Michael Offutt's Blog, page 36

Once you understand how a transporter in Star Trek works the use of it seems horrifying.

This was Robot's human form in Invincible. He helped the Mauler twins escape prison, because
they were experts at cloning. Once they were out, Robot asked them to create a body for him
and then when it was done, he had them transfer a copy of his complete brain to the new body.
Then the old body was taken off life support and allowed to die, but its death was very real.
I've been thinking of the transporter lately. I'm sure you've seen it. People in the multiple television series step into it and get "beamed" to another location almost instantaneously. What is actually happening is that a person is killed (disassembled) and their memories and personality and everything up to and including the moment of their death is reassembled in another location. To the person being reassembled it is fine. To the person being killed...that is their final moment of life. So the only one that notices it is the person who is being killed. In other words...it still sucks for them.

The reason I embarked on this thought exercise about the transporter has a lot to do with Amazon's Invincible. I was discussing with a friend the idea of the intelligent clones that are in that show and how they invented technology to create an identical imprint of the mind into the living tissue of another body. This effectively creates an immortality scenario, because the new person is equipped with all of the memories of the old person. Every single one. Only, it isn't quite so simple. You see, the old person is still alive trapped in their body, and when they die in that body...it is for real.

So, my friend and I had a discussion centered around this question: knowing that the transporter in Star Trek actually kills you, would you be okay using it knowing that the other clone of you would be identical to you in the same way? The clone would not be able to tell it wasn't the real person. Only the person who died at the proverbial hand of the transporter machine would actually know. He said that he would make the choice very easily and use the transporter. I said I probably would not. To me, it would be no different than dying with a bullet through the brain. It would be final death. Sure, my clone would have all of my experiences and my memories and would be identical to me. However, I would not be a part of that consciousness.

It's a strange mental exercise to imagine cloning and transporting in this manner. So, now that I've explained to you how all of that works...would you choose to use a transporter? Would you choose to be killed so that a bunch of time could be saved by recreating you in another location, even if that re-creation would be you down to the most minute detail? Your consciousness would end with your death and a new consciousness would be born in the transporter a great distance from you. The new you would not have any break in consciousness as the memories would exist all the way up to emerging on the other side. It would be the old you that no longer created memories (because you were dead). It's a strange question (I know), but I feel like it's worth asking.

And now I fully get why Bones (Dr. McCoy) did not like transporters.

I finished reading the Riftwar Saga of thirty books. It was mostly good even if it may have jumped the shark quite a while ago.

This weekend, I finished reading the Raymond E. Feist Riftwar Saga that spans thirty books while 100 degree temperatures settled in over the very parched western states. The last book in the series, Magician's End, was a bit of a slog of a read in the sense that it had a saggy middle. Feist was clearly wrapping up a lot of plot lines and had decided to devote his last novel to the politics of kingdoms, i.e., who gets the throne of the Kingdom of the Isles, etc. All of this while a greater threat from outside the world was happening under everyone's noses. While reading, I kept asking myself how I would have ended this series were these my characters. I suppose I wouldn't have done anything different. And I think that means that the series went on far too long, and it was really (in the end) dried up of any new stories to write about.

The Riftwar Saga in itself is quite an accomplishment. Thirty books means that the author and all those who participated in this magnum opus felt very strongly and passionately for these characters. Their origins may have been in Dungeons & Dragons games, but they got the full respect and treatment one would want for labors of love minus an actual movie from Hollywood. The author's stories were good, but the continual characters that were the backbone of the series all suffered from clear "power bloat," which is also a thing that plagues high-level D&D games. "Power bloat" is a phenomenon wherein a character gains so many powers, levels, and abilities over the course of play that they sail into retirement, because a story creator can no longer come up with ideas to challenge these mind-blowing and powerful characters. I never thought I'd see such evidence of this phenomenon in written books, but by the end of Magician's End, the main character was essentially a god. Rather than just "be a god" the author decided to kill off the main character in a most spectacular and very heroic way. I guess this was his method of letting go, so that he could focus on other projects and other stories. It would have been very difficult to write stories that involved an essentially omnipotent being anyway, so death in a heroic blast off was a solid way to say, "I'm stepping away from this project forever, and I'm glad you enjoyed the ride."

When I think of the Riftwar Saga, I'm kind of amazed at how much Feist decided to blend modern concepts of science into his epic fantasy. His characters in getting to know the universe leave few rocks unturned, learning about (essentially) quantum mechanics, ever expanding space, the fusion that drives stars, and other such things. Some of his characters proclaim loudly that magic doesn't really exist, even though there are magicians a plenty in the world working magic. But then as time goes and you delve into the story, you begin to see that what might be magic may be just another kind of physics that involve particles changing what they want to be at an atomic level and how magic just may be a way to encourage those particles along a pathway.

He even overexplains his bad guys, kind of taking away the mysteries of them. His demons that he introduces you to in earlier books are at first terrifying. But in later books, you just come to realize that they used to be the same host as angels and were separated in the ancient past. Hell (where the demons come from) is just another universe. And the demons have cities and their own people. They raise young and fear an ever increasing blackness at the center of their dimension. Demystifying all of this made the demons less like this evil force, and more like just another fantasy race like elves and dwarves. The big bad itself, which was this void thing called the Dread that wanted to eat all life in the universe was explained away too. Apparently, in the beginning of Feist's cosmic creation there were these two entities. One was curious and the other wasn't. The curious entity left the incurious one and started to investigate all of its ideas that it had. It created time as an organizational tool so that all of its ideas would not happen at the same exact moment. So time was literally this thing that allowed other things to be spaced apart and be organized instead of chaotic.

Well, all of this preoccupation by the curious entity made the incurious one lonely. So it attacking everything in reality to eat it and destroy it was really just its attempt to unravel time so that the curious entity would come back to its state of being and be peaceful in a kind of timeless bliss (as it had been before) with the uncurious entity. It was a weird concept that did make sense. However, it removed all of the horror to know that this was fundamentally what was going on. I felt like the big bad had been overexplained. It was still as annihilating as a black hole is, but by knowing exactly what was going on, it somehow became less interesting than it would have been were it some awful monster. Ah well. Were these choices that I might have made? I don't know. The only thing I do know is that thirty books is a lot for any one person to accomplish, and I suppose he did all right when it comes to that kind of dedication. After all, these super powerful characters needed something to figure out, because "big monster go smash" had happened so many books ago that to be original, the author needed something that would be different and justify all those pages.

He-Man in the Masters of the Universe Revelation trailer from Netflix looks like a blond superchad and I loooove it.

The Masters of the Universe: Revelation teaser trailer dropped yesterday. From the mind of Kevin Smith, I didn't expect to be so smitten by it. But the nostalgia is strong with this one! Also, they went full 80's. I've embedded the trailer below for your viewing pleasure. I mean...talking 80's here...but could you ever go wrong with Bonnie Tyler's I need a hero? The delivery on "I have the power" gave me chills, and Orko looks awesome.

Robert Kirkman's Invincible is a show that resembles in a lot of ways the America that I truly know.

This last weekend, I finished watching the first season of the Amazon series called Invincible. Before I talk about it, I want to give a spoiler alert for any people who may be reading, and who want to watch it before learning anything about the show.

Invincible was good, and that gave me hope, because I heard that Netflix's Jupiter's Legacy got canceled. Even though these two things aren't related, I did like Jupiter's Legacy enough that I wanted a second season if (for anything) just to get answers. If you've seen the show, it is anything but finished with huge dangling threads that will now have no resolution unless I want to go and read the comics (which I won't). I also liked that there were other superhero stories to tell out there that had nothing to do with DC or Marvel. As far as Jupiter's Legacy goes, the way the heroes got their powers was actually a decent story.

Sitting down to watch Invincible for the first time, I knew very little about it. In fact, the only thing I did know was that Robert Kirkman had created it. I like Robert Kirkman's stuff, his other property being mainly The Walking Dead. But even though I stopped watching TWD years ago does not mean that I didn't love the show for the world it created. Robert Kirkman has always been someone who seems to have real strength in putting together worlds and making them accessible to others. He doesn't ask too much from his audience. He gives you something that you are used to, and then puts a little spin on it to make it his own. The Wachowski's he is not, but that's totally okay. The guy isn't here to give us a brand new way of doing things.

Now to the nitty gritty of what I liked about Invincible. The first episode was benign enough all the way up to the surprise ending. It established a world that felt similar to ones I see in Marvel and DC. The Earth of Invincible is one where other supes are common enough that everyone sees them. There are space aliens, dimensional conquerors, and kaiju (yes, I said "kaiju"). That last one was really fun to find out, because kaiju look like they'd be a great add-in for any superhero show. There's also an Avengers-type club called the Guardians of the Globe stocked with this universe's equivalent of the Flash and Wonder Woman. Well at the end of the first episode, Omni-Man (who is a Superman-level powerhouse) kills every last one of the Guardians of the Globe in graphic bloody detail. We only find out later that Omni-Man was sent to Earth to conquer it by the Viltrumite Empire. It makes sense that to conquer a planet, he'd need to deal with its most powerful defenders.

Omni-Man is also voiced perfectly by J.K. Simmons, who plays J. Jonah Jamison in Spider-Man movies. Omni-Man is even drawn to resemble J. Jonah Jamison in many ways, so it seemed a natural and eerie fit to have this voice actor saying his lines. But what Invincible manages to do really well is take an 80's era aesthetic of animation, play on that nostalgia, and then cover it in gore and violence. There are tons of action-packed sequences with supervillains who do not pull their punches. And it's also the story of a teen superhero (kinda like Spider-Man) who ends up going through a hell of a lot more trauma in the telling of his stories.

My friend, James, who has read the comic books tells me that it gets even worse than what we saw in the first season (where Mark Grayson who is the teen "Invincible") gets beaten to within an inch of his life by his father "Omni-Man" who only has a change of heart at the very last moment of breath from his son. It makes me ask (at this remarkable scene) since when have we ever seen that level of violence from a show about superheroes?

And it's to the credit of the show to highlight a thing that we've known for years: adults do in fact beat up their sons, their daughters, and their spouses in many households. My own father beat my brother with a tennis racket and my brother still has that racket all these years later (don't feel sorry for me as violence was commonplace in my household growing up and it's like crying over spilt milk) covered in his own blood. These are things people don't talk about with dysfunctional families. But I've come to recognize that adults are in fact genuinely awful to one another and their children in numbers that should shock the civilized world. But no one talks about it! They are skeletons in the closet! Robert Kirkman dares to air all the dirty laundry by making superhero families no different than the Americans they are drawn from, which are (for lack of better words) awful people. And to be clear I'm not slamming Americans. I'm American too, which means I'm awful. I just know better than to pretend that I'm not.

Anyway, so Invincible almost gets slaughtered by his father. Well my friend James says that in the comics, he's got a brutal rape coming as well from a female Viltrimite. As I've grown older, I've come to understand that rape is pretty commonplace, and it's mostly perpetrated by men. I was literally at a breakfast thing with my friend Meg and her twenty friends at her home when all the women and the non-binaries started talking about their rapes they've endured for years. I was transfixed by all of these stories, and that they were talking about them.

Since that day, I've noticed that there's so much rape...rape everywhere...and trauma from it in our society. Sexual assault seems to be as common as navel oranges at the supermarket. Just...no one talks about it. I think it's good that people are starting to talk about all the oranges lying around, instead of ignoring them. Once we can all agree that it is a systemic problem, maybe things will change (that's my hope at least). But going back to Invincible and the rape of the main character by a female Viltrimite...it sounds interesting. Why? Because you don't hear a lot of female on male crime. Yet, it does happen. I have three male friends who have been raped by women. They have extreme difficulty talking about it, and other guys usually laugh at them about it (I don't...I listen with empathy). They are afraid to come forward to cops, because they feel that the system will just ignore them. And then they wonder if it was something that they did, and whether or not they are misinterpreting the situation or the experience. People have this idea that "men can't be raped" because you "can't rape the willing." That is categorically untrue and insensitive to say the least.

I got to hand it to Robert Kirkman who dares to rip the sheets back on society and use what he finds there as the foundation for his stories. The Walking Dead was always a story about the survivors, and how the people who had the cajones to survive an apocalypse would be filled with psychopathy. Invincible is the same way, showing that many superheroes would try to do the right thing, but that bad parenting, psychopathy, and the human propensity for abuse would also be visible in these characters. And even though the female superheroes were powerful, they would still be browbeat by the scourge of Christian patriarchy.

Kirkman's not trying to visualize a better world made so by the Justice League of America. He's trying to visualize a world in its natural state were these gods to actually walk among us, breed with us, and raise families. He's giving us the world where the fascist and racist person actually has the power to level a city with his own fists and isn't held in check by anyone. How do you deal with that? Where it differs from Amazon's The Boys is its scale. Invincible is galactic, pulling in Viltrimites from an empire that has conquered thousands of worlds to Martians to invaders from other dimensions. Every day of the show there was some kind of world-shaking catastrophe that needed to be dealt with by the Guardians of Earth. But even as these monsters appeared, the true monster that represented the greatest threat was always one that looked frighteningly human.

Access to money is used like a scourge to force people to do things that are against their will.

It's almost cliche to say this, but Americans are all equal. However, some are more equal than others. Growing into an adult, and also growing wise, I have seen with stark clarity the strings of manipulation that are used to get adults and young adults to conform to certain prescribed behaviors. The illusion of freedom of choice in America is exactly that. You are free to choose, just so long as your choice happens to echo the one who holds the purse strings. It's mind boggling really how this is true from the billionaire to the head of a small family. It is true from the Hollywood producer to a dating profile on OK Cupid. People desperately try to manipulate other people through the access of money.

Here in Utah, I am privy to one of the most obscene uses of money and control wielded by religious families. Let's say a teen (read this as a young adult) identifies as LGBTQ and they "come out" to a religious parent. I've seen them wield access to money like a knife. On the line are threats of homelessness, abandonment, isolation, because the young person very rarely has access to the kinds of money one can live on when on their own (especially with prices soaring in the rental market).

The solution to all of this (of course) is democratic social and monetary safety nets. Being a democrat, I think all people should have access to free medical care and universal basic income. All people should be allowed to vote regardless of whether they are in prison (or not), and housing should just be a right. If you are kicked out of a home, the government should step in and provide you with one free of charge. Call me a leftist radical if you wish. But this so called "socialism" terrifies the ruling class, because it takes away their weapon. It defangs them with the ability to scourge a person with access to money.

Utah is also one of the states in the union that is deliberately tossing extra unemployment benefits because they want to try to starve people who are on unemployment into taking crappy jobs that no one wants to do. My brain just cannot comprehend why they think this is a good thing. It is so transparently evil, that I don't know why the ones who are making this decision don't think of themselves as the devil incarnate. If you want people to work, pay them $30.00 per hour with childcare, paid leave, a full benefits package, and a generous pension. If that bankrupts you, then you are not (in fact) a job creator and don't deserve the company that you are trying to create. Stop exploiting people. Exploitation is bad, mmmkay? If your excuse is: well I want to be a job creator so I can be rich. Well tough titty. You don't have a right to be rich, and you never did. Too many people want to be rich, and it's this greed that is destroying the nation and the world.

What I don't get is why anyone would want to control another person so terribly. What does economic control give you? What does social control give you? Even if they were your own child, why wouldn't you want them to just choose to love you. If they didn't choose that, maybe it's you, and you should be a nicer person. Why would anyone want anyone else around them that wasn't choosing of their own free will to be around them? At some basic level, wouldn't you want a loved one to be taken care of no matter what? I wonder if these people (who are so into controlling another) get mad that plants grow on their own (and flourish) whether or not they are around. I think it would be a healthy lesson for people to understand that you do not have the right to treat another person like garbage. No one belongs to you. Everyone deserves a healthy and prosperous life, and they deserve to flourish regardless whether or not they even like you as a person.

I shake my head at the frustration of understanding why some people just crave power over another. Wouldn't it be healthier if you instead craved painting a nice model or if you craved playing some Dungeons & Dragons with friends on a weekend or if you craved a good book? Wouldn't it be funner if you solved a problem and then told other people how you did it and helped them to overcome a challenge too? Imagine what the world would be like. I like to think that in a world where roadblocks were removed and people could just choose what they would like to do or what they would like to believe or who they would like to love without coercion or manipulation, that everyone would be so much happier. The only way we will ever find out is to disarm those with money so that they can't scourge the backs of the ones without and make them do things that they don't want to do.

This month the IWSG asks writers to reveal the amount of time they let a manuscript rest before going back to do edits.

Hello everyone. It is June and that means Pride month. Maybe things will look more normal going forward (I'm sure hoping so). Being the first Wednesday of the month, it is also time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group. If you haven't heard of this and have somehow come across my blog post, please go here and give it a look. But allow me to answer a few questions you may have about it.

What is its purpose? Well, to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!

When do we post? The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting! Be sure to link to this page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog! Otherwise, when you leave a comment, people can't find you to comment back.

The Twitter handle for the Insecure Writer's Support Group is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

Every month, we announce a question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say.

Remember, the question is optional!

June 2 question - For how long do you shelve your first draft, before reading it and re-drafting? Is this dependent on your writing experience and the number of stories/books under your belt?
I shelve my typical draft about six months. Sometimes longer. But in the past I usually tried to let it age six months. You'd be surprised at how many things pop out at you after that time. For me, it helps spot spelling errors that are inevitable in a long manuscript. But it also allows me to sit back and think about things quite a bit to make sure I accomplished what I set out to do.
Please be sure to visit the co-hosts for the IWSG, and thank you for coming. The awesome co-hosts for the June 2 posting of the IWSG are J Lenni Dorner, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, Lee Lowery, and Rachna Chhabria!

It is difficult for me to understand why people do the things that they do.

I thought I was a relatively educated man approaching fifty. But in the last year I learned of two things that I had no previous knowledge about: the Tulsa massacre and Sundown towns. Both of these I actually learned about by watching either Lovecraft Country or Watchmen on HBO. I never read about either of these things in a history book in any class that I took in high school or college.

The New York Times wrote about the Tulsa Greenwood Massacre in incredible depth yesterday, since it has been a century now since the event occurred. It was a real eye-opener, because they showed what the town of Greenwood meant to its black inhabitants (in a slick computer-generated presentation), and to how it was a place of prosperity and pride for a population that was not welcome in the greater Tulsa area. Fast forward to 2021, and very little has changed. And the nation is still struggling with the way it deals with the narrative and facts of what happened in Tulsa a hundred years ago. Just recently, Oklahoma Governor Stitt got booted off the 1921 Greenwood Massacre Centennial Commission because he signed a law prohibiting the teaching of why Greenwood was burned to the ground. Like...why would you do that? Why would you not want it taught so that people could learn about it, and keep other people (like me) from having to confess that they are/were ignorant?

Sadly, you can look at Google maps today and see that where the federal Interstate highway was placed when they cut through Tulsa that they chose a path right through Greenwood. Of course they did. No one of importance (and nothing of importance) lived/occurred there, right?  I wonder if publishers of textbooks will ever have the courage to air within their pages events like Tulsa, or speak openly about the planes that flew overhead to drop dynamite on the buildings. And no one had any problem with that at all, because (apparently) it happened as a result of a black man assaulting a white woman. That's how all of these kinds of stories start out. The reaction was breathtaking, and (to me) it almost feels like it was an attempt at genocide.

It is difficult for me to understand why people do the things that they do. What goes on in someone's mind to make these things happen? Are there words one can say to describe the history of how black people were pushed and violently oppressed in the white-mob mentality to "stop the steal" of their supposed divine right to wealth, land, and prosperity? Much of that entitlement still simmers today. I wish I understood where it comes from better, rather than just observing that "there's really unpleasant work to do and the cotton doesn't pick itself so somebody is going to be forced to do it." Is that really what life is about...being the one person who gets to have a good life at the expense of someone else? Must there always be a loser for every winner? These are all questions that I have in my mind that don't make any sense.

Do second hand markets and scalpers ruin hobbies and games for other people? Is unfettered capitalism good for anything?

Do second hand markets and scalpers ruin hobbies and games? I was having a quiet weekend when I saw a video of a mad rush of adult shoppers at a Wal-Mart trying to punch each other out over the last remaining Pokemon cards. Most of these are destined for Ebay, resale, flipping...or what have you. I doubt these people actually play Pokemon and have a passion for their rare card because it helps them win games.

I've also heard the stories from scalpers. This may surprise you, but most of the scalping being done is happening to other scalpers. It's the same mentality that you see in crypto trading or stock market memes like "Gamestop." That is...all of the buying and selling is happening between scalpers who actually have no interest in the product other than, "If I can take advantage of someone, I can make some money on this and not actually have to participate in back-breaking capitalism which would require me to work for a number of piss-poor dollars per hour." In other words, very little product from a Pokemon buying frenzy is actually making it to consumers. And then scalpers buying off scalpers essentially controls the supply, and that's how the price goes up.

I also hear that scalpers created a shortage in the Playstation 5 that was released some time ago. So I guess what I'm asking you to answer (dear reader) is this: products being sold NOW are brand new and are being snatched up by speculators who have no interest in actually consuming the products. They just want to exploit their ability to create artificial scarcity to rip other people off. So my question to you is should this be allowed? If so, I'd like to hear why. As for me, I don't think it should be allowed. I don't like "unfettered capitalism," which has no regulations to protect the public from predatory profit seekers. Unfortunately, we live in a country where half of the populations is okay to let greedy people bribe out politicians to change laws and create loopholes so that they can get away with monstrous actions for profit.

Vignette number one from my Dungeons & Dragons game is about a watery tentacle that bestows supernatural gifts.

Here is the first of the vignette short stories that I got sent by one of my players. Her name is Geneva, and she's playing a rogue that multiclassed into Warlock. She seemed really taken by the warlock character class in the Player's Handbook which ties its power to some kind of ancient/old entity. Geneva decided that Valerie (her character) would have a connection to the ocean, as the setting for this campaign is around a small town called "Saltmarsh" in the Kingdom of Keoland.

The name of this piece is Tentacle.

Valerie wades in the surf, knee deep, in a secluded cove an hour’s walk from town. She is 8 years old. She has been swimming with her best friend, Oelien, a young elf boy around her age. He is still swimming out by the reef. She sees him surface, much less often than one would expect. She envies his ability to stay under the water for so long, but she is content to watch from shore for now. She may go back in for one more swim in awhile, but right now she is enjoying the feel of the summer sun drying her hair and warming her skin. She has plenty of time before she’s expected at home. Her mother made it plain that this afternoon she was to stay clear of the house until sunset, and her father is out to sea.

Valerie has been swimming almost since she could walk, and is quite good at it. She loves the way the cool salt water embraces her, buoying her up when she swims on the surface, surrounding her when she dives beneath. Moving through it feels the way she imagines flying would feel. She wishes she didn’t need to come up. She often opens her eyes in the stinging salt water to find a world of beauty below her. She can hear the fish feeding on the corals on the reef just past the shore break. The sound of the waves ebbing and flowing is the sweetest music to her. She can make small forays into the deeper water, but finds herself frustrated by the limits of her breath.

Sometimes the world of the water seems more real to her, more like home, than the world on land. Especially her own home, when her father isn’t there. Her mother is often preoccupied, and short with her if she’s underfoot. There are things in the house that Valerie only sees when her father is out of port, and she’s pretty sure she’s not meant to notice them. But Valerie has always noticed things. Sometimes, strange people come to the back door of the house for whispered conversations with her mom. Sometimes, those conversations take place in languages Valerie doesn’t understand. Once, when she was smaller, she went climbing up a shelf to reach a coin purse that was hanging from a high hook on the wall that had not been there the day before. She fell and was discovered. Her mother was furious, and, strangely, afraid. Afterwards, her mother carefully poured a few coins on the table and showed them to Valerie and explained to her that she must never, ever touch coins like this. The coins looked like gold coins, which Valerie had seen before, but these glinted red in certain light. Her mother swept them back into the purse, which Valerie never saw again.

The tide is coming in. Valerie is on a rocky bit of shoreline now, among tide pools filled with urchins, anemones, and purple sea stars. She crouches where the water is beginning to crash on the rocks, pulls off a few mussels from under the edge, pries the shells open, and picks out the tiny creatures inside. She washes them in seawater and pops them in her mouth. She chews, savoring the sweet/salty taste.

Now she is thirsty, and she realizes that she has left her clay water jug far down the beach, with her clothes. Oelien is still swimming, far out. She places her hands beside her on the rock and prepares to hoist herself up, then stops mid-motion.

There is a tentacle coming out of the water, right in front of her, and it is reaching for her foot. But it doesn’t look like a proper, fleshy tentacle. It’s transparent. It appears to be made of water. It touches her with a soft splash, and it feels like water on her skin, but it doesn’t lose its form the way a wave would upon impact. In the instant of that touch, a voice fills her mind. To Valerie it sings like the sea itself - thundering, beautiful, fierce, overwhelming. She can feel it swirling around inside her head, much the way a wave does across and between and under the rocks where she sits. The voice in her head is alive, and it flows unchecked into every part of her consciousness. She can’t stop the flow. It demands to know her.

Her body is standing now, her back arched, her arms thrown wide, her eyes sightless as the tentacle winds itself up her body and also into her mind. Angry now, she demands in return to know what thing believes it has the right to use her so. One who would give you the gift you want the most, child, answers the voice. One who is as wild as you want to be. One who welcomes you into the depths.

The tentacle, grown large and strong now, pulls her into the water and propels her forcefully away from shore and downwards. She struggles against the tentacle now, aware that the growing pressure in her ears means that she is going deeper into the water, and the burning in her lungs means that she will soon need to breathe. Then breathe, says the voice.

And then Valerie feels the seawater flowing across the sides of her neck, and the urge to inhale that she’s been fighting abruptly leaves her. The wave that had flooded her mind recedes until it is a lingering caress, a single tendril. A tentacle. The force binding her limbs eases. Open your eyes, child, says the voice softly. Look upon your new world.

She expects the familiar sting of the salt water as she opens her eyes, but it is absent. Her eyes quickly adjust to the light level. She is probably about 30 feet down, but her ears aren’t bothered. She is surrounded by sea life. Reds are dull and dark at this depth. Yellow and green and purple are still visible, if a little softened and blued in the filtered light. There is something swimming rapidly toward her that is roughly her size. Her friend? No. She sees a head and arms like a child’s, but then she sees its powerful, finned tail. Its skin is a sea creature’s skin’s texture and color, its movements more like fish than humanoid.

The creature is close now, so close she can see its eyes and its facial expression, which is hard to read. Curiosity? Concern? The eyes, though… it IS Oelien! Valerie thought she had lost the capacity for further surprise today. She was wrong. Her best friend is a… what is he, exactly?

He motions toward her neck. Valerie’s own hand follows the motion, and touches the side of her neck, gently, and she understands. She’s seen, and felt, something like this when helping her father clean fresh-caught fish. Gills. She has gills! The tentacle in her mind speaks. When she is in the water, from now on, she will have gills. They are the gift, perhaps the first of many gifts. She can now move between the worlds of land and

water freely instead of being an outworlder from the surface. Just like her best friend. The word the voice uses for him is one she has heard in stories. Changeling.

Valerie is overcome with a savage joy. She taps Oelien on the shoulder, and using hand motions, challenges him to a race. This time, for the first time ever, she matches his speed. They play under the sea, swimming through passages in the reef, plunging over the edge of the drop-off into deeper waters, watching motionless from below as several white-tipped sharks carve out a living ball of smaller fish from a school and feast.

After about an hour, Valerie heads for shore. She can breathe under the water and swim better than ever before, but the water is still cold, and swimming still takes effort. By the time she emerges onto the beach, her limbs feel heavy, and she’s shivering. The tentacle, as she has named the thing in her mind, is silent, but is still present in her head when she searches. She can feel it, now delicate and subtle, dipping into her experiences as they happen. Oelien comes ashore just behind her, now appearing as the elf child she had thought him to be up until this day. He is tentative around her. She instinctively knows why, and reassures her friend that she will protect his secret. She asks for the same protection in return. They solemnly link little fingers to seal their promise.

She cherishes the tentacle’s gift, yet she understands that telling any other person, especially a grown-up, might provoke reactions that would affect her in ways she can’t control. It is easy for her to imagine her mother forbidding her to go to the sea. She wouldn’t be able to stand that.

I've decided I'm going to post some of the vignettes the players in my D&D game have emailed me regarding their characters.

With the permission of some of my players in my weekly Dungeons & Dragons game, I'm going to post the fiction vignettes that they've been inspired to write about their characters. I think you may enjoy them. I plan on doing the first one Friday, but first, there's a little housekeeping in that I want to share with you how I started them all out adventuring in my homebrew world (homebrew is a term that means it is not an official product; rather it is one of the author's imagination).

I started them off by actually having them create roleplaying personas of people who are alive in modern Salt Lake City, year 2021. I told them that the only restriction on this was that they couldn't be a famous person. My friend Jed decided that he would be a thirty-five year-old man living in the basement of his parent's house, bitter that he cannot get a girlfriend, and watching anime porn/hentai all day long on Wi-Fi while trolling people on message boards. My friend Jake decided to be a sixty-five year old business man who got drunk a lot because his wife of 25-years left him for the son of a local billionaire. My friend Jesse decided that he wanted to play a guy that was in his eighties who was super rich. My friend Jordan decided he would play the son of Jake's sixty-five year old character. And my friend Sasha decided that he would play the son of the billionaire responsible for breaking up Jake's character's marriage. There wasn't a whole lot of originality, as most people just wanted to be either rich or to make a character that mocked and/or teased Jake in some aspect. Jake has diagnosable levels of narcissistic personality disorder, so it may have been a kind of passive/aggressive response to build characters linked to his background. Additionally, Jake may also have encouraged it as he very much wants things to be about him. But I digress...the table was set for these characters to make their first appearance on my game world, which I call "Wynwrayth."

Now, all of them were friends with a guy they called Milbar, and I always had in my head that Milbar looked like the actor Paul Giamatti. So, I told them that in this fictional Earth, Paul Giamatti didn't exist as an actor because I was going to use him as Milbar. They were okay with that. Milbar in the Wynwrayth universe is the very powerful god of magic. And I stole an idea from the movie, Jumanji (Dwayne Johnson not Robin Williams), to get them to Wynwrayth, only it was a bit more "colorful."

I told the group that their characters all knew Milbar (that was their common link). He was some skeezy guy that always had the hottest women hanging off his arm. He was the friend that always asked for favors, borrowed money, and never paid any of it back. He was kind of a slovenly pig, very well-spoken, but also arrogant. When he was at a party he would be wearing those 70's style open shirts with the big collars, displaying lots of chest hair and gold chains, with a cigar in one hand and brandy in a shot glass in the other. He'd just blatantly tell people, "I'm the god of magic," and then do cheesy card tricks while womanizing.

Anyway, for one reason or another, they all ended up at his house which wasn't in the nicest neighborhood one sunny afternoon in mid-July. With the pandemic raging, they were there to collect on money he owed them (or various other reasons). They arrived and saw in the driveway an adult maid service Kia was parked. I described it as bright pink, with fake eyelashes around the headlights and dominatrix stuff in the backseat. They knocked on the door, but Milbar didn't answer. They heard noises which caught their curiosity, and they walked in. That's when I played a cut scene from the show Billions. I'll link it below.

View it to just after Paul Giamati's character is getting the "golden shower" and that's where I stopped it. Needless to say, my group of players was shocked and laughing out loud. That's when I said, "Suddenly, Milbar notices you and in a fit of shock and embarrassment, he yells, 'Uhh! Uhhh! THIS ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK!" and he's gesturing wildly with his hands when "BAM" they get hit by something that flares out of him, and the next thing they know...they are hurtling through space and time in a wormhole of colors and images that are both terrifying and beautiful. And then everything goes black. When they wake up, they are in a field on top of a hill, and they are no longer in their original bodies. Jed's character (the man that lived in the basement and loved anime porn) is in the body of a super hot half Drow teenaged girl of seventeen (so he's now essentially transgender), and the others have similar and shocking discoveries of their new bodies. Furthermore, just like in the show Jumanji they can slap their upper chest at any time and view their character sheet. However, no one in the world can actually see it. Oh and each one of them has something useless that came from Earth. Cell phones with no signal, paper money and a money clip, one even had the steering wheel to their parked car (but the car wasn't there). One person had a laptop with no signal, etc. And that was the first day for their characters visiting my world, and we've been playing for a little over a year now.
So now, with that background, maybe the vignettes I post will have more meaning (and hopefully you will enjoy them).