I was at Ghost's ritual in Peoria last night! I always find it really cute when people recap notable moments in list form on here, so I thought I'd share some fun things I remember that differed from the last time I saw them in Chicago.
These are mostly about Perpetua, as I was transfixed:
Tempest was dancing very cutieful during Lachryma
During the instrumental intro for Cirice, V crept up the side of the drum platform, then posed at the top with his arms crossed Dracula-style
I can't remember what song, but Dew was absolutely wailing on an extended note at the end of one of his solos (mid-song), and Perpetua was trying and failing to get him to stop.
V talked about how they've been to the Peoria Civic Center before and how nice and old-fashioned it is that it's called the Civic Center, not a brand name. Then he called himself old and said that was enough about the past, so let's focus on the future, and we started TFIAFL
V did a little finger gun at the audience during “brown shirt stasi guard” in TFIAFL
V was dancing with the mic stand during the Satanized intro
I can't remember what song, but Aurora and Storm were dancing together on Storm’s platform. Very cute.
During the KTGG intro, V talked about how it was cold outside and cold backstage but very hot in the room, and how we'd warmed each other up. He went on about how we had an equal exchange and how we (both him and the audience) had to give a little and get a little (wink wink).
V continued the KTGG intro by saying that it was a Thursday, so it was a school night, meaning we couldn’t go all night. But maybe if it were Friday, and if they didn’t have another show the next day, then… [insert parking lot variant here]
V said a lot during the transition into the Umbra bridge, and I couldn't make all of it out, but I believe it ended with “listen up, pervs!”
The ghouls were all refusing to get out of Perpetua’s way as he tried to leave center stage during an instrumental in Year Zero
Phantom was all the way on his back on the ground writhing around while playing during Year Zero
V talked about “getting physical” during the KTGG intro (of course), then did a callback to it as a lead-in to the "tickle your taints" Mummy Dust intro
V lifted a leg and slapped the side of his ass at the audience during the start of Mummy Dust
V did a whole extended backbend following the Mummy Dust thrusts
After Mummy Dust, V asked us if we felt it in our loins. Then he turned to Richie as Richie passed him a mummy buck to roll, and he asked Richie if Richie felt it in his loins
Perpetua got us to bark for him. He specifically requested a big deep bark. just one at a time, and his example bark frankly did not sound anything like a bark lol.
No Jesus this time, as the mummy dust/bucks all went right out into the audience
V talked about Nihil during the intro to Mary on a Cross—about how he got some songs from him and how his dad was sometimes pretty cool. This included saying the word “saxamaphone.” Then he said he also got some jokes from him, and some of his jokes were bad.
V's hand-off to Dew for Squammer this time was "take it away, cowboy!"
If any of you saw a group consisting of an approximate Perpetua, an approximate Terzo, and Harrowhark Nonagesimus, that was my friends and me 🥰. Harrow is the lovely @gigipiet13! Everyone we talked to in the audience was lovely and very excited, and the ritual itself was great. Happy Skeletour!
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I had a dream once about an astronomy researcher. They were working alone at a remote research station at the edge of space, and their extreme isolation and obsession with the stars drove them to become fixated on the idea of human loneliness. They were isolated from the rest of humanity at their station, and the whole Earth and all its life was alone in a cold, unfeeling universe with nobody and nothing else for company. The universe was empty, the search for aliens was fruitless, and the researcher was devoting their entire life to staring out at that expanse of uncaring loneliness.
But then, as the researcher sat at their telescope, the stars, the balls of gas countless light-years away that should have been eternal to the human eye, began to open and shut. The stars blinked. And in that moment, the researcher realized they were not alone after all. Each and every star in the night sky was, however impossibly, an eye, and for all they had devoted their life to obsessively watching those stars, however lonely they had felt in their vocation, the researcher was terrified to realize that, in that moment, space was watching them back.
There was a woman titled as a knight, they said. The first woman given such a title since the founding of the knights' academies, or at least that's what the women of the rebel camp said as they traded gossip. Much more honorable and noteworthy than the country girls that donned armor and struck out as mercenaries alone, they said. One never knew what to call a girl like that.
But the knight woman, now that was a different story.
She was titled by the Academy on the Plains, so went the gossip. The oldest and most honorable of knightly institutions was that place, as the people of the Plains were always known to make fine farmers and monster-slayers. Coarse, rugged, classless folk the lot of them, but their Academy sorted the wheat from the chaff and produced what even kings and warlords and governors called most capable knights in all the Former Empire. And who were the wives and sisters of a petty rebel camp to disagree with that?
So yes, the woman, if there really was a woman, surely had to be worthwhile if they'd titled her. Why would such a place as the Plains Academy ever break with tradition if not to elevate one particularly golden grain? She must be leagues above those vulgar women that fought with swords without the title Sir, and every rumor seemed only to enforce that grand conclusion.
The knight woman's name, they said, was the young Sir Harlan. A common Plains name for boys, but given to a girl on account of some inexplicable family tradition. One woman said she was named for her grandfather on account of her parents having no sons, but another said she'd been raised with many brothers, so it was hard to say what tradition exactly it was. Either way, she went by Harlan as pronounced best in the common Yonla tongue, not the strange, Plains-language version of the name that pushed one's tongue too far to the back of one's mouth, so the gathered women agreed it was alright. Perhaps the masculine name was even a sign that it really was the girl's fate to be a Woman Knight. Or perhaps, as one woman suggested, her parents' strange naming choice had decided her path, rather than the other way around.
As the women talked around their washing, one young woman, looking strangely rueful, asked the crowd if any knew how the young Sir Harlan had found her place in the Plains Academy.
Another woman, knowing that the girl who'd asked had herself dreamed once of becoming a knight and been laughed away, answered with mocking mischief.
"Don't take it to heart, Miss Dawn. I heard she snuck into the summer tournament one year and bested all the knights in training, along with every late-applying Plains boy."
"No, no!" called another woman. "Even if that's true, would an Academy take in any girl that swordfights well? I heard she saved the Headknight's only son himself from being eaten by a monster that invaded academy grounds. She's a gift from the gods!"
A third woman scoffed aloud. "How could academy boys need a girlchild's help to kill a monster? I heard the Headknight had a dream that the gods told him Miss Harlan was to be treated as an honorary man, for she was the reincarnation of a great knight's soul, and she had been placed in a girl's body to test her fortitude."
"Don't Plains people not believe in gods? What's their Headknight doing having god dreams? Did the grass tell him Sir Harlan's ancestry?"
"Headknight Anzho's from northern Old Yon," said the girl the others called Miss Dawn. "Knight trainees all have to follow Yon's religion, and nobody had prophetic dreams about Sir Harlan."
Another woman sneered at young Miss Dawn. "Why ask how she got in if you know so much?"
Dawn gave a shrug, and her neighbor waved a hand at her dismissively.
"I heard she won the tournament and saved the Headknight Anzho's son, and then she told a sob story so beautiful that the gracious knights couldn't help but let her in."
"Well I heard the Headknight wants her for a wife!" yelled another woman, and the crowd all sputtered.
"How would titling a girl make her easier to marry, Ms. Linna?"
"Didn't we say Sir Anzho has a son? How could he marry her?"
The woman who'd made the scandalous claim, Ms. Linna, splashed water at her neighbors in response to the mockery, and they all laughed.
"I think Sir Harlan would kill you for suggesting that," said Dawn.
"No," Said another woman, "I hear the young Sir Harlan never kills a soul, and upon her titling she declared she'd never take a job that asks her to do so."
"Some knight! That's what they get for letting a girl get a title."
"But isn't it quite a story? She's like some old Plains hero from a fairy tale."
"What do you know about Plains heroes? You've never gone farther east than Logedz."
"I've never even gone that far!"
A provocateur, a friend of Linna's, fixed her grin on Dawn from across the water.
"You went to the Plains before you came here, no Miss Dawn? Did you ever meet Miss Harlan?"
Dawn pulled the last of her washload from the water and began to wring it dry, piling it all into her basket. She thought about the rebel soldiers it belonged to and wondered vaguely if she could best them with her polearm the way Sir Harlan could with her sword.
"I saw her once or twice," Dawn said dryly.
A chorus erupted, all echoes of "Did you really?" and "No you didn't" and "What's she like?"
I think she's an evil hypocrite, thought Dawn, but she knew she couldn't possibly say that aloud.
"The young Sir Harlan was dazzling," she said. "I admired her greatly and wish I could have known her better, but I think she would be too pleased with this conversation."
Another chorus of questions and jeers met the girl who had once dreamt of being Sir Dawn. Kay Manas, the girl who had fled her home for the Plains with laughter on her heels, then fled the Plains for the rebels in the west when not-yet-Sir Harlan had laughed at her as well. She made to leave, gathering up her basket of rebel men's clothes, and smiled, bitter and mean.
"I think the noble Sir Harlan is happiest when she's being discussed."
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What if I made like. A whole powerpoint slideshow about my Tai Sui clothing headcanons and character design notes. Would anyone be interested in that?
I don't know if it actually translates visibly to the doodles I post, but I have spent so much time thinking about like, the fashions of Jinping and how much different characters would and wouldn't conform to them. I could absolutely fill a powerpoint with it.
Lizard hilarity aside, I really enjoy how this chapter of dracula explicitly points out the same coping mechanism that Jonathan has been using the whole time: the narrowing of his focus.
We've all been joking about how he's embodying the "this is fine" dog, but honestly, I think his denial and tunnel vision is the only reason he hasn't had a breakdown yet. He's known something is wrong for a while now, even since the carriage ride I'd say, but he hasn't let himself dwell on those thoughts. He doesn't think too much about his fear when avoidable, and he certainly doesn't write about it in his journal, because that would mean giving the fear more focus.
Jonathan writes long paragraphs about what Dracula tells him of his history, of their conversations on soliciting, because that's what's safe for him to think about. He focuses on the facts—on the things not tinged with too much dread or many hints of the supernatural, because doing otherwise would mean confronting the true horror of his situation. He won't think too hard about what it might mean that his driver had apparent control over the wolves, because that issue opens up a bottomless hole of questions, but he can think about the issue of how he's going to shave without his mirror. It's a nice, tangible problem in a sea of things he cannot bear to dwell on.
Jonathan is a simple, business-minded man. He's built for dealing with train schedules and real estate law, not the supernatural, so these are the sort of things he focuses on. Anything else is a bit too much to bear. Even the blatantly supernatural stories must be recorded as though they are not so.
But now he's running out of normalcy to focus on, and I suspect that someday soon, Jonathan will be forced to confront the truth he's been avoiding. He's not just trapped; he's trapped with a monster, and when he's finally forced to face that truth head on, he is not going to take it well
