Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
isekai about a nyc apartment block getting teleported into a fantasy realm, and how this group of people who previously have only had incidental contact with one another come together to build a vibrant community in their new circumstances. there’s a season-long arc about introducing bagels and pizza to the fantasy world that gets into the details of sourcing ingredients, developing new technologies, and learning how to work with supernatural substitutions.
Clarifying question: just the people or the buildings and animal life too?
And does it include random people on the street at the time of the transfer?
oh the whole thing for sure, im picturing the whole city block with a crust of sidewalk just dropped onto the outskirts of a small medieval village. im thinking theres probably a corner store and a couple other things included too, so youve got the people who work there or were shopping at the time of the transfer too.
i hadnt thought of animals but having a whole thing w pigeons would be awesome too; have new york feral pigeons meeting with tamed messenger pigeons of the era, a raccoon that was sleeping in a trash can eats a magical necklace and starts talking. love it.
ALT
fucking love this. an army of monster rats descend upon the kingdom, led by a single subway rat under the banner of a half-eaten pizza crust
But they do not anticipate the rise of the Hero, their one, true, and most worthy foe—
Meanwhile, in NYC, the patch of fantasy forest that the city block swapped places with is breaking zoning laws, interfering with subway lines, releasing fantastic flora and fauna into the skyscrapers, sewers, and Central Park alike, and dividing residents over the question of what should—or shouldn’t—be done about it. An upcoming mayoral election focuses the city’s underlying anxieties about housing, the environment, coexistence, and changing times onto the ballot.
But the orc who got transported while gathering glowberries isn’t thinking about all of that, even as it threatens their continued existence. Right now, they’ve got only one thing on their mind: making it big on Broadway.
Once upon a time, there was a prose translation of the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was wonderfully charming and lyrical and perfect for use in a high school, and so a clever English teacher (as one did in the 70s) made a scan of the book for her students, saved it as a pdf, and printed copies off for her students every year. In true teacher tradition, she shared the file with her colleagues, and so for many years the students of the high school all studied Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the same (very badly scanned) version of this wonderful prose translation.
In time, a new teacher became head of the English Department, and while he agreed that the prose translation was very wonderful he felt that the quality of the scan was much less so. Also in true teacher tradition, he then spent hours typing up the scan into a word processor, with a few typos here and there and a few places where he was genuinely just guessing wildly at what the scan actually said. This completed word document was much cleaner and easier for the students to read, and so of course he shared it with his colleagues, including his very new wide-eyed faculty member who was teaching British Literature for the first time (this was me).
As teachers sometimes do, he moved on for greener (ie, better paying) pastures, leaving behind the word document, but not the original pdf scan. This of course meant that as I was attempting to verify whether a weird word was a typo or a genuine artifact of the original translation, I had no other version to compare it to. Being a good card-holding gen zillenial I of course turned to google, making good use of the super secret plagiarism-checking teacher technique “Quotation Marks”, with an astonishing result:
By which I mean literally one result.
For my purposes, this was precisely what I needed: a very clean and crisp scan that allowed me to make corrections to my typed edition: a happily ever after, amen.
But beware, for deep within my soul a terrible Monster was stirring. Bane of procrastinators everywhere, my Curiosity had found a likely looking rabbit hole. See, this wonderfully clear and crisp scan was lacking in two rather important pieces of identifying information: the title of the book from which the scan was taken, and the name of the translator. The only identifying features were the section title “Precursors” (and no, that is not the title of the book, believe me I looked) and this little leaf-like motif by the page numbers:
(Remember the leaf. This will be important later.)
We shall not dwell at length on the hours of internet research that ensued—how the sun slowly dipped behind the horizon, grading abandoned in shadows half-lit by the the blue glow of the computer screen—how google search after search racked up, until an email warning of “unusual activity on your account” flashed into momentary existence before being consigned immediately and with some prejudice to the digital void—how one third of the way through a “comprehensive but not exhaustive” list of Sir Gawain translators despair crept in until I was left in utter darkness, screen black and eyes staring dully at the wall.
Above all, let us not admit to the fact that such an afternoon occurred not once, not twice, but three times.
Suffice to say, many hours had been spent in fruitless pursuit before a new thought crept in: if this book was so mysterious, so obscure as to defeat the modern search engine, perhaps the answer lay not in the technologies of today, but the wisdom of the past. Fingers trembling, I pulled up the last blast email that had been sent to current and former faculty and staff, and began to compose an email to the timeless and indomitable woman who had taught English to me when I was a student, and who had, after nearly fifty years, retired from teaching just before I returned to my alma mater.
After staring at the email for approximately five or so minutes, I winced, pressed send, and let my plea sail out into the void. I cannot adequately describe for you the instinctive reverence I possess towards this teacher; suffice to say that Ms English was and is a woman of remarkable character, as much a legend as an institution as a woman of flesh and blood whose enduring influence inspired countless students. There is not a student taught by Ms. English who does not have a story to tell about her, and her decline in her last years of teaching and eventual retirement in the face of COVID was the end of an era. She still remembers me, and every couple months one of her contemporaries and dear friends who still works as a guidance counsellor stops me in the hall to tell me that Ms. English says hello and that she is thrilled that I am teaching here—thrilled that I am teaching honors students—thrilled that I am now teaching the AP students. “Tell her I said hello back,” I always say, and smile.
Ms. English is a legend, and one does not expect legends to respond to you immediately. Who knows when a woman of her generation would next think to check her email? Who knows if she would remember?
The day after I sent the email I got this response:
My friends, I was shaken. I was stunned. Imagine asking God a question and he turns to you and says, “Hold on one moment, let me check with my predecessor.”
The idea that even Ms. English had inherited this mysterious translation had never even occurred to me as a possibility, not when Ms. English had been a faculty member since the early days of the school. How wonderful, I thought to myself. What a great thing, that this translation is so obscure and mysterious that it defeats even Ms. English.
A few days later, Ms. English emailed me again:
(I had, in fact searched through both the English office and the Annex—a dark, weirdly shaped concrete storage area containing a great deal of dust and many aging copies of various books—a few days prior. I had no luck, sadly.)
At last, though, I had a title and a description! I returned to my internet search, only to find to my dismay that there was no book that exactly matched the title. I found THE BRITISH TRADITION: POETRY, PROSE, AND DRAMA (which was not black and the table of contents I found did not include Sir Gawain) and THE ENGLISH TRADITION, a super early edition of the Prentice Hall textbooks we use today, which did have a black cover but there were absolutely zero images I could find of the table of contents or the interior and so I had no way of determining if it was the correct book short of laying out an unfortunate amount of cold hard cash for a potential dead end.
So I sighed, and relinquished my dreams of solving the mystery. Perhaps someday 30 years from now, I thought, I’ll be wandering through one of those mysterious bookshops filled with out of print books and I’ll pick up a book and there will be the translation, found out last!
So I sighed, and told the whole story to my colleagues for a laugh. I sent screenshots of Ms. English’s emails to my siblings who were also taught by her. I told the story to my Dad over dinner as my Great Adventure of the Week.
…my friends. I come by my rabbit-hole curiosity honestly, but my Dad is of a different generation of computer literacy and knows a few Deep Secrets that I have never learned. He asked me the title that Ms. English gave me, pulled up some mysterious catalogue site, and within ten minutes found a title card. There are apparently two copies available in libraries worldwide, one in Philadelphia and the other in British Columbia. I said, “sure, Dad,” and went upstairs. He texted me a link. Rolling my eyes, I opened it and looked at the description.
Huh, I thought. Four volumes, just like Ms. English said. I wonder…
Armed with a slightly different title and a publisher, I looked up “The English Tradition: Fiction macmillan” and the first entry is an eBay sale that had picture of the interior and LO AND BEHOLD:
THE LEAF. LOOK AT THE LEAF.
My dad found it! He found the book!!
Except for one teensy tiny problem which is that the cover of the book is uh a very bright green and not at all black like Ms. English said. Alas, it was a case of mistaken identity, because The English Tradition: Poetry does have a black cover, although it is the fiction volume which contains Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
And so having found the book at last, I have decided to purchase it for the sum of $8, that ever after the origins of this translation may once more be known.
In this year of 2022 this adventure took place, as this post bears witness, the end, amen.
counterpunches: I would like to hear the story of how you slept under the christmas tree
so i immigrated to the US at age 9, right, and one of the first things my family did was join the local Chinese church. as far as the whole “figuring out how to do things so we no longer have to live in the back shed of Uncle Joe’s* Magic Emporium” thing goes, it’s a pretty sound strategy! now we had people to teach my dad how to drive and give us old furniture and say “hey, Seattle is pretty rainy maybe you should rent an apartment-like space before either a) the shed roof caves in b) your daughter with the famously delicate constitution falls dramatically ill from a strain of black mold or possibly herpes”
*is not my uncle, that’s what his store was called. he sold magic gadgets and my dad knew him because???? possibly in a past life they ran a meth empire in Albuquerque, who knows
ANYWAY. thanks to the church i did not fall dramatically ill from black mold or possibly herpes, but there was an unforeseen factor in joining a Christian church, which was that they? were pretty hardcore? about Jesus?**
**in a nice “we build houses for the homeless” way, not in…the other way
given that we’d just immigrated and that China’s religious policy is worshiping Mao’s preserved corpse ehhhhh…let’s call it “freedom of atheism,” my family was decidedly not hardcore about Jesus. my parents mostly took the bemused “i guess Jesus is okay since he indirectly led to us living in a place suited for human habitation” route, but i
was
DISGUSTED.
i was the first kid in my class to get her red scarf, okay, and when we sang the national anthem and saluted the flag every morning i fucking meant what i was singing. we almost didn’t come to America; my dad had more lucrative job offers in Germany and Belgium, but i put my foot down because everyone knows Europe is full of gross imperialists Dad, GOSH, and the Americans helped us fight off the Japanese.
so seeing all these fellow Chinese believing in THE CAPITALIST GOD was basically the worst thing to ever happen to my delicate psyche. my parents’ tacit approval was even worse: DID PATRIOTISM AND COMMUNISM MEAN NOTHING TO THEM? DIDN’T THEY KNOW THAT DOING NOTHING AGAINST OPPRESSION MADE THEM OPPRESSORS THEMSELVES??
clearly something needed to be done.
so because the church was pretty hardcore about Jesus, it was understandably also hardcore about Christmas. big party, massive intricately decorated REAL TREE, sleepover for the kids with presents in the morning—you name it. everyone was going to be there.
WHAT A GREAT OPPORTUNITY TO PROVE TO EVERYONE HOW WRONG THEY ARE ABOUT JESUS.
my plan:
sleep UNDER the giant real Christmas tree: y’know, the one with real pointy needles reaching all the way down to the base? that sheds? with lots of pokey tinsel?
catch Jesus in the act of depositing presents***: look. i’d seen like, ALL of Scooby Doo by this point. i knew Jesus was probably a real person, just not the Son of God.
subdue Jesus so he’s still around when everyone else wakes up: CLEARLY VERY FEASIBLE, given that Jesus was a heavyset white dude who used superhuman agility and strength to deliver presents around the world overnight and possibly had reindeer minions and i weighed 70 pounds at most while sopping wet.
(who is Santa Claus?? who cares)
????
EVERYONE MAGICALLY BECOMES AN ATHEIST AGAIN, AMERICA BECOMES A COMMUNIST STATE
***even if i didn’t believe in him, why was i slavishly devoted stopping a highly altruistic man who gave? people? presents? did i hate joy????
sure enough, at around 3 in the morning i heard soft boots approaching the tree. i reached out and snatched one of the Ankles of Jesus
—whereupon Youth Pastor Liao screamed “OH MY LORD” and kicked me in the face.
and THAT, dear friends, is how i spent my first Christmas in America with a concussion.
You drop a small piece of food on the floor, and decide to kick it under the oven/couch/whatever because you can’t be bothered to pick it up. As you’re walking away, you hear a very quiet “Thank you!” from under it.
“No problem,” I say, the words passing out of my mouth on autopilot, before my brain engages and I freeze.
I turn, and look at the fridge. It seems to be the same fridge that was here when I moved in.
I mean, I’m also kind of embarrassed. I never do that, I know that’s how you get roaches, but my back hurts so bad that getting up and down is next to impossible, much less bending over. “Um, you holding up okay down there?” I ask.
There was silence.
“I know that we’re probably the only apartment in the building that doesn’t have a bug problem. That’s, well, that’s you, right?”
Again, silence. But I know I heard it.
“Listen, I can’t really bend over right now, but if you’re down there and hungry, like, there’s half a rotisserie chicken in there that’s about to go bad. I was going to throw it away, but if you could use it-”
You live with a Vampire. Every Saturday, you give them a cup of your blood, and they cook you a nice meal.
Here’s the thing, I assumed that the thing was a joke. It was just a humorous listing, right?
“Fully furnished private room available in historic home, well maintained. Rural living skills are a plus- if you know anything about gardening or livestock, please consider us! Close to town but outside of the bustle, perfect for someone who just wants to get away! We have a household of mostly women in a variety of creative pursuits. Rent very reasonable, less than 200 per room, all bills including internet (we just got fiber!) but please interview for further information. Women preferred. Pets are welcome, though large dogs will need to be carefully introduced and monitored. House owned by immortal blood drinker, but very friendly and knowledgeable, just hefty sun allergy. Blood donations are accepted but not required for living here!”
Like, what? Sounded like a weird coven thing but 200 a month is SUPER REASONABLE, and I’d been struggling to find a place. I had three cats and a recent divorce, so if I could take my cats and could avoid being a cult member fuck it, it was worth the savings.
A short stranger moves into town, doesn’t seem to interact much with anyone, and six months later when there’s a scandal about someone’s daughter being pregnant out of wedlock, he shows up out of the blue to claim paternity. He says he can’t marry the mother - he’s got a wife somewhere else, estranged, but a wife nonetheless - but he’ll take care of them. Baffled looks are exchanged around the room, but nobody challenges the claim. The child’s mother, who doesn’t seem to have ever met this man in her life, but has found her options limited, agrees that he is the father.
This, somehow, happens again, and not only several times, but often enough for people to expect it. Each time there’s a young, unwed mother with nowhere else to go, she ends up moving in to the shack this man, Jonathan, has claimed for himself and his growing family. The question “do they know who the father is, or is it Jonathan’s?” becomes an ordinary thing to ask.
He himself insists that each new bastard is his - if the child looks nothing like him nor the mother, there is always an ancestor he has who had hair exactly like that, or a nose exactly like that, as he himself is constructed of every single recessive gene known to man, a mixture of every kind of ancestry there is.
The village tolerates him. Despite of being quiet most of the time, and rude when he talks, he’s a law-abiding citizen, save for threatening to fight other men to defend his growing flock of bastards and the honour and dignity of their respective mothers. There is no winning a fight with a small man, you’ll either come out as a laughingstock if you lose, or looking like a brute if you win, and no man is willing to gamble his dignity in order to find out whether Jonathan can actually fight or not.
Nobody is exactly sure what, exactly, he gains out of cultivating notoriety as a man who singlehandedly fathered 38 bastards and continues to do so into his forties and fifties, as a short and angry little man who wasn’t even particularly handsome in his youth. He and the family he continues gathering are a problem they prefer to have. And for as long as he continues doing what he insists on doing, nobody pauses for long enough to figure out that he’s trans.
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
Might I add:
The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed
The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child
The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship
The adventures of a space roomba
Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)
I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head
hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):
I have had a really full and busy day today, but the highlight was:
So I’m sitting in the staff work area and one of my colleagues comes up to me. There’s an open day this weekend, and so we need to plan an activity for the would-be students.
“Simple!” I say. “Let’s get them to dissect some owl pellets. Hands on, fun, they get to play with skulls.”
“Good idea!” she says. “But we’ll need something even fancier for the open day in February. What can we do? Perhaps we can take some soil samples.”
And as we’re debating the photogenic merits of soil Vs dead mice…
Suddenly, a Dashing and Handsome Stranger (read: an autistic engineering lecturer) appears with a flourish (read: launches himself into a seat beside us while visibly and physically vibrating with excitement about his special interest being Useful) and asks “HELLO I’M SORRY DID YOU SAY SOIL BECAUSE I HAVE A RAMAN MICROSCOPE”
“Amazing!” declares my colleague. “…Who are you?”
“COME AND SEE IT!!!” he says, currently the human embodiment of the :D emoticon.
We went and saw it. It’s an excellent microscope and his ten minute infodump about it was both spectacular and also extremely useful. We’re going to use it to assess microplastics.
I have a new friend.
Guess who I saw again today! I say ‘saw’, he hunted me down to invite me to train on using his microscopes - it turned out some of the engineers asked if they could look at explosive substances with it and he was like NO YOU MAY NOT IT’S POWERED BY A LASER so now he’s insisting that everyone train on it, but wanted to ask me if I’d like to do it. Obviously I have said yes. He’s getting an SEN as well so he’s put my name down for that, too.
And then we compared notes on working in labs, and he told me about the time he was sent to the 'chemical cupboard’ in his last lab and found a Tesco bag of asbestos, three and a half kilos of TNT, and half a pint of cyanide, and when he told the health and safety woman she just said he should use a lone working protocol, and he was so angry he yelled A LONE WORKING PROTOCOL WILL NOT SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM A DIRTY BOMB, CAROLINE
I love this man
Why did the chemical cupboard have three and a half kilos of trinitrotolulene (the full name for TNT, for those unaware), and was it at the very least an explosives cupboard?
It was not in an explosives cupboard, and he didn’t know. Basically this was in an HE building being converted over to a young offenders institute, and for whatever reason, all the science teachers quit en masse as the switch was happening, leaving all their students in the lurch. So one morning he came into work, was told he was being promoted to Technical Demonstrator, given a Bunch of Mysterious Keys, and told he had three hours to familiarise himself with the contents of the chemical cupboard.
“Great,” he said. “Where is the chemical cupboard?”
“Shrug emoji,” his boss said gravely, and wandered off to have crisps.
So he spent an hour wandering the building and trying his keys in every lock before finally finding a door that opened, and upon finally opening it, was immediately greeted by a Tesco carrier bag on the floor labelled 'Asbestos, do not touch’.
“Right-o,” he thought. “No touching that.”
But then he had two hours left to familiarise himself with the packed shelf contents of quite a large room, and the problem is that when you tell an autistic lab tech to familiarise themselves with a room full of chemicals, what they hear is not “Have a quick look so you have an idea of what’s there”, it’s “These chemicals must be catalogued in detail and also here have a time pressure,” so he was going to be both Thorough and Grumpy about this. And this room was packed.
The oldest bottle he found was a reagent opened in 1959.
It had crystallised.
(“It was quite beautiful, actually,” he told me dreamily. “A work of art. I wish I’d kept it.”)
The cyanide, when he finally found it, was in a stoppered glass vial. So that was the point he lost his shit and went and grabbed Caroline.
The kicker is, Caroline didn’t care. She insisted they didn’t have the money or resources to spare on getting rid of it. So he had to march all the way to the Dean’s office.
“You look like you’re having a bad day,” she said warily.
“Well I thought it would peak with the Tesco carrier bag of asbestos I found,” he said, “but I was very wrong.”
There’s a history of pickled beets in my family. Growing up in the great depression meant that for my grandma that was sometimes the only thing available to eat and she HATES them. But my grandpa loved them so she would always buy a jar and when he opened the jar she’d be all the way in the next room and somehow just KNOW he was opening the jar of beets. She’d come running into the kitchen just to tell him ‘yuck!’
Years pass, grandpa died, my dad got into the habit of taking her out to eat at places with a salad bar so we could make sure we all get our greens. He’d always pick out a few pickled beets for himself. Grandma would point at them and say 'yuck!’
Years pass, my grandma is getting on in years. She has a Facebook account, but she just kind of treats it like a family newsletter and barely actually interacts with anyone and just kind of lurks. She has an aide to help her around the house and keep her company and do things that are hard for her. She can’t really type anything because last month she had a stroke that messed with her spatial reasoning and typing is hard.
A few days ago, I told Facebook that I had pickled beets on a taco and it was pretty good. My grandmother, age 96, alerted her aide that it was imperative that she reply. And so her aide Naiya, age 22, on behalf of the matriarch of the family, got on her Facebook specifically to tell me…
ALT
