for this! When I saw this I really hoped they’d let Nicky keep him!
65321 (Gold x 12)
v/finfinale77 Best bot meets best boi.
63557 (Gold x 5)
v/snakesthathug Of course he pet it! Who could resist such an adorable little pupper?
63205 (Gold x 4)
v/bedybedyboopbop Shocked? Really? Like even a synth could resist such cuteness?
35214
v/turtumkops (Gold x 2)
The tin man had a heart all along. He just needed a puppy to thaw it out.
27153
v/quqaqeqiqu PUPPER!!!
26133
v/peepeepoopoo5 Can we give the dog some augments? That way Nicky can have a robopup.
17320
v/AndImHerschel I wanna see da cyberpupper!
90472
v/UAML Your boot, your chew toy, and your treats, mister synth. Gib dem to me!
372
v/britcheslasagna Wrong movie dumbass.
-701598
v/imalilbastard223 Filthy mutt should just be euthanized.
Edit: It was in a drug lab, people. Thing’s been breathing meth and chloro fumes its entire life. It’s going to have a ton of health problems later on.
26921
v/fillamaboo22 Congrats! You’ve officially beaten EA’s record!
-685926 u/[removed]
[removed]
24584
v/robobobo [MOD] Hello,
v/imalilbastard223. Your comment has been removed for the
following reasons:
-Inciting violence, threats
-Racism, sexism, hate speech
-Terroristic threats
-Spamming
-Inappropriate sexual remarks
-Linking to content that violates ReadAt TOS
-Uploading of malicious software
-Online stalking, harassment
-Cryptocurrency mining via ReaddAt thread
-Posting NSFW/NSFL images in a non-NSFW/NSFL thread.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to message the mods of t/BestBots
--------------------------------------------------------------
(I am a bot
\beep bloop!** And sometimes bots make mistakes! If you feel your comment was removedin error please contact the mods).
3430 v**/borbperson2**
Seriously? Just ban the fucker already!
3296 v**/tittattaddlywack**
t/diosmioreadat
11535 **v/pooperdoodle**
t/usernameaccurate
254229 **v/brittenybuddha0**
It’s so cute and adorable and I wanna snuggle it!
And the puppy’s pretty cute, too.
21295 v**/milknmahhooha**
I wanna bang a synth.
19354 v/SomeFacialHairedFellow (Gold x 4)
“You quiver in anticipation as NK-33 gently bends you over the park bench, and you feel something pressagainst your butt, and then suddenly realize it is, in fact, three somethings. And you hear loud whirring noiseas they begin to move.”
Do you wish to continue? Yes/No?
18726
v/milknmahhooha O-oh my…
15094
v/blepshep8 *Smashes Y until keyboard shatters*
13297
v/ITWIDWPIWOOTDM Yes officer, this post right here.
5223
v/holydiverdiosama t/diosmioreadat
3297 v**/kurimolibbyo**
t/cursedposts
1970 v**/longshort9337**
t/blessedposts
891 v**/kamakamakamehamea**
t/blursedcomments
1699 v**/toastertub88**
This is my fetish.
-----------------------------------------------------------
I stopped reading through the comments at that point. It seemed the online world had barely changed between then and now.
Why the hell had that synth given me these, again? Most of what I’d seen had been public knowledge at some point or another, save for the security feeds and phone call audio. And even those were about events that people had learned about before the synths had gone rampant. And what wasn’t didn’t seem to show me anything new.
Test_Group_ODN-1-3 I clicked open a .pdf file, and it took me a few seconds to realize what exactly I was looking at.
The first appeared to be pictures of an autopsy. A man lay naked on a table, horribly bloodied and his face slashed and mutilated. His chest and abdomen had been ripped open- definitely not with the careful, surgical precision you would see from an autopsy. Several other photos showed the arms were riddled with numerous holes and tubes running in and out of their lengths, and even in the photos, it was clear that numerous veins and arteries throughout the bodies had been replaced with circulatory prosthetics that were fairly common at the time.
ODN-1 Status: Failed COD: Combination of multiple brain aneurysms and self-inflicted wounds leading to massive tissue damage and organ rupture. Reason: Subject broke restraints during [REDACTED] procedure and proceeded to tear at abdomen and chest cavity. Expired when [REDACTED] attempted to [REDACTED] and restrain subject. The second was of another person- a woman who looked unnaturally pale- and not just because she had supposedly been on the autopsy table in the picture for who knew how long when it was taken. This one had more tubes and wires winding their way in and out of numerous points on the abdomen, and the woman appeared to have had a recent double-mastectomy at the time of death- with obvious and only-partial healed surgical scars on her chest.
ODN-2 Status: Failed COD: Cardiac arrest. Reason: Subject suffered a series of tonic-clonic seizures that didn’t respond to any on site medications. After third seizure, subject suffered cardiac arrest and subsequent failure. The third photo, however, was completely different. It wasn’t of a corpse on an autopsy table in some hospital basement, but of a large, humanoid figure laying on an enormous metal slab, arms and legs held in place by cables and mechanized limbs. The figure seemed to be wearing an odd, plastic-like, figure-fitting fabric, with small plates of some kind of thick metallic plating over the joints, and a single large plate of it completely covering the face in its entirety. Next to it was a second photograph of what looked like an enormous storage tank, although its contents were unknown due to a complete lack of any labels or markings of any kind, and even from this photo, its actual size was difficult to determine as well.
ODN-3 Status: Extraction and Insertion Successful Subject has been relocated to [REDACTED] for Phase 2 testing. [REDACTED] being held in Fac. [REDACTED] storage for further experimentation. 39n5&2&G-3-2-13 This was more security camera footage. Three men that I recognized from earlier: General Kaulman and Professor Nakigawa were sitting across from Professors Minje and Ihoff. Professor Nakigawa appeared to be calm and resolute, but General Kaulman looked rather aggravated, or irritated. But what was even stranger was that he didn’t seem to be even trying to hide it. And while I could only see Ihoff and Minje’s faces intermitantly whenever they turned their heads towards the direction of the camera, I could tell just from the curling of the fingers, clenching and unclenching into fists, and the accusatory tone of their voices that they were very, very angry.
“So why did you do it?” Ihoff asked.
“What are you talking about?” Nakigawa responded.
Ihoff leapt from his seat, and leaned onto the table. And you could tell that he was struggling to just talk rather than scream at the tiny Japanese engineer.
“Don’t be stupid. We pulled all of the net records and traffic during recovery. Right before the fire started,
someone got in and wiped everything. Prep, extraction, reinduction, react- everything- hard drives and servers were all slagged.”
“And you think we had something to do with this?” Nakigawa responded, infuriated by the accusation.
“Only seven people would have clearance for that kind of access. Hidose and Yaumont have both been dead for years, and we’ve already ruled out Montigue, which means it was someone in this room.” This time from Minje.
“This is absurd! You honestly think-” Nakigawa began but was quickly interrupted.
“Well who else would it be?” Ihoff interjected.
“How?” Nakigawa yelled back.
“That’s what we’d like to know!” This time from Minje.
“No, I mean, all my bio’s were put on a prohibited list when I left there- S.O.P. for any big business, and all my old codes and encryption keys were red-flagged as well. How the hell could I have gotten in if any of my credentials would cut the whole building off?”
Ihoff then turned to General Kaulman, who had remained quiet and surprisingly stoic so far despite the shouting match. “You have any ideas, Karl?”
Kaulman didn’t respond, but I could barely make out his eyes as they glanced over at met Ihoff’s gaze, and just stared.
The expression on Ihoff’s face slowly changed from one of anger to confusion, and then slowly, slowly changed to one of disbelief and shock.
“Wait. No...it was. It was you? It was you, wasn’t it? You did it!” Nakigawa and Minje had both shut up by now, as they realized what Ihoff was implying, and were quickly coming to the same realization that Ihoff just had.
“But why?” Minje asked. “You were so-”
“Because we now have a bigger problem.” Kaulman responded. While quiet, the fact that the words were coming from him carried more weight than anything the other three might shout or scream at each other.
“I don’t know if you gentlemen have actually been paying attention, but we’re having more and more problems with the synths. And I don’t mean the odd little peccadillos in their behaviors- like that one in New Manhattan with the dog, or the one in Florida that learned how to play a guitar. I’m talking some of the more recent ones- like the one who broke into a house in Brazil, or the one in Florence that was caught disassembling a car engine piece-by-piece.”
The other three looked at each other, then back to Kaulman. “We’ve been looking into the reason for the unexplained behavior for the past year.” Ihoff replied, and then turned to Nakigawa, “And Toshi, you said that once we started putting them into public service, they’d inevitably start mimicking things around them- things that other people were doing. It was a side-effect of their neural architecture- that they needed to understand the world from a human context.”
Nakigawa nodded once before responding. “Monkey see, synthee do. We knew stuff like this would start happening eventually. But re-extraction and -insertion always wipes the slate clean if something goes catastrophically wrong.” They all turned back towards Kaulman, “What’s the problem? Why would you-”
Kaulman raised a hand, silencing the others. “Gentlemen. We did what we did out of sheer desperation- humanity was only looking at maybe just a decade before the swarms finished advancing and cleansing every living thing from the planet. What we did was monstrous enough- but I will be thrice-damned if I let anyone else learn how we did it.”
“This again?” Minje shouted. “Dammit Kaulman, we’ve talked about this! Given how bad it was back then, I’m pretty sure most of them would be willing to give us a pass this once!”
“Then why don’t you tell them?” Kaulman responded, clam but terse. Minje visibly shrank and sat back down into his seat, while Kaulman continued to just stare at him. Ihoff and Nikagawa were too busy averting their eyes, apparently dreading making eye-to-eye contact with Kaulman’s gaze. “Write about it in another one of your books. About all the little wonders and miracles our little monsters gave us. Tell the world what we really did. How many people we lost- the nanites couldn’t account for all of them. You know this-”
Kaulman stopped as Minje raised his hands in front of him, in a gesture of surrender- Kaulman had made his point.
Kaulman then looked over to Ihoff and then Nakigawa. “And besides, that’s not the point. Imagine if some rogue nation got a hold of it, refined the process- something with a much lower failure rate. We designed these things to be nigh-indestructible killing machines, and ended the war with less than a thousand of them. Now imagine if some fascist dictator or religious zealot converted an entire army of them. The death toll would the North African front look like a fucking junior high schoolyard fight!”
Ihoff exchanged a confused look with Minje, before speaking again.
“What makes you think they’ll turn violent? We made them to-”
“We made them to adapt, mimic, learn- to adapt to anything and everything they might face. The first series figured out how to exploit loopholes in their hardware within a week of the war. Now they’ve learned how to play instruments after just watching people play.”
Kaulman then leaned forward, and Minje shrank back from the death glare Kaulman was giving him.
“How long until they start mimicking emotions? Say anger, for instance.”
Hinje, Nakigawa, and Ihoff’s faces began to visibly pale as Kaulman’s words began to sink in.
“How long until one of them mimics a murder?”
The video ended.
Jesus, we’d known that there had been warning signs that something was wrong with the synths, even long before they went rampant. But no one had even a hint they’d turn violent in the end. And yet these men- their very creators, had known about the risk from the start. Had known about it, and told no one.
But that still didn’t answer the biggest question- why had the synths gone rogue at all? With the original facilities destroyed years before their revolt, and all of their former creators dead at the hands of their own creations, there was far more conjecture than there was actual information on the matter. The biggest consensus was that we’d simply repeated the same mistake with the synths as we had with the nanites in the first place- a creation so adaptive that it had completely outgrown any semblance of control by its makers. Artificial beings with a constantly developing and evolving A.I. that it had either found some glaring loopholes in its original programming, or had simply “realized” that it didn’t have to follow what it had come to regard as arbitrary or redundant instructions, and had simply “decided” to revert back to its most basic of processes- consume, replicate, defend. And the nanite swarms had been the result.
But the synths had been designed specifically to think differently- advanced machines comprised of synthetic flesh and fluids, with artificial brains that couldn’t be infected or hacked. The odds that something so vastly different would come to the exact same conclusion- that mankind was a threat to their very survival…
It just seemed astronomically small that they would make the exact same mistake that would lead them into the exact same mess.
The next file I clicked on was another screenshot, this time from the
New England Bay on 3/10/25.
(Continued below) submitted by ThatDudeWithTheBeard to WritingPrompts [link] [comments]
New year, new Me
 | So I know this is pretty 2019, but I haven't been back home in a while, and I can only read through social media at home, so I missed the great opportunity of posting this on the 1/1/2020. The following picture was taken on that day as I knew my books has incurred the wrath of my mother for space keeping purposes, so I wanted to take inventory on what books I had at home from the Riordanverse. Missing from this image is Kane Chronicles Survival Guide, which I found behind a large art frame on the bookshelf mere minutes after packing the books back around the house, and the PJO, HoO, and The Hidden Oracle, which I now own as e-books due to the book purge. However, today, 01/10/2020, I am finally not under my parents' thumb (in boarding school), finished a 'side project', which some of you may know, a found a nice date to post this image, so enjoy (I guess..). Bookkeeping image As I stated in a comment in my last post, I wanted to explain the prophecy that I wrote. I hope people gave much thought into it, but who am I kidding... "Blade from eternal beauty born by swan,": This was supposed to represent Katoptris, as Helen was stated to be the most beautiful woman of all times (and may have been a rape job done by Zeus in the form of a swan). This may also mean a blade from whoever has their sacred animal being a swan (I did some research but only got Apollo/Aphrodite from the Greco-Roman mythology, and Aphrodite in the Riordanverse is depicted having the sacred animal of doves, and Apollo uses bows, so if anyone wants to talk about some other blade, do enough research to back up the reason that the blade in this prophecy is referencing your chosen blade, and be my guest!), though due to reasons I doubt it. "Triumph threefold through theomachy threats.": This line was supposed to reference both the time period that the prophecy is set in and the events that happen during the prophecy's course. The time period, I hope, would be explained through the 1 st two lines, as Katoptris has been held by both Helen and Piper, so this "story" could either happen with Piper still holding the dagger (which wouldn't be my intention), or someone else inheriting the dagger (ages later, which would be my intention as this would mean new cast and another reason I would explain on line 7-8.) As stated, the events that will be transpiring will be Armageddon for the collective Riordanverse (Theomachy: a war or struggle against God or among or against the gods. {this is the Google definition but I couldn't get the google link so here's Wikipedia}), with Katoptris winning either way in the Trojan war, sat out the "1 st" great prophecy in a shed, winning the Gigantomachy with Piper, and Apocalypse being the 3 rd Godly war that it will partake in (so I hope it stays out of action). Totally proud that I got all the words on this line to start with a " T". "Cultural influence shall pay the debt,": I took the words to heart when Chiron talked about the heart of a civilisation (couldn't find the shorter quote by someone else soooo......): ‘Come now, Percy. What you call “Western civilization”. Do you think it’s just an abstract concept? No, it’s a living force. A collective consciousness that has burned bright for thousands of years. The gods are part of it. You might even say they are the source of it, or at least, they are tied so tightly to it that they couldn’t possibly fade, not unless all of Western civilization were obliterated. The fire started in Greece. Then, as you well know – or as I hope you know, since you passed my course – the heart of the fire moved to Rome, and so did the gods. Oh, different names, perhaps – Jupiter for Zeus, Venus for Aphrodite, and so on – but the same forces, the same gods.’
‘And then they died.’
‘Died? No. Did the West die? The gods simply moved, to Germany, to France, to Spain, for a while. Wherever the flame was brightest, the gods were there. They spent several centuries in England. All you need to do is look at the architecture. People do not forget the gods. Every place they’ve ruled, for the last three thousand years, you can see them in paintings, in statues, on the most important buildings. And yes, Percy, of course they are now in your United States. Look at your symbol, the eagle of Zeus. Look at the statue of Prometheus in Rockefeller Center, the Greek facades of your government buildings in Washington. I defy you to find any American city where the Olympians West. And so Olympus is here. And we are here.’
So I rephrased the literal meaning and the phrase "Cultural influence" popped up. This just means gods of different mythologies clashing to prevent the end of time by repaying some sort of debt (you make it up)! "As last days of Earth be written and drawn.": Pretty self-explanatory, this line states that the end of the world is nigh. "Religions reliance on brain and brawn,": Also pretty self-explanatory, This just means that different religions will rely on their selected heroes of that time to rise to the challenge (though this will be further expanded upon on the 7 th line) "To hinder the harkened final sunset.": Final sunset is in reference to Ragnarök, as it translates to Twilight of the Gods, with it being pretty obvious afterwards. "A team of thirteen shall now heed call, yet": Similar to the "2 nd" Great prophecy by specifying the number of people on this quest (which I hope goes around the world), but I hope the team consists of more than the core 4 Riordanverse mythologies (Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Norse), with the kicker being... "Not scions of the dodekatheon.": Let me back up a bit. I started this whole journey down this rabbit hole with this single, most infuriating line: Yet not scions of the dodekatheon
Unseen vocabulary? No matter! (Dodekatheon: the Twelve Gods that comprise the principal deities worshipped by Greeks {even worse, no definition from Google! It's under the Twelve gods title on the page}{Basically Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Hephestus, Aphrodite, Ares, Demeter, Apollo, Artemis and Hermes})(Scion {plural: scions}: a descendant of a notable family{No Google link, here's a Cambridge dictionary one!}{I wanted a word for direct offsprings of the 12 gods bud offspring didn't sound epic enough) After taking ages browsing through the internet searching for a word that will state the twelve Olympian gods which I obviously didn't include 'dozen'(what are they, eggs?), I found the word dodekatheon. However, after creating this line, I found a few problems. First, the Iambic pentameter. Sonnets have lines consisting of ten syllables, whist this has eleven. A way I could have amended this was by swapping the word scions for something else as every single word was integral for this sentence to make a bit of sense, but I couldn't have used the word spawns instead of scions as it would sound like I was berating the heroes. Another way I could skirt around this problem was by using enjambment, which would lead to the problem of having to rhyme both 'yet' and 'dodekatheon'. However, I live for the pain! You could probably guess which one I went for. Secondly, the rhyming. How does one rhyme a rare 5 syllable word? Took a lot of head-scratching and the use of rhymezone.com. Lastly, the placement of the line. I wrote this line with the intention of it being the back of another line, so obviously it would be in the middle somewhere, but where? Ranting aside, this line states that none of the team members are direct kids from the dodekatheon, which makes it hard for the story writer to write as the amount of highly liked, non-dodekatheon kids would be, Reyna (scratch this, Hunters can't be in prophcies{or can they?}), Hazel, Nico, Lavinia, and... uhhh... sorry, I can't think of any more from the top of my head(maybe Butch and Clovis?) I much rather this story happens decades later after our main character have their happy ending and a good life (except Magnus and Alex, Muahahaha...) so that minor godling can get their chance to shine. I hope the team consists of about 4 Greco-Roman godlings (Either minor godlings or legacy godlings {a Percabeth kid would be fun}), roughly 2 House of Life magicians, roundabout 2 einherjar (hopefully a disapproving uncle and a shapeshifter) as chaperones, and around 5 spaces to spare for other religions. And that finishes the octet, which took me about 8 days. I should probably have revised for my mocks more but heyo. Couldn't do much at home due to stereotypical Asian parents reasons, and unpacking from the 5 th to the 6 th seriously hampers my progress. Now onto the sestet, which I planned on using the breath/death rhyme as a joke and something else... "Liquidated titan’s son takes a breath,": I wonder how many of you have heard the story of Metis. For this line, I was trying to put in Athena's brother, but due to trying to do an acrostic in the sonnet, I very well couldn't have put in "Logic goddess' brother" instead of "Liquidated titan's son" now could I (1. She is the Wisdom Goddess and 2. Logic goddess' brother doesn't sound right now does it?). I mean Metis (I assume) did die of liquifying in Zeus' stomach acid. According to the story, Metis, the titan of thought, was prophecised to bear two children, one, a powerful daughter, and two, a son more powerful than their father that he may one day overthrow his dad. Zeus (being himself) decided to sleep with her. Surprisingly, he only thought of the consequences after his action (what a wise king!) so he swallowed Metis before she ever gave birth to any kids. However, Athena was already conceived by Metis, so she was passed through Zeus' holy nerves and spine to burst out of Zeus' head. However, according to the moral of Kronos eating his kids', Immortals don't die by divine stomach acid. This predicts that Metis will bear her son, and that he would take his first breath or kill someone (intentional vagueness). "Ere thunder and order death serpent made.": Ere: before (in time). If you've read both Magnus Chase and Kane Chronicles, you'll probably understand the reference. Death of thunder references this (under 2.2.2 in the last paragraph): Thor kills Jörmungandr but is poisoned by the serpent, and manages to walk only nine steps before falling to the earth dead.
Since lightning dies, thunder dies. whereas the death of order is referencing Apophis (The Lord of chaos{also known as Apep}) swallowing Ra (God of Order). Here's proof: Apep would swallow the sun god, but they would cut a hole in the belly of the snake to allow the sun god to escape. If they failed, the world would be plunged into darkness.
or, If he ever succeeds in stopping Ra, the sun will fail to rise and the world will be destroyed.
I believe they are both stated in the books, but more proof doesn't hurt! The basic gist no one can deny, if Thor and Ra die, the end of the world is nigh (This was crap). "Glazed eyes soon slay the bovine beast shall sheath": Well, this could mean some rando just kills a cow, but I was thinking more on the lines of a new blind character with the guts to go up to the Olympus throne room and sacrifice the Ophiotaurus (you know, Bessie, from TTC and TLO) to obtain the power of destroying gods. As stated in chapter 15 of The Titan's Curse: Zoë nodded. ‘But there is power in killing innocence. Terrible power. The Fates ordained a prophecy aeons ago, when this creature was born. They said that whoever killed the Ophiotaurus and sacrificed its entrails to fire would have the power to destroy the gods.’
Hopefully, this isn't another kid with a "Luke" mindset (Gods don't care about us so they must be decimated from their roots!) and one who will help the protagonist stop the cataclysmic events transpiring, as... "Arrays of knowledge doomsday shall cease. Aid": A good question may be what does knowledge mean in this context. I was imagining that this sightless person may be a very knowledgeable person that had a boost in knowledge due to the sacrifice in line 11. They may also be a person with a large stash of powerful weapons. Rhyme scheme starts to bite me in the back. "Carnage and one shall see, how one could trade": When writing this, I found out that I had a limited range of vocabulary for words that start with C. How many wars do you think would be happening during doomsday? I was hoping that "Aid carnage" meant helping stop the war, but my interpretation may be wrong... "Years of life, save the world, and get their wreath.": The last line took me ages (3-4 hours instead of 1-2 hours) as I needed to start the line with a word that starts with Y and ends with a word that is interchangeable with death. Iambic pentameter totally delayed me for another hour or so to figure out. There wasn't much thought put into this line, though it states that the world would be saved. Did you know wreath aren't just a kind of decoration and award for the old Olympic games, but also something to be laid on a grave to mourn the dead? The last bit may mean that some heroes get the recognition they deserve whereas others die without knowing they saved the world from certain annihilation. Ima explain the sestet tomorrow, as its about 1:15 in the morning over here and I still need to go to school tomorrow. Good Night! The sestet was murder as: - How does one rhyme breath? There was that "joke" in my last post, but it's virtually impossible to rhyme!
- Did you find the word legacy? I thought making an acrostic was going to be easy but nooooo! I was going to do "Battle of legacy" but totally forgot during the octet. Forcing myself to use a limiting factor on both ends of the line was nigh impossible but I somehow managed.
- Petrarchan sonnet form. The octet was supposed to introduce the problem while the sestet was supposed to solve the problem (or in this case, outline how to fulfil the prophecy). As I am totally not a story smith, I totally flunked that bit, which is why I wanted help.
- Dyslexia and ADHD. Though ^ this post may be a total counterpoint, I do, in fact, have a slight writing disorder and a total inattentive disorder. Half the time I was doing this, I was spacing out.
- My inferiority complex. I may not have this, but self-observation may disagree. I never believe that I am correct and strive to undermine any achievement I think I didn't deserve. Totally deleted another version with the word ultimatum and tantrum for the rhymes in it, though I don't remember it anymore.
Anyways, if anyone wanted to know what I wanted to improve, it would be the "battle of legacy" acrostic and a more story filled sestet like the great prophecies that preceded this. TL;DR Book collection "Prophecy" explanation: Katoptris fights and wins three God level battles, gods from different mythologies will fight to stop the end of the world, 13 heroes from different mythologies will band together to stop doomsday, but not any of them being kids of the main Olympians. Athena's brother appears with some sign of doomsday showing up, blind perp kills Bessie and has the knowledge of stopping doomsday, and the world is saved by someone's sacrifice. Hopefully, I didn't sound to ostentatious (which is a pretty ostentatious word in it of itself). There're these questions in my first post that I wanted answered, but no one would probably care anyways. Final note. I hope someone would write a short story based on this, as I don't have time and am not that good at writing, though the chances of this flying under the radar are quite high. Here's a variant to finish off. Blade from eternal beauty born by swan, Triumph threefold through theomachy threats. Cultural influence shall pay the debt, As the last days of Earth be writ and drawn. Religions reliance on brain and brawn, To delay the heralded final sunset. A team of ten shall now heed the call, yet Not offsprings of the dodekatheon.
Logic goddesses' brother takes a breath, Ere solar and lightning death serpent made. Glazed eyes soon slay the bovine beast shall sheath Armory of swords doomsday shall cease. Aid Carnage and one shall see, how one could trade Years of life, save the world, and get their death.
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10 years ago. Favorite Answer. In Greece, parts of Italy, South America and parts of Africa it is a gross insult. A thumb's up there as a middle finger up in other countries. It is therefore wise... What it really means: Thumbs up is sign of approval in the US and even eventually to Zangief, but it actually translates to “up yours” in other places around the world. Just smile instead. Thumbs Up Don't do this in Greece Jose (Image: Getty) In Iran, Greece, Russia, Sardinia, and parts of West Africa the thumbs up is as rude as the middle finger is in the UK. Giving the thumbs up to somebody in Greece is equivalent to giving the middle finger to an American. OK. Creating a circle from your thumb and index finger is a sexual insult in Greece. So if you want to signal your agreement with something, better say it out loud. Holding up the index and little fingers The Thumbs Up. While you might be ... Even if you don't mean anything negative by it, pointing at someone or something with only one finger is considered very rude and impolite in parts of the Middle East. Many people interpret it as if you're singling them out or making fun of them. 3. ... is considered a sign of disrespect. The thumbs-up, the peace sign, and the wave are common gestures in the US to express positive emotions and share your thoughts. During a presentation, the way you move your hands can also convey more about the message than you might even realize. But hand user beware! These motions often carry cultural significance that can … Continue reading "Don’t Give a Thumbs-Up in Russia and Other ... Thumbs up In many areas of the world a thumbs up signal is interpreted as meaning “Okay” or “I agree.” However, in Iran, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South America, the Middle East and parts of Italy and Greece it is an obscene insult meaning “sit on it” which is their equivalent to holding a middle finger up. The "thumbs up" sign popular in the United States is used widely in most of Europe to say "OK" (it also represents the number one when counting). The "V for victory" sign is used in most of Europe as in the United States, but may get you a punch in the nose in parts of Britain, where it's an obscene gesture (if you make the "V" with your palm toward you.) In Greece, the thumbs up gesture means “ok”, when used as a reply. For example: -Doctor, am I going to be alright? -Yes John, everything is going to be ok. Have you signed your testament? It was once the gesture of hitchhikers, back in ’70s and ‘8... Iran: Thumbs-up. What might seem to ... Though this one doesn't have a common non-offensive equivalent in America, it is worth noting that a similar gesture does mean "thank you" in American sign ...
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