nona nona nona nona

It reads like she's an upset IT/repair specialist who got tired of driving 6 hours to look at servers that were not turned on, and she's going to make everyone suffer for daring to involve her in this mess. She ripped stuff out and casually put her hands into Judith's stomach, she was one bad moment away from trying to factory reset her with a hammer.

As Abigail said, the soul yearns for the body

Her connection to the sword is broken and the body of cytherea is broken too

What she has left?

Her own bones, preserved by the ninth

So the doctor sex situation, but the body is not buried and she has the insane willpower

So one skeleton on the ninth quietly goes rogue

And including the situation there, nobody can stop her

They are using fountain pens on spaceships. Fountain pens. To the extent that every vaguely intellectual character (other than Abigail Pent, who is repeatedly described as "neat" and "immaculate") is constantly described as having ink stains on their hands and even faces, and the smell of ink is referenced repeatedly.

And when they're not writing with fountain pens, they're using necromantically stabilised blood (this isn't just a Harrow quirk - the Sixth have special spikes on their clipboards for signing documents...).

Amongst the Lyctoral traces Abigail finds in the library at Cannan House are "a warped automatic pen with a thin inner cylinder of ink and a plex casing, rather more antiquated than one with an ink cartridge."

It also seems reasonable to assume that the "clockworks" they wear are analogue watches, as Nona scolds Cam for referring to her beeping digital watch as a "clockwork" on New Rho.

And besides the fountain pens, regency navy uniforms, swords, and general 20th century pulp literature culture, a few more things that characters specifically describe as antique or ancient include:

Sunglasses

Metal industrial shelving

Paper books with glossy pages

Black tie formal wear

Automatic doors

LED lights

Chrome kitchen fittings

Guns (to the extent that Abigail specifically says to the Sleeper "you come bearing ancient weapons")

And fine, these are all within the realms of things people are reasonably allowed to have a personal preference against...

But you know what else the Nine Houses don't have?

VACCINES.

What was the thought process by which Dr Science and Humanitarian Empathy decided to bring back routine childhood illnesses from the 1950s?

Speaking of the 1950s, why - in a society that appears to find permanently magically manipulating the bodies of living people trivial - does the standard of eyecare seem to also be from the early 20th century?

As a glasses wearer, I totally appreciate that there may simply be a social preference for glasses despite the existence of flesh magic. But Abigail Pent swapping between two pairs of glasses would seem to suggest that varifocals went the way of the mumps vaccine...

I would like to know, however, why — in the world where flesh magic is a real possibility — is anyone bothering with glasses in the first place? Why are we not simply employing one of the optical-specialist flesh mages to reshape the cornea and eyeball to achieve 20/20 vision again? Being that most refractive error is simply the result of the light not reaching your retina correctly, due to the length or curvature of your eyeball.

As to why they're not using flesh magic to fix vision, I fear that glasses are probably a signifier of a particular kind of scholarly necromantic frailty.

We do get repeated discussions about what does or doesn't qualify as a sin, or a "necromantic sin" specifically, but no firm conclusions about what those sins might actually be (making a beguiling corpse? Siphoning? Making eyes at your cav outside of the niche jurisdiction of Fifth House canon law? Engineering a necromancer out of 200 infants?).

Silas seems to suggest that there's some kind of practice of confession. But given that the Eighth regard the Ninth as heretical, I can't imagine they're sending people off to do penance on the Ninth when 10 King Undyings and a donation to the Cohort Orphans and Widows Fund just won't cut it. And what is penance understood to do, spiritually, in House religion anyway?

The other question is whether they're in penance for their own specific sins, or whether there's a more general sense that the orders of the Ninth House are doing penance simply to keep the Tomb shut.