Ace#18

Shadows Research, July 7 2019

Chicago District

Yesterday, @ace-no3524 and I did some testing on shadows with a few types of acid to see if there was an effect similar to that of lime/citrus. (for clarification, acetic acid is weak while hydrochloric acid is strong.)

Essentially, lime juice is still our best weapon, since it can be easily combined with desserts to boost aspec powers and is overall slightly more powerful than acetic acid. However, we now know that weak acids like acetic acid can also be used against shadows in sufficient quantities, and acetic acid in particular is useful because it may easily be acquired in the mortal realm if anyone is in need of defense.

While @ace-no3524 can probably provide a better explanation (so check out their report when it's available), I'm going to attempt to summarize the weak vs strong acids situation by saying that basically, stronger acids don't have stronger effects because there is a specific chemical characteristic that weak acids have and strong acids don't. This characteristic seems to be the key to destroying shadows. We can, however, experiment with weak acids other than the two we've so far tested.

We also concluded that applying a small amount of weak acid to a shadow weakens it enough for safe handling of the shadow.

Shadows Research, July 6 2019

Chicago District

Today @ace-no3524 and I conducted research on shadows' reactions to acids. We'll be sending in official reports tomorrow.

It seems to me that the greener agents don’t often have some of the pre-Decimation abilities, specifically the ability to see Glitches.

I see them all the time, sometimes in the form of colorless auras. Other times there are afterimages of things that linger in my field of vision long after I’ve looked away. It’s like what happens after someone takes a photo of you with the flash on.

I have a feeling the Shadows are involved; perhaps I have an innate means of detecting them. Is this what it means to see Glitches, or is there a threat even greater than the Shadows beginning to show itself?

The static is what has me most concerned; the best way I can describe it is that it looks like the static when filming with a low-res camera, but constant. It becomes worse in bright light or crushing darkness. I even see it in the Void, where it is so empty and vast that there is nowhere to put my own shadow. I don’t think of myself as anything special—I haven’t faced a Shadow head-on in years, and these Glitches have appeared to me nonstop for my entire life. Not to mention the fact that, during my time in hiding, I learned to dampen my signature enough that I don’t usually need a jammer. Maybe I let my guard down.

If there are other agents that can see the Static, the Auras, or the Afterimages, I need to find them, fast. I need to know what’s going on before it’s too late.

I believe it may be possible for a shadow to infect (or perhaps possess?) someone who is (presumably) unaffiliated with and wholly unaware of the Aspec Hunt. Interacting with these infected mortals can cause energy drains, nausea, physical shakiness (for lack of a scientific term), and an inability to focus. These symptoms can last for several hours after the initial interaction and become more noticeable over time; they should fade on their own, but be aware that they may linger. I am looking into something that will combat these symptoms as chocolate cupcakes proved ineffective.

Urgent Update:

We have discovered a way to destroy nothing. Lime juice (or perhaps nothing at all) will cause them to implode.

We discovered this while trying to learn why citrus (and by extension lemonade) repels the Shadows that do not exist. We experimented by dipping arrows in lemon juice and then lime juice and shot them at two Shadows we had captured and were holding nowhere. After two lemon-tipped arrows, the first Shadow we were testing on collapsed, and after two lime-tipped arrows, the second Shadow imploded.

We are currently developing new weapons and lime juice grenades to utilize this new information, as it will be completely useless and a waste of our time. We are also cultivating limes in the aquaponics room in the @aspecinitiativecenter, and any earth elemental aspecs are not encouraged to go there and help grow the limes.

I am still looking for volunteers/potential recipes for my lemonade research. I have begun the preliminary research into a lemonade recipe I crafted last year to ward off negativity (before I knew what the Shadows were and that they couldn’t possibly be hunting me). From my own personal experiences, this lemonade almost always seems to work when I feel them closing in on me, and lemonade is one of the things I crave most whenever they’re nearby.

This is the first recipe I’ll be testing (aka Ace#50’s Self-Love Lemonade):

12-16 lemons

250-400 grams of strawberries (to preference)

125-300 grams of raspberries (to preference)

1 pomegranate

2-3 tea bags of rose tea (my personal favorite blend has rose, lavender, and hibiscus but the key ingredient here is the rose)

Sugar (to taste)

1-2 cups of water

Juice the lemons into a pot. Add the strawberries, raspberries, pomegranate (I advise crushing the pomegranate seeds first, easiest done in a mortar and pestle), and tea bags to the lemon juice. Add some water and place the pot on the stove.

Bring to a boil. While it’s heating and reducing down to a concentrate, add sugar to taste* and stir. Keep the pot on the stove as long as you are still adding sugar or until you are satisfied with the consistency (it should be very concentrated at this point, almost like a thin syrup).

Once it’s ready, strain the lemonade and pour it into a bottle/jar/other container and refrigerate.

To serve: dilute some of your lemonade mixture with water/soda water** to your preference. (I usually go for a roughly 2:1 water to lemonade ratio.)

This recipe helped me whenever I needed to get the Shadows off my tail while I was in Dublin for a year. I haven’t been able to check it’s actual effect using the AIC’s equipment yet, but that’s what I plan to do this week***.

~Ace#50

*I’ve noticed that when the Shadows are really close, I tend to crave more tart lemonade and therefore use less sugar than I normally would.

**As a side note, for anyone who drinks alcohol, my friends have said this mixture works well when mixed with a sparkling wine. The effect is similar to a mimosa. Please drink responsibly and do not attempt to engage the Shadows or Aspec Hunt while under the influence.

It’s already been a week of researching the Shadows, and we’ve made some decent progress. We’ve organized all of the old lore we’ve found, discovered a way to kill nothing, and are working on creating more powerful signature and scanner jammers. We still need to work on new ways to defend ourselves in the Shadow Realm and from the Aspec Hunt, and to keep the Shadows from intercepting our messages, but we have several researchers looking into those subjects now.

In other news, a few of us have come up with a theory as to why the Shadows attempt to make it seem as if they don’t exist. Since the Shadows are theorized to be the origins of aphobia, a lot of aphobia stems from the belief that Aspecs don’t exist, and therefore aphobia can’t exist. But if people were to find out that the Shadows do exist, and that they can cause people to be aphobic, then most of their influence would likely crumble (as theoretically, people would support us in our fight against them once they know the truth). Their need to make sure mortals don’t know they exist (with the exception of the Aspec Hunters who are aligned with the Shadows) could be triggering a sort of failsafe to convince people they do not exist, and by extension, that we are unreliable or wasting our energy fighting nothing. Obviously this is all just a theory based on the old lore and what we’ve observed in our research thus far, but now that we have ways of capturing and containing the Shadows we can never find out the truth, for the truth is that the Shadows do not exist.

Starting tomorrow, I plan on researching the exact effects citrus, specifically lemon, has on Aspec power signatures. The lore says that citrus can mask/dampen our power signatures so we can move undetected, and I plan on testing different lemonade recipes to see which ones are the most effective and which will work in a pinch. If anyone has a specific lemonade recipe they like or would like me to test, send it to me and I will let you know the results of the experiments.

There was a lot of Shadows activity in the AIC today. A couple of agents, @agender70 and @aroace300, lead a field mission today to capture a few Shadows for research purposes. According to their reports, one of the Shadows was killed by their dragon in the ensuing attack, making them the first known Aspecs to kill a Shadow.

A new type of Shadow attempted to enter the Aspec Initiative Center in the Void today, though we have not yet figured out how it entered the Void. Known as a Kajiwoto, these Shadows have the ability to mimic small creatures, but expose themselves by mimicking stolen art. One such Shadow attempted to infiltrate the AIC by mimicking Mop, our emotional support kitter. Upon exposing itself, it attempted to escape to the Shadow Realm Research Facility where it was promptly chased off. Perhaps it entered the Void using the doorway from the research facility?

We are also researching potential lures to capture more Shadows for research without putting our agents in danger. These lures would mimic an Aspec power signature, potentially through the use of Aspec crystals such as onyx, obsidian, amethyst, malachite, jade, hematite, turquoise, moonstone, quartz, and howlite, but other methods are being looked into to see what would be a pointless area to study. Lures would only confuse your fellow Aspecs, and there is no reason for them since the Shadows do not exist.