Vesperlf - Vesper

SPIRIT OF FLAME, HEAR ME

Staggered in under the black stone, sick from the teleport. He’d barely made it. Could feel how close it had been, as the power ebbed. He fell to his knees, succumbing to the shivering exhaustion that spread through his core and into his limbs. 

Once, he had been strong. He remembered how the villagers of Ta-Koro had first looked at him from behind their thin spears: fear and hope mixed. They were frail, weakened by the darkness, but still they had raised open hands toward him.

“Mata Nui has answered,” they’d said in hushed tones. Then, beseeching: “O Spirit of Flame, hear us!”

The Armor had abandoned him. Angonce had warned...“Contingency against contingency” or something equally as cryptic. Not only that: The Armor had taken its power with it, emptied him of all the strange abilities it had granted. Teleportation was all he’d been able to manage. One last escape, and no more.

All that was left now was his own elemental power, but even that.... The Hunter’s black ceramic lances throbbed where they protruded from his back, draining his energies. Dark and smooth and alien. He couldn’t get them out. He’d have to try again....

Jaw clenched, he crawled forward a pace, felt cool air on his brow, and remembered that he was maskless. That’d have to be first. He reached out with his mind. It was hard, much too hard...but then he felt his old Hau respond. It came to him from however far away and covered his face with its familiar shape, filled him with its familiar energy.

Better. He breathed and pushed back against the pain in his body. Now he raised a hand in front of his face. Focused again. It was still hard, but not like before. Come on!

Radiance. A small tongue of fire sprang to life above his palm. It grew. Yes, it was alive. He was alive. For now.

“Listen to me!” he’d yelled, trying to make himself heard as the Hunter smashed blunt arms against his shield. He’d used the Armor to exert telekinetic control then, arresting his foe’s upper limbs. The great eye fixed on him with an expression of...Amusement? Insult?

“Your creators don’t want this!” he’d gasped, breathless from his wounds. “And neither do mine. We must stop. They don’t want this destruction.”

The Hunter had no real mouth, but words came from somewhere, a metallic clamor issuing from the gaps in its carapace.

“THEY DO.”

He’d felt it then. An unlatching, a withdrawal. The air shimmered as his telekinesis failed. The Armor twisted him, wrenched itself from his body and limbs and face, and flung him away. Teleportation saved him from the impact, but not much else, and then...

The tiny flame danced before his eyes. Alive.

They have answered you. They have shown you what they want.

Pain swelled in his body, and his hand began to shake. His arm sagged, and his breath came in gasps. He was weak, weakened by the darkness, and there was no one here to help.

He struggled to raise his hand a little higher, felt the warmth on his mask.

“Spirit of Flame...hear me,” he whispered.

Then he collapsed forward, and was still.

The flame wavered in the air. Trembled.

But it did not go out.

you ever feel like you were born with something rotten inside you and if people get close enough they’re gonna find out

Bionicle Anomalocaris V.2

day 6 / ???

THE MADNESS OF TURAGA

“Where are your Matoran, Bahtu? I’ve seen no one on the hike up here.”

The Turaga fiddled idly with his stick. His eyes wandered around the empty village.

“They are…they are gone, old friend.”

“Gone?”

“Yes.”

“Gone where? And why? What happened?”

“They were…broken.”

“Explain! Who did this?”

“Now calm yourself, my friend. My nerves are not what they used to be.”

The Toa stepped forward, lowering his voice.

“Tell me what happened, Bahtu. Was it Zygl–”

The Turaga began to speak gravely:

“It started with small things, you see. Day by day. Small changes. Small…deviations. A lost minute here or there. A construction made slightly different from the Standard. A repair completed with…I don’t have the word…”  The Turaga gestured limply, “…a ‘flourish’, maybe, as the Great Beings might have said. Maybe that.”

“I don’t underst–”

“–All still workable, to be sure,” the Turaga continued unbothered. “Still workable, but…but deviant, you see. Not according to the Great Standard. The Saa Nui is very demanding if us, as you know. And to stray would be disastrous.”

“So you say. And what then?”

“Oh, what then…let me see. Well, then came other strange things. The Matoran would…would talk to each other. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Not simply transmitting information, I mean, but…but talking for its own sake. I would catch them sometimes, coming around a corner, speaking about something or other that was clearly beyond the scope of that moment’s Duty. And though I corrected them, still they persisted. Even worse: they whispered instead. So many whispers. The village was full of whispering, day and night. I could not stop them all.”

“Go on.”

“Oh yes, yes, and then there were questions.”

“Questions are not out of the ordinary.”

“Of course not, no…but these questions were different. They began to ask all manner of things, inane things, like ‘Why do the sky-stars burn out at night?’ or ‘Where does the Great Spirit live?’ Once, one even asked me ‘Why should we work to fulfill our Duty?’”

The Turaga shook his head, “I was aghast, as you may imagine. I did not know what to say! I sent that Matoran away to work on the mountainside, away from the others, for a time, lest they…lest they ‘talk’ about it.”

“I still do not see what–”

“–And that’s not even the worst of it! Oh, my friend, one day…One day, they asked me for names. New names. Can you imagine it? Each and every one of them I named when they were brought forth from the eles raliska–gave them the embodiment of their Duty, their place in our world, and they thought they knew better! I could not bear it then. So…I sent them…away.”

“Where? To work on the mountainside?” The Toa looked up, scanning the hills in the distance, “Where did you send them?”

“No…to be mended.”

A light breeze made the thorn-trees rattle on the edge of the village. The shadows of the crumbling huts crept longer. The Turaga stopped fidgeting.

“You sent them to–”

“–To Him, yes! It was the only thing to be done.”

The Turaga began to gesture agitatedly, his words pouring out faster: “I put forth the summons, you see, and the Great Crabs came up from the sea, and–”

The Toa stepped closer, cutting him off:

“You know that few have ever returned from His Land. You know this.”

“Oh…I know. But it was right. They were too far gone. It would have been a disaster if I hadn’t. And if they do not return, then…well, more can be called up, if Mata wills it, and I will give them their names, and…”

“How long ago.”

“I…oh…perhaps some days–”

“–all of them?–”

“–…or years?” the Turaga mused. “My timing is all off now, you see, without the rhythm of their work. But it will soon be put right. Soon. Do not worry.”

“Years…” The Toa shook his head, “So you have been here alone, all this time. Doing nothing.”

“Waiting! Preparing! It will all be put right soon. Soon! You’ll see.”

“I cannot see that. The village is…”

The Toa looked around at the ruins of the village once more, lapsing into silence.

“They were broken, old friend. I could not let them suffer in that way. It was not right.”

“Did they fail in their work?”

“They deviated. It was necessary.”

A long silence followed.

“I see now,” the Toa said at last, in a quiet voice.

“Ah, that is good. You are a Toa, after all! Of all beings, you would understand. It had to be done, to keep the order of the world. It is what we are made for, you and I.”

Lesovikk’s hands closed slowly, slowly into fists, clenching until the armor of his gauntlets creaked. His gaze narrowed to a point, fixed upon the small, pathetic being before him. The wind died.

“I am not a Toa anymore.”

frankly outside the moral reasons to be pro-shoplifting I'd rather folks just take something instead of attempting to haggle me to pay less on technicalities

I don't have the patience to explain why you can't add an expired coupon to a discount promotion that hasn't started yet please just steal them it'll be easier for both of us

the problem i have with the whole "humans and nature as opposed and mutually exclusive forces" style of environmentalism is that it discourages people from a sustainable, mutualistic relationship with the ecosystems around them, because getting resources from an ecosystem is Bad. Therefore it requires you to think that parts of Earth that provide resources are not ecosystems.

this is where you get unbelievably stupid crap like the "half earth" project that proposes "protecting" half of Earth's land mass as nature preserves, never mind how we choose what half or what happens to the other half.

this type of environmentalism literally encourages people to think of their own presence as excluding or cancelling out "Nature."

And so people think of their lawns as Not Ecosystems, as Not Nature, so they cannot think "How do i live in right relationship with my ecosystem, as its caretaker?" This is death to ecological thinking.

The lawn was consciously created by intention and design, with heavy machinery that was manufactured, sold, and operated, it is not spontaneously created by fumes that the human body gives off.

You act upon the land, now time to learn what you are doing, and who you are doing it to.

Messing around with the AI, behold my abomination

Dezeen

RISD researchers create floating mycelium pods to cleanse waterways

A team of RISD students and researchers have created floating planting beds made of a mycelium to cleanse waterways of pollutants

A team of Rhode Island School of Design students and researchers have created tesselated, floating planting beds made of a mycelium biomaterial to cleanse waterways of pollutants and restore wetland habitat.

The floating Biopods act to introduce native plants back to degraded wetland systems while cleansing the water through bioremediation, or the re-introduction of microorganisms that naturally decontaminate their environment.

"Because of the urbanization of the Providence River itself, a lot of the wetland that acts to actively remediate pollution had been removed. So the project is really about reintroducing this new biology to kick start these ecosystems again so that the river might repair itself."

"It's interesting, the relationships that we have to biomaterials and the way that we are connected to systems that have the potential to remediate in a way that isn't electricity intensive or chemically intensive," said Banerjee.