Differences
This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.
Both sides previous revision Previous revision Next revision | Previous revision Next revisionBoth sides next revision | ||
parn:dilzio [2013-04-23 13:50] – nik | parn:dilzio [2013-04-23 13:54] – nik | ||
---|---|---|---|
Line 374: | Line 374: | ||
--caslab | --caslab | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====I don't understand humans==== | ||
+ | |||
+ | Wed Sep 26, 2012 3:07 pm | ||
+ | |||
+ | A general rule of thumb is that human beings dislike being mistaken for vegetables. I made this mistake quite often during the carnival when introducing people for the first time. A gentleman who struck me as the spitting image of a carrot objected vehemently when introduced as such to a young lady who resembled nothing so much as a wilted lettuce. | ||
+ | |||
+ | --mango | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====Arrival of the trees==== | ||
+ | |||
+ | Wed Sep 26, 2012 2:56 pm | ||
+ | |||
+ | (Beaver Moon, Week of Merry Rollercoaster Rides cira Motionless Daisy Hula-Hop Paraphernalia Exploraton) | ||
+ | |||
+ | Somehow during the night our laboratory was transformed into a jungle. The light changed; the walls dissolved; or rather, we can now walk right through them and into other locations. Maybe the plants seeped down through the skylights while we slept; perhaps the machine elves were at work. Our room is now filled with a mesmerising susurrus, and we carry out our research like somnambulists. Celsa Rizofor has discovered a new soma - I am tasting it now, and it is really good. | ||
+ | |||
+ | When the assistants water the plants, the room floods. Many of our notes are washed out onto the streets and into the canals that surround the abandoned candy store, to be discovered who knows where. To escape the deluge we move upstairs and sleep on ancient grass that was fossilised in plastic - it still retains its green pigment after all the passing of the eons. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ---druko | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====Shopping arcades; sleep experiments==== | ||
+ | |||
+ | Tue Sep 25, 2012 5:14 pm | ||
+ | |||
+ | Castuus made a rare appearance in the Snoepwinkel yesterday and was much more talkative than usual (in fact he never really talks at all). Evidently something was troubling him, for it’s usually impossible to find him anywhere else than in the greenhouses; | ||
+ | |||
+ | I overheard him in conversation with one of the research assistants - she’s the only one who’s ever been able to exchange more than a few words with him - but today he was positively animated. It turns out that, while sitting in the deepest recesses of the greenhouse, he began to hear a mysterious singing. Some ferns, normally so silent, had begun a plaintive melody. Somehow this roused him from his meditations, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Looking around him, he began to feel a jarring, restless melancholy about the people he saw everywhere. He felt they seemed to be so fearful of stepping out of the busy world of shopping arcades, cars, self-importance, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Then he thought he should try to understand their point of view. He tried to absorb himself in spiritual contemplation of fashion shops and perfume advertisements. He quickly became intoxicated, | ||
+ | |||
+ | He went to sleep on the mezzanine with both pillows upon the fossilised plastic grass. The queasy restlessness of the day disturbed his sleep, and as he twisted and turned he moved his head from one pillow to the other. Then he noticed that his dreams changed depending on the grain. A different quality of Viriditas seemed to fill his sleep depending on the different seeds under his head. Late that night he asked Hazel, Ivy and Frazer to try an experiment, sleeping on the different pillows to see what their reaction was, inscribing the results on the wall next to his makeshift bed. All of them experienced a similar phenomenon - distinct dream states depending on the pillow. He convinced us that he needed to stay on and sleep all day to discover other ways to reach people in their dreams (when they are closer to their vegetal minds). We reluctantly agreed to this, though we left him and went on a field trip over several days using Zizim. | ||
+ | |||
+ | --alchumilla | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====Moondrop Potion==== | ||
+ | |||
+ | Tue Sep 25, 2012 5:13 pm | ||
+ | |||
+ | (Blue Moon, Elliptical Patabotanical Time 39488:102, Era of Vampire Princess Mildred' | ||
+ | |||
+ | I distill my potion beside forest pools in the first light of dawn, under the slowly sinking silvery moon of late summer. In these forests I collect wild verbena and lady’s mantle, which grow in the hidden dells and culverts where falling droplets of moonlight congeal. These droplets of alchemical moon water can be preserved using a delicate crystalline apparatus. At a moment just after the false dawn, when the coolest, palest colour of the day filters through the leaves of the forest, I infuse these droplets with scents that are condensations of dreams and memories, and mingle them with the volatile essences of verbena; then my potion is almost complete. I prepare another vial of concentrated morning dew, condensed from the twilight mists of the forest just before dawn. Served in the right way, I hope that these substances can imbue the thoughts of those who take them with inner landscapes. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Two drops of the potion are dripped onto an Alchemilla leaf held in the cupped hand of the drinker. (These leaves must be folded into the protective pages of a book made from ancient parchment, to preserve their sustaining properties.) At the same time as the potion is drunk, the elixir of concentrated morning dew must be sprayed in a fine mist above the drinker’s head. Those who partake of these substances will catch a fleeting but piquant vision - an awakening landscape of Viriditas. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Amidst the hurly-burly of the picnic carnival in the Citadelpark, | ||
+ | |||
+ | The landscape is a picture filled with leaves, where forest rain falls in the first chill of autumn; a misty time of day with traces of humidity; damp, fresh, growing, and wet on the face. There are pools of moonlit water into which you plummet, pulled upwards and downwards at once and sucked ever deeper into a place where you can just be, behind the whirlwinds and finally at peace with the daemons. Creatures faint in a lemony scent, and sometimes the taste of peppermint accompanies problems with technical parts and nearly-destroyed nature. Somewhere else you catch glimpses of a silvery metal in straight, angular, and machinic shapes, amidst waving grass and endless fields of fairy floss, suffused in a sweet, pinkish colour and tasting of honey. Further away, perhaps, you come to the shore of a place that may be Italy, where intensely comfortable boats float in the warm twilight. Further still, and you reach a lush, nearly deserted island where ritual initiations are taking place; you want to swim in the warm waters. In the early morning you waken to the blue, orange, violet and purple pastels of another dawn, in the mild warmth of crisp, sweet sea air, smelling slightly of fish. Or maybe this landscape is nowhere else but your parent’s garden in summertime, a bright place where time no longer matters. | ||
+ | |||
+ | But then you’re abruptly shaken from your reverie by a feline creature covered in golden hair riding by on a bicycle with a million spokes, her hair growing longer with a lingering aftertaste and innumerable small creatures emerging from all surfaces. | ||
+ | |||
+ | --alchumilla | ||
+ | |||
+ | ====First day setting up in the abandoned candy store==== | ||
+ | |||
+ | Tue Sep 25, 2012 5:12 pm | ||
+ | |||
+ | (Sturgeon Moon, Parallel Holiday of Incandescent Flowers, 293856 RPT) | ||
+ | |||
+ | We have finally started setting up in the abandoned candy store. Our new laboratory is located in a big room at the end of a long, narrow corridor. Cloudy light filters down through large skylights high above, suffusing everything in eery muted whiteness. The strangest thing about this room is that there are no plants in here yet. They will arrive tomorrow; today we have to set up the furniture and struggle to make sense the first pieces of botanical translation machinery our assistants have found for us: scouring as they have the peculiar shops and fleamarkets of a nearby city for useful equipment. | ||
+ | |||
+ | http:// | ||
+ | http:// | ||
+ | |||
+ | Our assistants are difficult to comprehend and often exasperating, | ||
+ | |||
+ | Herbert Taraxi has faced many challenges in trying to devise interfaces between the stagnant technologies of this world and the sentient alchemy he is most familiar with. He continues to complain that the voices of plants are almost impossible to detect using available microphones. And so he spent the afternoon curled up, brooding behind the sofa, impossible to rouse. | ||
+ | |||
+ | --alchumilla | ||
+ |