Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 18

The Beast Fears Fire - Feral Paths

Feral Paths [Disaster 2]
Impulse - To Take You Places

The Teigou is big - it could easily fit 20 Cricktons under its canopy, 30 if you leave out the Central Mountains and Lahey. There are portions of the forest that have not been mapped, not by the Hemlocks, not by the Pines, not by anyone before or since, at least, not in any surviving form. We are aware of many settlements inside the forest, some of which we know how to reach but not where they are located in the forest. No one needs to be the first to stand up and say that not knowing where something is tends to preclude knowing how to reach it. In this case, the settlements are only reachable via the feral paths.

The origins of the feral paths are pretty straightforward. There are new ones which appear periodically, which lends a little credence to the general consensus. They are the trails of spoiled blood the feral gods leave when they break free of their shrines. No one's certain where the feral gods go, or what happens to them when they break free. There are no surviving accounts of an encounter with the entities, and given the state of the shrines, when traced over the network of paths, that seems understandable.

Feral paths have a way of compressing distance, making potentially month-long treks into the depths of the Teigou the work of a few hours. While this has obvious benefits (including making a large portion of Song living in what is technically Murren defacto members of Crick society), they can also be quite dangerous. There are some stable and well-traveled paths, but even these can sometimes decide to take travelers to different places than they normally do. Some of these places are in less hospitable parts of the forest. Some may be the sites of feral shrines, which are almost always packed to the gills with stray spirits and supernatural miasmas, some might dump you in Dim Stroen. Additionally, travel on the feral paths can put a traveler slightly out of phase with the rest of the world and drawn inexorably toward Dim Stroen.

The Wood of Error
When you walk the feral paths, face Disaster
On a Hit, you arrive at your intended destination, if you're on a path that goes someplace specific or you arrive someplace relatively safe, if you're exploring.
On a Hard Hit, you arrive as if you Hit, but also get to choose the Cool or Hot option for Acting Under fire.
On a Miss, you end up someplace unpleasant and suffer the Peril Lost on Feral Roads, which you cannot resolve unless you are in a inhabited area.

Those lost on feral roads do not become aware of their predicament until they attempt to interact with other people who did not join them on the trip. It doesn't work. Those lost are aware of those not lost, and are able to interact with the environment, but they cannot interact directly with people who are not lost. Nor can people who are not lost interact with or perceive the lost. Even attempts at violence by the lost against those who are not lost seems to fail (though the lost do not pass through the bodies of those not lost as though they were incorporeal. Their descriptions of physical contact with those not lost is... confusing and slightly unpleasant.)

What's more, those lost report being pursued by shadows of trees (usually pines) which have no corresponding trees and are visible as noticeably darker than even lightless conditions or by those suffering from blindness. Evading these shadows seems to be the secret to finding oneself again, and those who have witnessed others failing to do so see them dragged off into deeper darkness still.

The Wood of (T)Error
When you are lost on the feral roads, face Disaster when you enter an inhabited place.
On a Hit, you suffer 1 Harm from the clutch of Dim Stroen, but get +1 Hit forward to try to escape again.
On a Hard Hit, you resolve the Peril and return to the world.
On a Miss, suffer 2 Harm from the shadows of Dim Stroen. If you Fall while Lost on the Feral Roads, you are gone forever.

Minimal pairs and gaze: IMPORTANT.

This from Rose. And many thanks to her for letting me repost.

Originally posted by rose_lemberg at Minimal pairs and gaze: IMPORTANT.I am continuing the discussion of editorial address from the previous entry, because it is important to me. I think it is important, period, but importance is relative. Yet if you are a reader of this blog, I really do want you to read it.

This entry has two parts. I know, it is long, but both parts of this entry are important. The first one deals with minimal pairs, and the second with gaze.

Thank you.

This entry is not about the Rhysling, but the Rhysling is an acknowledgment of our editorial work. At Stone Telling, two people choose all the poems; two people pitch money to pay for the website, the poems, and the non-fiction entries. Stone Telling is co-edited and co-funded by Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan. Receiving a list of nominated poems is to say "here, you did well selecting these poems. Good job!" It is polite to congratulate the people responsible by name, but it is also just fine to address Stone Telling or Editors, or skip even that and go for Hi!

Clearly, the officer who emailed us thought it was important to congratulate the editors by name. That person looked at our About page, the only place in the magazine where we list our names. That person then wrote an email addressed to Rose Lemberg only, glossing over my co-editor, Shweta Narayan. The person then suggested that the website is not clear enough.

The website is clear. This is about something else, which happens to be quite demonstrable in this case.

Shweta and I have complex identities. In many ways, each of us is pretty unusual and non-mainstream in multiple ways. But considered together, we are, in terms of our identities, very much a minimal pair in the phonological sense.

Both of us are female assigned at birth.
Both of us the same age.
Both of us bisexual.
Both of us genderqueer.
Both of us immigrants, and immigrants *multiple times.*
Both of us struggle with issues of language loss.
Both of us spoonies.
Both of us linguists.
Both of us did graduate work at UC Berkeley.
Both of us worked with Eve Sweetser.
Both of us fantasists often working in the mythic tradition.
Both of us neo-pros.
Both of us poets, and published in the same magazines.
Both of us Rhysling award nominees.

Sure, there are some differences. I am a mother. Shweta is considerably better published. But looking at our bios, there is only one major difference between us: one of us has an Anglo-Western name, and the other does not.

This is the distinguishing feature in our minimal pair.

Almost nobody ever does this intentionally. To have intent to exclude is to have malice. Though I have seen and experienced, in this community, such things directed towards me with intent, most people are not malicious. Most people are good people. Most people’s will is good. Most people want to be good to each other.

There is agency, which is to say intent, deliberation. Then there is gaze.

Unlike intent, which involves an act of thinking and deciding, gaze is societally conditioned. Gaze is a set of learned behaviors and reactions that we assume towards each other, internalized from what society tells us.

Male gaze is when men are societally conditioned to see women only as objects of desire, and themselves as agents of this desire. Women, male gaze is the thing that often makes important men in your life evaluate you first or only by how good or young you look, i.e. as sexual objects, and not as individuals with autonomous will, wishes, hopes, and dreams. We push against male gaze. We have a long, long way yet to go. But we talk about it and recognize it. Yet women as well as men buy into the male gaze and defend it, because it is the societal default and it is easier not to push against it.

When the person who is the subject of the gaze encounters a person who is the object of the gaze, the subject’s eyes gloss over. Instead of a person seeing a person, the subject sees an object. It is very hard to push against it, but it is possible with effort. You need your agency, your will, your intent, to push against societally learned knee-jerk reactions that make us glaze over people who are not like us.

Most of us are subjects of some gazes, while being objects of other gazes.

Women, we push against the male gaze because it denies us personhood.

Disabled people, we push against the able-bodied gaze because it denies us personhood.

Queer people, we push against straight gaze because it denies us personhood.

Non-cisgendered people, we push against cisgendered gaze because it denies us personhood.

Immigrants and internationals, we push against US-centric gaze because it denies us personhood.

People of color push against the white gaze, because, by golly. By golly, it denies personhood.

Most times this is not intentional. We need intent here. We need to push against these gazes. We need to do more than this: we need to examine the ways in which these different, societally conditioned, othering gazes have caused harm, often unintentional harm, but harm – that is cumulative and ongoing. It is not enough to see people as individuals and not objects, though it is a crucial first step. It is also important that we consider how each of us has been harmed by the gazes of which we are objects. How we have been cumulatively harmed by them.

Then, summon your power of decision, your willpower, to make an effort to really see people even when you do not have to, because you are the subject and not the object of this particular type of gaze.

The Beast Fears Fire - Senlin Teigou

The Teigou has never been fully mapped. It is the largest forest on the continent, possibly in the world, and it's southwestern corner dominates the northeastern region of Crickton. The rest of the forest technically resides in Murren, though the more isolated Sōng settlements may still hold that they are part of the Pine Province (or Kingdom, depending where they fell on that ancient political divide). The forest extends east to the coast and north into the Murrenic Taiga.

The Teigou is a temperate rainforest with a dense canopy of pine (similar in appearance to P. thunbergii), maple (A. stirges, Narrow-Leafed Black Maple or Teigou Maple), a local species of cork oak (Q. suber teigoum) and ghostwood persimmon (D. manes). It's well known for the dark coloration of its flora and almost universal melanosis among its native fauna. It is the continent's primary supply of ghostwood and cork. There are several large rivers that flow through the forest as well, and the waterways are said to be excellent fishing.

All that is nice enough, but doesn't really explain the bad reputation the Teigou possesses and absolutely deserves. Part of the trepidation that the forest elicits is simply its darkness. The canopy of the Teigou is almost unreasonably dark, and, according to lore, gets even darker as you continue toward the center of the forest until you reach a region that is only known in a pre Sōng tongue as Dim Stroen, in which travelers have been known to experience total sensory deprivation (those successfully fished out of the heart of the forest). The Teigou is also home to a number of local gods that have gone feral, warping this and local otherworlds with their power and madness.

The Sōng tell the story that when they were hounded toward the east, driven by the old empire in the early days of the Provincial system, they crossed the entire continent from their original home in the far northwest. The empire had their sights set on exterminating the Sōng, and only left off their pursuit when the forest rebuffed them. Inside the forest, the Sōng encountered another civilization native to the place, which their history calls Tiě shān. The Tiě shān were apparently very close to the local deities, and employed them to try and repel the Sōng, and they almost succeeded, but the Sōng turned the tide by employing an imperial tactic for dealing with enemy gods. They fed them blood. Lots of blood, and let them get drunk, then sent them back to their own people where they demanded ever more and more sacrifice, refusing to lift a finger without liters of blood in compensation. With their gods gone from a strength to a liability, the Sōng eventually destroyed the Tiě shān culture, though there are stories of communities deep in the forest.

The Sōng eventually bound the blood-drunk gods into remote shrines with staff and priests enough to keep them propitiated and enjoyed a time as one of the strongest and most cohesive Provinces of the Provincial system (though they were saddled with the name of Pine Province - Sōng, meaning pine, has a lot of connotations of weakness and fragility, and when the empire enacted their rituals to wipe the real name of the Sōng people out of all record and memory, they chose that tree, that name, and those connotations to replace it with, out of spite). Pine Province had its own hereditary monarchy, and the empire didn't really have anything it could do about it. That old national capital is lost somewhere in the forest, according to legend, still ruled by the Lich that was the last King of Pine.

Pine province was one of the principal belligerents in the Autumn War, the event that brought forth the Queen of the Ugly Birds, and between that and the death of its ruler (who had been, in life, a Highly Effective Tyrant) leading to a struggle for the throne between his three children (Stupid, Brutal and Insane; each one chose a different combination of two) and then their father's subsequent return from the grave as a lich, Pine Province collapsed.

Since then, the Sōng have lost track of a lot of those shrines that once imprisoned the feral gods they once turned on the Tiě shān. Perhaps there are still families watching over those prisoners, sacrificing to keep them quiescent. Perhaps some shrines still hold, derelict and their prisoners are too weak or lost in themselves to break free.

One can hope.

The Beast Fears Fire - The Walking Dead, Volume 3

The Directing the Dead [Malevolence 2]
Impulse - To Further Confuse Matters

There's no prerequisite of magical experience or aptitude in order to get the dead to rise. You simply need some magically resonant crystals and an easy-to-follow formula, which, in terms of skill, is easier to follow than most bread recipes. The downside of the ease of recruiting the dead to walk is, aside from the ease itself, that no formula known to anyone in Crickton has any mention of how to control the dead once they are up and walking. Those who have survived raising the dead tend to come up with idiosyncratic methods that aren't provably more reliable than chance and lowered expectations, and those with magical ability do sometimes come up with means of directing them, or, at least repelling them. If sufficiently more powerful than the originator of the dead, it is possible for a magician to supplant the originator as the one in control of the dead.

Well, as much as anyone can control the dead. Which is not much at all.

Corpse Herding
When you want to repel or command the dead, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, the dead pause, wait and do nothing in your presence but respond to other threats. If there are dead bodies yet un-animated in the area, though not necessarily in the Scene, they animate.
On a Hard Hit, you can dictate one action that is not directly suicidal for the dead to take. Only one corpse in the area rises to join the throng.
On a Miss, all present walking dead focus in on you and attack. Act Under Fire. Also, all corpses in the area and Scene rise up to join the ones already roaming.

Some people claim that if there is a motivating intelligence behind the walking dead, it would prefer to have any authority over it divided up as much as possible, to have multiple living folk pushing as much of their will upon the dead as possible. Directing supernatural energies into a group of the dead is clearly a bad idea, but occasionally, there is nothing for it in the short term.



Skeletons [Violence 2]
Impulse - To Prowl and Fight

This is the other potential consequence of putting too much supernatural energy out when the dead are walking. Occasionally, when there is sufficient energy, whether from powerful or multiple forces vying for control of the dead, from throwing too much crystal in a corpse or having enough corpses in a throng of the dead, some of them go kind of bad. Decomposition continues until all flesh and connective tissue is gone, but instead of breaking up and falling to pieces, some crystalline residue remains and fills in the cartilage, eventually causing the marrow to crystallize itself. At this point, what was once a walking dead becomes a cunning and murderous creation with its own goals and motivations.

Harm Variable Skeletons, whoever they were in life, are warriors in death, and seek out weapons to carry out their aims. People have been able to observe skeletons practicing with the weapons they find, obsessively, without fatigue or need to eat or sleep. If deprived of better weapons, they will make use of whatever is available, gathering bags of stones or making use of tools in place of dedicated weapons. Skeletons without will still seek out weapons of war until they have found one. Skeletons are fast and skilled combatants and attack anyone they notice as soon as they notice them. Their skill at arms is usually bad enough, but the real problem with fighting skeletons is the thoroughness with which you have to destroy them. It's necessary to break all the major bones in a skeleton's body and scatter them pretty far apart within a short time before they reform and the powers that animate them knit the bones back together. Attempts to communicate with skeletons have, so far, not been successful.

Scatter those Bones
When a skeleton attacks you, face Violence
On a Hit, the skeleton rises again, but weaker, causing 1 less harm. If the Skeleton was causing 1 Harm, then it rises again, but you and your allies get +1 Hit Forward to harm it.
On a Hard Hit, you break and scatter it so that it does not rise.
On a Miss, the skeleton rises at full strength in the worst possible position for you. Suffer Harm as stated.

The bones of animate skeletons are full of miasmite.



The Land of the Dead
Impulse - To Serve as a Warning to Others

It's not impossible to imagine that, given the right conditions, a single outbreak of the walking dead could turn out to be a plague on par with the vampire epidemic of 50 years ago. Possibly worse, since spiritual intervention only seems to encourage the animating force to spread to other corpses. If such a thing has happened, history lost track of where and when. There is one last aspect to the dead that requires some discussion, and that's what remains when the remains are finished shuffling around. The flesh the decomposes in the later stages of an instance of the dead is some of the more toxic stuff you will encounter, and the dead spread it far and wide as a result of their rampages. Well, it's toxic to living things, but to ghouls, it's like booze. No, it's more like a boozey vacation in a pleasant clime full of willing sex partners - something that no ghoul can easily resist, and something that every ghoul in a pretty wide radius can smell.

People hypothesize that ghouls are the reason why there have been no continent-spanning plagues of walking dead. However, any place that has suffered attack from the walking dead ill needs a secondary incursion from drunken ghouls, and the ghouls gobbling up the dead detritus left about is actually slightly preferable to the stuff just sitting there, getting into the soil and the water.

This Tastes Funny
The first time you go about in a land that has suffered an attack from the walking dead in the last year and every time you return from being away, face Want.
On a Hit, you must Hold Steady or suffer the Peril Sick. Anything you try to purchase is more expensive than usual.
On a Hard Hit, you are fine, no worries, go about your day.
On a Miss, you get there just as ghouls start making trouble, or something else Moderator Hard Move starts happening.

Ragged they come and ragged they kill
In modern times, it's the Blackthorns who are the usual suspects for creating the walking dead. Even they use the knowledge of how to do it judiciously, usually as fire-and-forget weapons in very limited numbers before moving on.

The Greater branch of the Otterley clan are able to remake corpses into animated servants using their uncorrupted river necromancy, but this appears to be an entirely different, if related process over which they have a comparatively tight control. Creation of the Otterley's "ones" is only available to those who have the uncorrupted river necromancy, and therefore, as far as we know, only to the Greater Otterleys themselves.

The Beast Fears Fire - The Walking Dead, Volume 2

The Plague [Ignorance 2]
Impulse - To Bring Forth Panicked Inhumanity

Researchers who look into the history and nature of the walking dead are going to find that most of their information comes from the Quercan (Orange Murren) people who dominate the eastern part of that country (and are the Murrens who are the ancestors of Murrenic Cricks, most of the actual Murrens you will meet in Crickton or bordering parts of Murren, etc.). They used to be a seafaring people like the Cricks, but largely fled inland when the old Oak Province finally collapsed from infighting among the oligarchs and the war with Pine Province. To this day, Crickish Sea Folk tend to dominate east and southeast coastlines of the continent, and very few Quercans ever put to sea.

Tellingly, the Quercans also provide most of the extant literature on the Other.

Quercan history relates that, at the dawn of the Provincial system, their former deities sold them as a people to gods who lived in the sea, whether out of celestial poverty, venality or disgust over the Quercans' inability to hold their land against the empire, nobody remembers. What Quercans believe happened after that was that the sea gods kept their peoples' souls sequestered in the afterworld created by water, preventing them from being reborn and using their energy for their own purposes. No one knows what those purposes were, but the consensus is that the sea gods either got what they wanted or what was coming to them. (Except that sometimes, they come back for Quercan spirits, particularly those of naughty children with exhausted parents...) Quercans believe that the motivating force of the walking dead comes from what is or was left of those spirits. This is a notion that benefits most from lack of competing hypotheses, but there might be something to it.

I bring this up now because there is some sort of guiding principle behind the walking dead, and one of the things that seems to recur with each instance is the notion that whatever this principle is, it tends to conform to expectations and beliefs about it. It can also lead people who are under attack by the walking dead to formulate notions about the instance or the walking dead in general. A lot of what is considered accepted wisdom about the walking dead appears to be manufactured by the animating principle behind them, and seemingly for the purpose of making the victims of an incursion their own worst enemies.

The most common misconception about the walking dead is that being wounded by the dead condemns you to sicken, die and rise up as one of them. This is not true, but try convincing people that, especially when you are the one who has been wounded (it's not easy). What does happen is that some of the crystal gets in the mouth of the dead and gets embedded in your skin. About half an hour later, you're likely to find painful little crystalline growths around the injury, and if you're very young, old or delicate, you might get a low grade fever. If you die at any point while these crystals are growing (it's usually 8 hours before they stop), you probably will rise as one of the walkers, though that's hardly certain. But infection with the crystalline growth is usually enough to convince someone to put a wounded person out of their misery or eject them from sanctuary. This is by no means the only common wisdom that the animating force will promulgate, but it is the most well-known.

One Bite and You're Hooked
When you or someone else in a Scene with the walking dead makes a declarative statement about them, face Ignorance
On a Hit, nothing happens. The dead retain their usual behavior.
On a Hard Hit, you can make a declarative statement about the limitations of the dead (Can't Climb, Allergic to Salt, etc.) which is true for this instance of the walking dead.
On a Miss, the Moderator gets a Hard Move which they can take at any time, based on either mistakes made by other characters in the Scene or new capabilities (Can Climb, Can Open Doors, Fast Dead). That said, they still cannot cause people to die and rise as walkers themselves with just a bite.

Outran the Walking Dude

For the time being. Just one day of feeling symptomatic and two days for feeling kind of low. Looks like I will be marching off to Boulder after all...

The Beast Fears Fire - The Walking Dead, Volume 1

The Swarm [Disaster 2]
Impulse - To Make You Look Stupid

Those who have never had to escape from a swarm of the walking dead assume that those who could not were foolish or weak or, if the observer is an asshole, had it coming.  Intuitively, it does not seem like it should be that much of a trick to evade animate corpses.  They can occasionally lurch forward with some speed (more often, faster and for longer distance as the crystals that power them decay), but generally shuffle at a slower pace than that of an able-bodied person.  They have fairly weak senses and their instinctive reaction is to move toward anything they do sense, whatever it is.  You can't really call them stupid, since they would have to actually have some capability of thought in order to be characterized as deficient.  And yet.

The problem is that people don't understand how a swarm works.  It's actually pretty complicated, and I'm not going to try to explain swarming dynamics here, just that if someone drops a jar of angry wasps in a room, it's slightly harder to get out of that room without being stung than it is to evade a swarm of walkers.  They do seem to share senses as a group (individuals from different instances of animation seem to be able to link up without a problem, and if there are multiple animators, the line of authority gets muddy, so it's best, if you're planning on raising up some corpses, to be the only one doing it) and so what one notices, all notice.  What they notice, they approach, inexorably.

In game mechanics, The Swarm is a standard Gang-Up (or Force-Up, because if you're using the walking dead, you are buying in bulk), with the option that anyone who mentioned thinking that the dead would be easy to evade gets the Peril Panicked or Terrified as they find out how wrong they were.


The Terror [Hardship 2]
Impulse - To Make You Afraid

At first, this is not so bad. You should be afraid of the walking dead when they are walking, but this is a reasonable fear, something with which a person who is reading this is probably well acquainted and can overcome. Once individual walking dead run down their batteries, so to speak, things get a little trickier.

After a certain stage in the life-cycle of the dead, as the power in the implanted crystals starts to wane, certain changes become apparent in the individual corpses. Decomposition, previously arrested by the process begins to accelerate. This spreads quickly throughout the local walking dead, so that once one begins to decay, all the others do as well, regardless of whether or not they were made later or with greater amounts of crystal.

Around this time, the corpses also begin to evidence visible, if diffuse auras of purple-brown and rusty red light. This aura gets larger and more distinct as more individuals get closer together, and is the psychic component to a combined physical and mental fear assault. Mechanically, this is similar to Frighteners' Smelt it/Dealt it move, but Panicked, Terrified, Weakened or Slowed are the only Perils possible from missing.

The Beast Fears Fire - The Walking Dead

From a cold, objective standpoint, the walking dead are a case of you getting less than you paid for.  They aren't terribly effective at what they do; they are slow, dead stupid, and while they are durable, they aren't that durable.  The process for creating them is only matched in the number of unpleasant ways it can go wrong with the number and unpleasantness of the ways in which it can go right.  It also requires a pretty serious supply of spiritually active crystal (miasmite and pigeon's blood seem to work the best), and once the supply gets low, the dead get a lot less reliable in all sorts of evil-plan-ruins-itself sorts of ways.  Still, they are murderous slaves who feel no pain that you can get in quantities with little comparative effort on your part (the effort comes in with keeping them) and no magical aptitude.  The process for raising the dead is tightly controlled by most societies (there's rumors that some country in the far west never got the memo that raising the dead is a taboo on the level of sibling-fucking and cannibalism... There are rumors they never got those memos, either; then again, the Dahanish and Rierdans thought the Cricks never got those memos, so who knows.) and punishments for employing the methods start at baroque and get more unpleasant and involved from there.

So the dead themselves.  They are what you would expect.  Savels and Murrens sometimes call them zombies, but Cricks know better - Zombies are something the Sea Folk remember - chemically and magically enslaved living people, spirits captured, wills enslaved by poisons and drugs.  The methods for making zombis are harder to find, even in Crickton, idiosyncratic to the evil witches and island-barghests that create them, and you can be certain that even the rumor of the methods and materials being available anywhere in Crickton is going to meet with immediate response (you can get the stuff at the back of any goblin market or in the city of the Blackthorns, if you're nasty).  Anyway, corpses animated by an activation of the crystals stuffed in their mouths.  That's pretty much it.  Destroying or removing the head is likely to dislodge the crystal, causing the corpse to return to its inert state, but massive trauma of any kind in sufficient quantities will also get them to stop.  Anyone with experience facing other monsters is likely to be steady enough to face the dead, but there is an aura of dread that surrounds them, which only gets stronger as they near the end of their service life.

The big problem with the dead from the point of view of the one who wants to raise them is that there is no particular means of controlling them.  They will not harm the on who raised them (usually; at least, not until their batteries start to run low), but beyond that, any means of directing them is something you have to work out on an ad hoc basis (and there are notes on how other people managed to herd them in one direction or another, but these don't always work even as well as the notes claimed they did.  There are also deliberately sabotaged notes full of things that it would be a VERY BAD IDEA to try, all of these are available at the local goblin market...).  Left to their own devices, the dead are drawn to the living, in a violent and unpleasant sort of way, so they work just fine as a terror weapon (especially to people who know the deceased), but let's face it; Ash trokkar are better in every way than the walking dead, including less awful environmental impact. Yeah.

A couple of other bits of curiosity; people who have seen and heard the formula often claim it's written in Abyssal, but a lot of scholars dispute that, saying it's just some magic words in some language (like Ash, for instance) foreign to Crickton.  Also, if you want to really annoy ghouls, this is a great way to do it.  Raising the dead draws ghouls from all over the place and drives them a little crazy.  In fact, it's not always a bad plan to count on the ghouls that chase the dead to do most of the damage you intended.  You know, except for the part where the ghouls want to damage you.  Eating the crystal-laced flesh of the risen dead kind of affects ghouls like vodka - a really angry, belligerent drunk comes over them, and very few ghouls can resist eating the walking dead.

Or the people who raise them.

Baby, Can You Dig Your Man, Part 2

I didn't realize just how righteous a man he was until I tried cleaning the house.  The half-assed version of my usual half-assery feels like it was epic.

Baby, Can You Dig Your Man

(He's a Righteous Man)

darkpaisley is dancing with Captain Trips, and now he's giving me serious side-eye.  I suspect next week is already fired.