(photo cred to kid zoom)

I’ve mentioned them before, I think, and for awhile now they’ve even had their own tag over at the inspo blog, and heck I even titled the blog after them. But I’ve never said who they are. So by Anne’s request, I’m clearing that up! Let’s talk about spider children. 

The Spider Children go by many names, depending on which level the narrative is taking place in; however, TSC is the first incarnation we encounter, so it’s become a sort of collective title as well. They are, in short, a cult, because what quasi-dystopian sci fi future rife with monsters is complete without a cult to go with it? The immediate connection you should draw is spider children == glitches. Their level—and nature—of involvement changes depending on which layer you’re in, but the spider children always know about the glitches, and they do not intend to fight them. They work as followers, worshippers, servants, diplomats, messengers and megalomaniacs. They wish to usher in the glitches, or harness their power, or sometimes both, and sometimes other things entirely. The other thing you should know is that the spider children are very dangerous. 

Now, I know that having a cult / religion type thing is pretty cliché, perhaps even trite! But they serve an important duty in the story, and that duty is basically to exist as a physical manifestation of monsters that, technically speaking, my little band of heroes cannot fight (especially when they’re first starting out). They are a steady supply of villains and half-villains and even some anti-heroes. The main gang can get to the monsters through the spider children, but the spider children serve as intimidating foes in and of themselves! 

Not only that, but they complement and complete the threat that the monsters pose. The monsters—glitches, parasites, demons, whatever you want to call them—are not malicious in their destruction; they merely destroy because that is what they do to survive. But humans can be malicious, they can be precise and intelligent and cruel as hell. The monsters are all brute force and devoured universes and carelessness, the spider children are compasses and scalpels. It’s a fairly classic method of balancing villains and power—think Doc Scratch and Lord English, or Loki and the Chitauri, or any other story where the villain courts an immense power they believe they can harness. Power needs control, precision needs puissance. The spider children and the monsters they serve exist in conjunction; neither is quite as frightening without the other. 

That’s all quite technical, though, and I am not sure it’s really what anyone is looking for. Hard facts on the children, then? You got it!

First, it should be known that “children” is a loose term. Most people in the cult are not actually children, though some are (filling the empty “creepy children” niche in my heart). They are typically teens and young adults, since this is a relatively new phenomenon, but as we advance through the levels and the problem becomes deeper and deeper the age grows higher. Just as there are children, there are also older folk, but in newer groups, age does little to determine rank. Older groups have more of a hierarchy, and typically the older members wield more power. (Like I said, it depends on the layer you’re in, and what timeframe as well.) Children instead refers to themselves as “children” of the monsters they serve. Also, it sounds better than “spider individuals.”

The Spider Children’s full title is “The Spider Children of Nephrite, the Devouring Messiah.” Spider Children is shorthand for that. It is typically left uncapitalized if you’re referring to the collective group of cults, which would include those under a different name, but capitalized if you are referring specifically to the Spider Children of Nephrite. Nephrite doesn’t mean anything deep, it’s an arbitrary name that I chose as a placeholder because it sounds nice. Other titles from different layers that I’ve played with: Nerve Burners of the Warping One, First Spectral Ones, and Wolf Criers of the Grasping God. (The general rule of thumb in naming is to be as ridiculous as possible.) 

Spider children have a noted fascination with skeleton imagery, in a way that is probably significant. Skull makeup and bone-shaped skinstains (similar to henna, a stain that can be used to create temporary tattoos of varying potency) are common in ceremonies and certain fanatics, but most members try to be more discrete by having, perhaps, a single bone inked on a thumb, or an omnipresent skull-shaped ring, to identify themselves to other members when they are out and about.

They spread their message in subtle ways, typically by way of vague graffiti slogans and elaborate skull paintings to establish their presence. I imagine their motto pops up quite frequently, and if I knew what that motto was, I would tell you, but alas I haven’t come up with anything interesting yet. They adore theatrics and make a show of being mysterious when it is appropriate. 

Oh, and one more thing. There’s another role of the spider children which I haven’t mentioned yet. The more talented members act as sort of spirit mediums, channelling the parasites. Sometimes it is voluntary. Sometimes it is not. Possession is a risk with everyone in a world that has begun to break down, the sole exceptions being Lucy, Nate and Cassandra, who have built in “armor” to protect against breaches by probing parasites. 

Unless they were to sacrifice that protection for some reason. But they wouldn’t do that.

Okay, here are some tropes! Unfortunately, I don’t really have a whole lot, and a couple are stretches. But this is just a chance to get acquainted with the characters. 

I’m putting in some commentary on the tropes. Hover over the links for the laconic summary of each trope, but I recommend reading the whole pages because who doesn’t like TV Tropes. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Lucy: Action Girl: There are few things I despise more than wimpy female leads, so I simply could not permit one in Apastron. Lucy, although far from strong, is very willing to fight, and she’ll probably win. She takes advantage of her small frame to move fast and outsmart the person she’s fighting against. 

Lethal Chef: Cin and Cass aren’t great, but Lucy manages to concoct vile poisons using common household ingredients such as paste and tomato sauce. She is in complete denial about this, and maintains that she “only needs practice.”

Chronic Hero Syndrome: Out of all of them, Lucy most embraces the idea of helping and being a hero. 

Primal Fear: The dark. Nothingness. Lucy is absolutely terrified of complete darkness.  To the point of near-breakdown over it. 

Bad Dreams: Lucy has a lot of very confusing nightmares, and any normal dreams she has tend to get corrupted very quickly. 

Red Oni: To Cass’s Blue Oni. 

Blue Oni: To Cin’s Red Oni. 

(To be continued)

Cinead: The Lancer: To Lucy. 

Friendless Background: Not entirely friendless, but he does put himself in a sort of perpetual isolation due to his travels. He’s nomadic, and prefers not to get too attached to people he knows he will eventually have to leave behind. 

Hair Trigger Temper: He’s not flying into a rage necessarily, but his go-to expression of negative feelings is anger and frustration. It’s not hard for him to push people away like this. Lucy will push right back. 

Last of His Kind: Ah…what the heck, this is a little spoilery, but you find out pretty quick, so whatever. The city he was born in, Athos, was destroyed when he was a baby, by rogue bombers. He was the only survivor, found in the center of the city amongst the ruins. He is obsessed with finding out the mysteries behind it. 

Berserk Button: He has a few. The most notable one is anything against Athos. 

Red Oni: To Lucy’s Blue Oni. 

Cassandra: Anti-Hero (Type III or IV): Cass is mostly type III. In contrast to Lucy’s general morality, Cass does not hesitate to behave in “bad” ways in pursuit of “good” goals. Anything that keeps her and her friends alive is the right choice. Cass is not afraid to hurt someone very badly or even kill them, if that’s what it takes.

Emotionless Girl: To an extent. She gets angry, but she doesn’t have a hair trigger temper like Cin’s. She does, however, keep relatively calm in stressful situations, although she may snap at people. 

Stepford Snarker: I think this summarizes her pretty well. They are all pretty snarky, but she is in particular. It’s a complement to her emotionlessness / emotion repressedness and her anti-heroism. 

Action Girl: Yes, she’s moody, but damn does she know how to kick some ass. Her mercilessness really comes in handy here. (If you could really call it “coming in handy.”)

Perpetual Frowner: To this day, I have not once drawn her smiling. Usually she appears neutral or slightly annoyed. Canonically speaking, she does smile, but it’s rare and small and looks kind of funny. 

Blue Oni: To Lucy’s Red Oni. 

Bad Dreams: Not really about events, though. (OR ARE THEY??) And yes—everyone in the initial trio of Lucy-Cass-Nate have really bad dreams, typically featuring the same fearful and corrupted subject matter. Cass has it the worst, without a doubt, due to her particularly “tuning” ability. (Which we will discuss later.)

Nate: Adorkable: Not as awkward as other Adorkable children have been in the past, but he is pretty precious. 

The Heart: Nate plays a very conciliatory role with everyone. If they were all trolls, Nate would be everyone’s moirail or auspistice. He is simply the best there is.

Morality Pet: Mainly to Cassandra, though he does this for Cin occasionally, as well as Lucy at her darker times. 

Nice Guy: Well…he is. 

Nate is hard to find tropes for. These make him out to be incessantly optimistic and cheerful, and while he’s definitely positive, he doesn’t share Lucy’s energy. He tends to be more laid-back and somewhat nervous and awkward. Like I said before, he’s very good at keeping everyone calm and working together. 

—-

OKAY. This is more than enough for now. I am pretty tired, so I’m going to bed. I’ll finish with Lucy and Nate sometime soon. 

Snowie sent me a bunch of numbers from this askmeme and I was working on them and question forty five was starting to get long so I decided to move it over to this post. Hooray!

-

Music similar to dubstep, Pogo, Madeon, triphop and other sort of weird remix-based music is VERY popular. AND THERE’S A REASON! 

I talked a little bit about the effects of the glitch on the universe itself, but I haven’t really talked about the effect on the people. Lucy, Nate and Cassandra (they’re supposed to be dealing with the smaller glitches, remember!) are sort of like antennas—they’re very sensitive to its effects, so they can locate them and mend them more easily. They also have some various types of mental “armor” that protects them from the more mentally devastating parts of the collapse. However! Your average person isn’t like that at all. While they don’t pick up on the effects nearly as well as Lucy, Nate and Cass do, they still feel some of them. Furthermore, they aren’t protected from the mental effects. The most common side effect is the scrambling of that “mental ear”…I don’t know what the scientific term for it is, but it’s when you can “hear” songs that are stuck in your head, or narration for a story, or otherwise. The idea is that this part of them would get a little messed up—maybe lots of different songs crossing over, or sounds getting otherwise “corrupted.”

Because that’s what people are hearing, their art reflects that, and they find the corruption fascinating even if they couldn’t identify what it was exactly. (ie, they’d be [subconsciously] amused by the thoughts in their heads but wouldn’t actively be like, yo dude my thoughts are corrupted!) Thus, music that’s very remix-heavy, or just generally weird sounding, is produced constantly and is very popular with the masses, who identify with the corrupted sound. 

This extends to art and writing, too. The period of art they’re in currently is best described as “neo-surrealism,” which uses the same elements of juxtaposition and non-sequitur, updated for more modern times. The darker branches of neo-surrealism tend to exploit the uncanny valley and nightmarish images to evoke a feeling of misplaced horror. (What remains of Lovecraft’s work* is very popular with this particular crowd.) Another branch of neo-surrealism is hallucinism, which is where more bright and trippy stuff goes. Drugs like LSD are for the most part no longer around, so hallucinism tends to draw its inspiration from dreams and, of course, hallucinations, which are typically brought on by rips caused by the glitch that people accidentally pass through. 

Okay my head is way too scrambled to finish this now, I’ll pick it up again later x_x

*The small-scale apocalypse that occurred a hundred or so years ago wiped out a lot of creative work and culture along with the people. Their culture is built on what remains of all that stuff. 

Another version of the Lavender Town theme (which I think I mentioned in the last post)

This is the Lavender Town Music played backwards. 

Reading about different glitches in Pokemon was what got me thinking about the idea of glitches that you would encounter in the real world. Lavender Town has some creepy music, and making it backwards produced the desired effect of creepy, melodic and entirely wrong. (That sounds really pretentious.)

This song is a pretty big centerpiece of the Official Apastron Playlist™. u v u 

((I wrote this quite a while ago, when Kuri asked me about it. I never finished it, and in a couple areas the info is a little outdated, but this is still the most informative thing I’ve written on it to date. I had to edit out some things that were edging uncomfortably on spoiler territory, but hopefully everything still makes sense.

To be honest, I still am sort of confused with this at the moment. Apastron started out as a fairly straightforward amnesia-recovery adventure story with biopunk elements and a lot of genetic engineering geekery…but as I started fleshing out the characters and plot line I realized what I had was pretty boring. So since then I’ve been tossing around a lot of different potential elements, but as of now, these are the things I keep coming back to, organized in what is hopefully a coherent fashion…))

Read More

(I wrote this awhile ago, back when I only had a pretty vague idea of what was going to happen. Even with all the stuff that I’ve changed, it still feels relevant, and perhaps a decent introduction to this blog in general.

Forgive the rocky writing. I decided to just go full steam ahead on this, and that means unedited stuff, sometimes.) 

-x-

She had been here before. She knew it the moment she came into being. This realization, which cut though the darkness fogging both her body and mind with shocking clarity, was what sparked that first bit of fear. She had been here, but its name would not rise to her lips as commanded. Where was here? And how did she get here? One moment she was… where had she been? Wherever it was. She had been there. And now she was here. No transition. Sudden as snapping bones.

The blackness was as a living thing, surrounding her like she had been swallowed by it. It rippled under her feet as she paddled blindly, sensing solidness under the bare pads of her feet despite despite the dip in her stomach that told her she was falling. The confusion of her senses made her want to vomit. 

There had been screaming, she remembered. Screams. And eyes that pierced through a thick haze to her. Golden eyes. 

 The space here was too dense, a cube compressed between two halves of the universe. She could barely move, the air was so thick. Like she was walking through water. Or blood. 

Ahead, she thought she saw light. She moved towards it somehow, gratefully. She called out names she did not recognize, desperate for closeness, for closure, and for escape above all. She didn’t know how long it took for her to move the whole way—it felt like days, but at the same time, seconds, like she was stretched across a million timeframes. The light was brighter now, flooding her vision. She gratefully reached towards it as it looked up at her. It smiled, opened its mouth of a million teeth, and swallowed her whole.

Her body was static personified and transformed into a pulsating beacon that tore a straight shaft clear up through the ceiling of the sky. Her consciousness was another matter; like wishy washy water in a ten gallon tank. Nothing but energy and space, and in between those, something imperceptible that fluttered like eyelashes. 

She opened her eyes and stared directly into the sweeping canvas of the sky.