User:TeuthidaRegina/sandbox

Birth
She doesn't remember much of it.

Death
She hasn't gotten around to that yet.

What's in-between?
Now we're getting somewhere.

She's spent most of the time she remembers in Maryland. Southern Maryland, and it's a place that'll remind you every time it could just put "Maryland" on a pamphlet or email or letter. It was technically in the Union, but it's still the kind of place where you'll see Confederate flags stuck on every pickup truck outside the high school. She had a friend in elementary and middle school, because the teachers were worried about her eating alone at lunch. One time in that brand-new elementary school with the green roof and the water-saving systems she walked out of the bathroom to find two girls whispering, and they stopped and stared when they saw her. She's had social anxiety since. She found out she was autistic only when she was driven a few hours into a city for a study; but they had her dance, and played a game with mirrors, and made her lie in a machine while she watched a movie, and had her fill out endless sheets of paper with neat rows of multiple choice answers. She's built everything around papers like that.

She went from the shiny-new elementary school to the middle school next to the Chipotle to the high school surrounded by farms, for the art kids and the finance kids and the kids who just happen to live out there. She got herself into the finance program- she wanted to learn to pay taxes, and they never taught her anyways- and ignored it whenever possible. The school's mascot is the Brave. Banners deck the halls of smiling white teenagers in war bonnets that dwarf their own heads. They held a committee the year before she was born, and decided conclusively that they were not racist. Once, four seniors broke in at 3 a.m. and released 72,000 ladybugs into the school. Once, a teacher was murdered here.

She filled out more papers. The bubbles bent to her will. It was easy, to choke down and cough up information. She never took notes. Why bother? Most of the time, she needed nothing more than her memory. Most of the rest, it was process of elimination or the careful application of logic to fill in the gaps of what her mind wandered from. Anything that didn't immediately yield to them, they were willing to toss aside. Guess and move on. If she didn't know it now, she wouldn't know it later, and she had better things to do with her time than struggle with something they didn't understand. It's a process that got them five years tuition and four years housing with next to no effort. For bubbles they're brilliant.

For bubbles they're brilliant. Bubbles don't mean anything. You can't make anything out of them. But she does her best to make something anyways.

Hey, what's with the squids?
Oh, she basically wrote a novel because of them.

A fucking novel?
Essentially. A couple thousand pages and counting, though made by two people. Moved from Tumblr to Discord in February of 2019, and it gets harder to keep track after that. 1355 pages on the old tumblr blog, maybe a dozen more on a blog that got hacked and deleted, and once you get to discord it's impossible to count. If you sort the chat by posts from her and posts from him, it adds up to 51,991 posts, but it's hard to measure how much of that is actual content. Toss in a couple bits of writing on the side in the same universe, some put up around a03, some not. Depends on context, mostly. "Three boyfriends pick strawberries and argue about it" gets published. "16 pages on the history of a single continent in a single world"  doesn't quite make the cut. The former's still at 1 hit last time I checked anyways. As does the one about a bounty hunter hallucinating as she burns to death in the apocalypse.

It's called squid prince. It doesn't have very much to do with squids anymore. Princes remain a shockingly consistent motif. It started with her just liking to see characters become monsters they hate and fear. Preferably literal monsters with teeth and claws and appropriately gruesome transformations, but anything will do if it's distressing enough to be. It's not a common enough trope, so she'll take matters into her own hands when she wants to see it. Send an anonymous message talking about a recent joke video, and watch it spiral out from a minor idea to a developing plot, watch it form a new blog, watch it distend and force itself from the skin of what birthed it into something new. It took a few years to shed the names of the oldest characters.

They only forced a character into the skin of something they didn't want to be once more, and that fucker deserved it. She can't send art, it's commissioned and not her own, but she'll send it with the screenshots. Sablekey on Flight Rising, they've got an art store up there if anybody's interested.

But enough about the project that's consumed five years. What about the things

Left behind
A thousand things. Half-stitched embroidery hoops and sketchbooks of malformed faces and chainmail rings with metal scales that are forgotten before they even arrive. Forgetting is as easy as giving up. It's easy to want, and hard to follow through when there's so much else. It's a suffocation that starts in the pit of the stomach and squeezes the lungs on the way up. A desperation. There's something in your head. You want it out. In writing or in pencil or in thread or metal, and even as the form slips and shifts in your mind your hands don't have the skill to pin it. You get a shadow. Held against what it should be, it's demoralizing, constantly short of what you mean to show.

It's no big deal. There are beautiful things already.

What's beautiful?
A leech's jaws. Nobody gets a leech's jaws right. It's always a ring filled with teeth.

The North American Medicinal Leech has three jaws shaped like buzzsaws, with 50-60 teeth on each jaw. When it bites, the jaws saw back and forth to make a Y-shaped incision. It hurts a lot less than bloodletting, and their saliva keeps the blood fluid during feeding and during the months of digestion. It makes her want to cry. For the sheer amount of media that flaunts leeches and their jaws for a touch of menace, you'd think more would have the decency to show them as they deserve. The leeches themselves are beautiful too. Macrobdella Decora is a gorgeous shade of green, with yellow spots and a bright orange underbelly. Perfect angels. She'd fucking die for them, holy shit.

She doesn't really think about leeches all that often.

Seriously, what's up with the squids
Squids are just nice. Can't you all appreciate a good squid?

Childhood
Could have sworn we've covered this already.

She went to Disney World a lot as a kid, just because it was close. Kept it up after leaving for a while, until her dad got sick of it. One of her favorite stuffed animals- aside from the dolphin that permanently altered her sleeping habits, making it impossible to be comfortable without holding something- was a fuzzy bat webkinz. You bet your ass this one is coming with a picture as well. Picture it a bit older and scruffier, with bent fangs. She brought it with her at least once, and there's a picture somewhere of it perched on top of a Mickey Mouse statute painted like a pumpkin.

She should have brought it with her.

Controversy
Oh god, does this part happen? They don't want to be controversial. They'll shut up just to get the conversation over with, and hold their tongue until it suffocates but things turn uncomfortable.

The reckoning
what

The fucking death and destruction
wait

THE MAW OF HELL
can we slow down please

Okay. So, what else?
Well, it's kind of against the whole point to say, isn't it? People have tried a lot of different ways. But saying just isn't something we can do. Not yet.

Come back later. For any given value of "later". The future means the same thing in any measure.