#nacricontent

We wrote something! That calls for a celebration. Like answering a tag game. @forthesanityofstorytellers tagged me and look it's even been less than six months since we were graced with seven lines of my favourite wasteland no-longer-humans yukking it up.

i will no-pressure tag @ambiguouspuzuma, @tabswrites and @edwardskhakipants

My lines are from the most recent time Elise dies in my manuscript. Don't worry, it's only chapter 3 she'll get better about it.

At first glance it seems obvious: this is a change, and they don't change. They don't grow they don't age. But they do grow, because they can heal wounds, and they can produce sperm, so there's some exceptions. What makes the changes associated with ageing different than the ones associated with just continuing to live, and why is hair growth considered part of the first category.

The answer is death. Much of visible ageing is caused by the natural cell cycle of cells reproducing, and dying. Notably, they usually kill themselves, in a preprogrammed cell death once they've divided enough times, because it reduces the risk of cancer. This is also how you get hair. Your hair is cells that have killed themselves. This cycle is clearly turned off in vampires; none of their cells will die. They only reproduce when there is a overriding system, like wound healing or reproduction that would need it, and even then, never any system that would call for cell death, because they cannot die, only be killed.

I did this little wheel-based poll activity, and the name it generated for me was Thief of Kings. As a YA novel. I think I might want to write it now??? Though it wouldn’t end up YA I don’t think??

[FMC] is a faerie. She is part of the Court of Rot, a group of fae who have sideways allegiance to the Unseelie Court of Autumn. They are however, considered Seelie fae, and answer to Titania last. Human concerns should be far below her.

Of course, there is one human concern. She was never placed as a changeling. That was the one part of interacting with humans that always did seem trite. The fun part was the drama. The power struggles and corruption. The rot that wound its way through gilt castles and private forests.

If she must steal a human to be raised in the Court, let it be one of them whose life she steals. See how the humans fare if she can trick them long enough to be crowned their King.

The notion of being a changeling as a coming-of-age ritual, fun stuff about what faux pas can and can’t be overlooked by people of lower social station, heirs as property of the state rather than real children, biting off more than you can chew…

I was tagged by @forthesanityofstorytellers here, thank you very much! I have been watching the tag bounce around my dash with a certain amount of dread because I have no clue how to answer it. A good chunk of my OCs are immortal, so does never dying just count as winning? Do I have to count every Elise/wielder pair separately? Or should I have her on her own? Also their competence changes dramatically over the course of the series, when do I put what? How much magic do I allow?

The rules are to make a tierlist using this generator discussing how likely your OCs are to win in a fight. Category names are subject to change to fit your setting.

In answer to these questions I will thus include only the main 4, and their permutations. So I'll treat Elise with and without magic at different points of the story as different characters. Immortal characters can still lose if rendered incapable of fighting back or banished to an afterlife, even if they could survive it and come back.

Red mentions that the version of the trope where the weapon is actually a villain that was sealed away and has now been released is more boring than the more technological options, because you just have to defeat the villain. That if the villain had to be sealed away and nothing else would have worked, then there's no chance of reasoning with them or anything.

This proves that deep down people don't really think of carceral justice as being reformative in any way. Of course if you lose your freedom for doing a thing and then you get out you're not going to stop doing the thing you might just be additionally angry at whoever removed your freedom.

You might say this is a poor comparison, because of the social compact. That because the justice system has assumed authority and that people in the society buy into the rest of the society thus inherently acquiescing to the system, they would be more likely to treat their punishment in the way it was meant to be received, as a warning not to do the thing again.

This could just as easily apply to the ancient villain. Who's to say their being sealed wasn't an act of justice. Often times their opposition are kings, even kings they had previously sworn loyalty to. Or their sealing is divinely facilitated, if the threat is beyond the scope of mortal men, and what greater social compact is there than the one with a provably exitant God?

You might alternatively say the comparison fails because the sealing wasn't meant to be a punishment, it was meant to be preventing the villain from doing harm. This would be somewhat hard to distinguish from the perspective of the villain, especially if the punishment is framed as "we're only dealing them away because they can't be killed", so really, seems like it could just as easily be a punishment as anything else.

So both sealing a villainous superweapon until the prison breaks and carceral justice end up serving the same purpose, and yet we never expect villains to reform inside. They must simply be stopped again.

Oddly, the one counterexample I can think of to this is Lucifer. There are versions of the Devil that have taken their time in Hell as an opportunity to reflect, and actually don't feel strongly that they need to take revenge on humanity anymore, and will no longer repeat the behavior that got them punished in the first place. Admittedly, these versions of Lucifer are often more sympathetic to begin with, but regardless. I think it's a very interesting concept.

"Oh great Master Dracula, on this last full moon of the year we have sacrificed the thousandth virgin for the sake of your return that you may rule in dominion over this miserable human race"

Dracula, who's really had a lot of time to reflect on his actions and their consequences in the thousand or so years he's been dead:

> Carlisle is still a doctor, but in this case he specializes in plastic surgery.

> Edward comes from a racing family; both he and his brother Peter started racing young.

> Their parents both died of an H1N1 infection (fun fact this is actually a resurgence of the Spanish flu) because of their HIV positive status making them more vulnerable to infection.

> Carlisle had always been interested in racing, and so had met them through charity events organized by Mrs. Mason.

> Upon her death, Mrs. Mason asked that both her sons be adopted by Dr. Cullen, but he was only able to adopt Edward using the argument that he had inherited a genetic predisposition for AIDS from his father.

> Peter instead got sent to their aunt Maria, who was already a foster parent in Mississippi.

> Esme, in a fit of truly unhinged support for her new son, decided to indulge his desire to vent his emotions by joining a local street racing scene. She was, however, concerned about the relative safety of the practice, and pressured Carlisle to start his own scene in a smaller town to allow for a racing outlet with less influence from other illegal activity.

> After a few years in Chicago, Carlisle has successfully built up a scene in a tiny town in Washington, in a place where the two-officer police department for the region can’t do much to stop it.

> Before they move, Carlisle adopts Rosalie, a foster child who had been sneaking out to hone her skills working on the cars. He hopes to set her up with Edward, working on his car, but she ends up preferring to race her own cars, so Edward is still without a personal mechanic.

> The champions of the scene in Forks are called Vampires, because the prize is free plastic surgery from Carlisle, making winners appear ageless.

> Edward had always somewhat disliked racing, only leaning into it in his teens as a form of depressed rebellion. By the time he’s living in Forks he resents his Vampire status, resents that he seems somehow faster than the previous Vampires, resents that he feels he cannot just give it up without disappointing Esme.

> Down in Mississippi, Peter has also ended up street racing. It turns out Maria has been abusing her position in the foster care system to bring in new drivers, make money off the thriving betting scene while they’re still unknowns, then discarding them as they get too old, in collaboration with Jasper, who came back from Iraq with a silver tongue that got him out of many a field mission and gets the kids into racing.

> Little does Maria know, but Jasper has started dating Alice, the bookie who runs the betting on the races. She’s got him convincing Peter to throw races Maria had bet he would win, and so their business relationship is broken and Alice is run out of town.

> Peter tells Jasper about the new scene up in Forks, which he is aware of because he’s been following Edward’s socials, even though Edward fully burned that bridge in the immediate aftermath of their separation.

> After Jasper starts racing, and Alice starts taking bets on the outcomes, the races get more intense, and more and more local teens start to go out to watch and bet and even race.

> Of note are Bella, who was dragged out by Mike Newton, who thinks he is her boyfriend but is not, and Emmett, who took a fancy to Rosalie and has been following the races ever since she arrived.

> Bella takes an interest in Edward, but after she clears up Mike’s misunderstanding, has no way of knowing where the next race is to take place. She ends up enlisting her childhood friend Jacob Black, who has an interest in fixing up cars and so has been doing repairs for any kids on the res who want to race but can’t get a mechanic to help them out cause illegal.

> Jacob tells her about how the racing scene actually predates Carlisle by decades, and that the winners used to be called wolves. However, Carlisle wrested control of much of the scene from the locals who’d been running it by offering better prizes, and so the locals, Quileute and settler alike generally resented the Cullens.

> Emmett and Bella end up feeling the brunt of this, as their new friends grow distant as their relationships to the two Cullen children get more obvious. Edward is angsty about this.

> One particularly close race sees Jasper force Rosalie off the road, hitting Emmett. While she could have continued driving, her car being undamaged, she instead stopped to rush Emmett to the hospital in Seattle, a choice which saved his life according to the doctors there.

> Edward’s goes full New Moon over this, asking Carlisle to shut down the races and fully ghosting Bella.

> This simply causes the preexisting racing scene to resurrect itself on the res, with the Cullens as persona non grata. Jacob helps Bella get started racing (motorcycle races).

> A girl named Victoria from Chicago comes to the area, intent on getting revenge on Edward, who ruined her boyfriend James’ perfect racing record back when he was at his most depressed, coming off of his parents’ deaths.

> She brings in a bunch of new racers and in the significantly more crowded race Bella is wounded, which Edward feels responsible for and so confronts Victoria to an even more unsanctioned race, which he of course wins, even though he hadn’t raced in months because Rosalie was willing to work on his car, in large part for Bella’s sake, because Bella is worried sick about Edward, when Rosalie told Alice told Bella what he was planning to do.

> Finally, in a twist ending, Peter and Maria get into a huge fight, culminating in a high speed chase that kills both of them, leaving Peter’s secret daughter Renesmee, the reason he hadn’t left Maria, to his only living relative, Edward.