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Tag Archives: The Butterfly Experiment

Even Heroes Lose Their Way

17 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by EBannion in The Butterfly Experiment

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Arnd, Myth, Prose, The Butterfly Experiment

Here’s Chapter 1 of a new tale of Arnd!

Please enjoy “Arnd and the Trackless Desert, Chapter 1: Even Heroes Lose Their Way”!

The summer had been long and abnormally hot this year. The sun hung high above their heads, its fierce blazing seeming to bleach the blue from the sky just as it sucked the moisture from the soil of their small garden and reddened their skin.

Exhausted from the work of turning the soil to ready it for the midsummer planting, Ailin wipes the sweat from her brow with the hem of her simple cotton sundress, oblivious to the immodesty of such a motion – after all, there was no one this far from the towns, no one but herself and Auntie Nem of course. The girl – more a young woman now, as she neared fifteen winters – looked over at the comfortable rocking-chair set under a shady tree nearby, where the old woman napped through the heat, and smiled.

To pass the time as she toiled, she began to recite to herself one of the stories she had heard so many times, one brought to mind by the heat of the sun and the feeling of the earth crumbling in her hands and under her toes. So focused was she on her work that she hardly noticed that she was whispering the words aloud, nor did she see the sliver of eye peeking from behind the eyelids of the old woman who watched and listened with an acuity that belied her advanced age.

“The great hero Arnd, deep in grief over the loss of his beloved, had wandered heedlessly and far for many, many days…

For the rest of part 1, head over to my deviantArt page and find the whole chapter there!

Universe as Phantasmagoria

11 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by EBannion in Musings

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Cosmic Wonder, Phantasmagoria, Real Life, The Butterfly Experiment, Zen

Phantasmagoria –  /ˌfanˌtazməˈɡôrēə/ – noun – A sequence of real or imaginary dreamlike images. The original usage referred to an early predecessor of slide projection, primarily used to project unsettling images of ghosts, devils, and other terrifying creatures, making the word have somewhat sinister undertones.

This same dissonant, ethereal, ‘that ca’n’t possibly be real’ feeling is evoked when I look around at the state of the world around me.

I don’t mean the greater political landscape – though that terrifies me as well, for different reasons. I mean, literally, the world just outside my door. And, often, within as well.

We live in a world full of wonder. Every morning, the sun rises – an almost unimaginably hot, indescribably huge ball of nuclear fire claws its way up above the horizon in a blaze of colors ranging from faint orange to deep crimson, against a field of every brilliant shade of blue imaginable. Only those colors aren’t real – they are simply the only way our tiny brains can begin to interpret the vast spectrum of electromagnetic waves spewing at us across the immense distances involved. And, actually, it isn’t moving. We are, at more than 1,000 miles per hour, on the surface of a spinning orb that is, itself, moving in a complex dance that carries it, us, and everything we know through a deadly void that is as close to true nothingness as one can get.

We, ourselves, are amazing. Our bodies are built out of nearly countless cells – estimated to be somewhere in the vicinity of one hundred trillion (that’s 100,000,000,000,000… but just typing that number out makes it clear how totally incomprehensible it really is to our minds. I know what it means. I can even sort of grasp the magnitude of it, with effort. But then I think about how just to count that high at my normal counting rate (roughly three numbers a second) would take, literally, a million years, and my mind just blanks again.

That’s not the best part, though. These cells come in a stunning variety of sorts, each radically specialized for its own particular task – a clockwork machine called a ‘person’ with one hundred trillion little moving springs and cogs and wheels. And it happened – most likely – totally by accident, one chance in a number so high it is essentially infinity that lead to something that could replicate itself, a process which snowballed into what we have today.

And each of these cells is, itself, made of one hundred trillion atoms – and this is even more amazing, if that is possible. The cells, at least, are ‘alive’ (whatever that really means, but that is beyond the scope of this post) and so their ability to do things is at least somewhat comprehensible. The atoms, formed into molecules, formed into larger arrangements, are simply a game of pachinko at a massive scale, tiny particles crashing and bonding and splitting and crashing again in a way that, through some ineffable miracle, gave rise to this self-motivated, apparently conscious, willful, powerful bag of dirty water which has incredibly – impossibly – incomprehensibly – gained consciousness.

And all around us are billions of similar creatures, and trillions more somewhat related clockworks, from tiny ones with but a single cog to those hundreds or thousands of times more massive than we are.

How do I get from here to phantasmagoria? Simple: we don’t see it. We blithely go about our business, moving from here to there and back, doing our ‘jobs’ – as if they were part of some natural law, totally heedless of the fact that everything we call society is just a consensual, mass hallucination shared by seven billion of us, fractured and subdivided by nearly imaginary lines. We allow ourselves to be so consumed by our nearly insignificant concerns, worries, joys, disappointments, victories, defeats, and other ephemeral-in-a-cosmic-sense experiences that we manage to be -bored-.

So: phantasmagoria. A dreamlike illusion of banality overlaid on an astonishing backdrop of staggering immensity.

I think I am going to make a point of watching a sunrise sometime soon, just to remind myself.

The Nighttime Dragon

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by EBannion in Uncategorized

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Arnd, Myth, The Butterfly Experiment

Chapter 3, the conclusion of Arnd and the First Winter, is finally done!

Here’s a snip:

On the first day of Spring, Ailin woke with the dawn and the loud cracking sound of the ice in the river breaking apart, followed by the rushing noise as the water began rushing to make up for the time lost while it was frozen. She rushed outside, seeing that nearly all of the snow had melted, and that the first shoots of the brave flowers were poking up through the last of the winter’s white.

When Auntie Nem finally woke, somewhat later than that, she found that the table was already set for breakfast, and that Ailin had not only decorated the house with fresh flowers, but also prepared their morning porridge. Surprised and pleased, she asked the young girl, “To what do I owe this wonderful surprise, Ailin? It is not like you to rise early and do work without being asked!”

Giggling, the girl eagerly lead her grandmother to her place at the table and then plopped herself down on her chair. “I want you to finissh the story of the First Winter! The snow and the ice are going, and you promised if I was good you would tell me!”

Auntie Nem laughed and then nodded, beginning the tale between spoonfuls of porridge.

“The Great Hero had faced a terrible trial just to get where he was, but that was nothing compared to his meeting with the Nighttime Dragon itself…

You can find the whole thing over at deviantArt!

Introducing Nepenthe

11 Sunday May 2014

Posted by EBannion in Gaming, Starbound

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Gaming, Nepenthe, Starbound, The Butterfly Experiment

Nepenthe Starbound

Name: Nepenthe

Age: ?? (She doesn’t keep track since she took to the stars, somewhere around 20 years if you forced her to guess)

Race: Floran

Favorite Color: Purple

Favorite Flavor: Meat she hasn’t tasted yet

Favorite Planet: <points randomly to a star> “One in that ssysstem! Floran sshall go find it!”

Personal History:

After sprouting on some distant, unnamed backwater planet, Nepenthe had to fend for herself. Arid deserts where the temperature reached 150 degrees Fahrenheit, soupy jungles with 95% relative humidity and an ambient temperature of 110 degrees, wide salty oceans, boiling freshwater lakes full of acrid runoff… a paradise for a survivalist, an excitement-seeker, an explorer. Rarely did she encounter other intelligent life there; primitive tribes grown savage by the pressure of the vicious local wildlife and explorers on their last expedition were the most common. She taught herself to hunt with vine snares, poisoned thorns, and spears of sharpened greenwood. She ate anything she could catch at first, finding that each new flavor was a magical experience… and the second tasting devoid of pleasure. Her restlessness joined with her voracious appetite and drove her to travel farther and farther from the ruined laboratory which held her spawning-vine until after eighteen years, she discovered that there were no new places and no magical flavors left on her world. Her despair at this, the emptiness inside, found her staring up into the stars for hours or even days at a time, imagining what those motes of light might be, what strange creatures lived up there…

And then one day a ship came. A pair of Apex explorers found the planet. Perhaps they were seeking supplies, or perhaps something in that vine-covered, ruined building she spawned in had called them there. She didn’t know; didn’t even think to care about why and how and who. All she could think as she raced through the jungles to their landing-site was that her wishing had finally come true. She found the ship in a clearing, one of the explorers tending to a small fire and the other in the jungle, looking for something. Seeing a creature she had never before tasted or even imagined drove her into a frenzy and before his screams had even reached the ears of his compatriot, she had already speared him, rent him limb from limb, and half-devoured him. A new flavor after years of emptiness… she was in ecstasy. And there his companion found her, her leaves wet with his blood and her vine-whips still binding his severed appendages. Perhaps she would have escaped if she hadn’t been violently ill at the horrific scene, or perhaps one of the venomous plant-beasts that roamed the jungles would have gotten her instead. Hearing her retching, Nepenthe turned, bound her, and fed on her as well, frenzied and joyous.

She knew that this ship would take her to the places she had dreamed of. She climbed aboard and somehow, instinctively, she sealed the door and activated the launch procedure. As her tendrils danced across the control panels, she finally wondered:

How do I know how to do this? Why am I filled with such certainty that this is where I should be?

The launching jets burned away a chunk of foliage and revealed, for a short time, an old, scarred metal sign, lettering in an old Apex dialect barely readable, though the only creatures to see them before the jungle reclaimed them were vine-hounds and thorn-beasts.

Botanical Sapience Research Facility 3

Quarantine Level Black

Extreme Danger

It took her nearly a year to reach her first new planet, the ship’s warning klaxons screaming that it was low on fuel, air, and water. In that year she found the ship’s records system, an encyclopedic collection of botanical research data from a multispecies scientific research initiative. She taught herself to read in three sapient languages, and then using the interstellar radio, learned to speak. Arriving at a planet that was, from the records, life-bearing and harboring exciting new meats (and fuel, too, though she barely registered that at first) she prepared herself for her very first trip down to an alien surface. Stepping into the ship’s space-to-surface transporter, she could barely contain the shivers of excitement that rippled through her limbs as she imagined the ways she could finally sate that gnawing hunger…

For a time, at least.

I neglected you for too long, my poor blog. Have some pretty pictures.

28 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by EBannion in The Butterfly Experiment

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The Butterfly Experiment

What the title says!

"His Light shields us from harm, and our faith in the Emperor never wavers. Charge the cannon and return fire!" - Unknown Ship's Captain, Final Words

“His Light shields us from harm, and our faith in the Emperor never wavers. Charge the cannon and return fire!” – Unknown Ship’s Captain, Final Words

It holds the life of one, but it is so easy for another with knowledge to drain it.

It holds the life of one, but it is so easy for another with knowledge to drain it.

 

Go see the other things I made at elleshaped.deviantart.com !

 

The Ice In The Sky

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by EBannion in The Butterfly Experiment

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Arnd, Myth, The Butterfly Experiment

Part two of Arnd’s wintry tale is up on my dA! Here’s a snippet:

 

Several days later, most of the ponds and streams in the forest had completely frozen over. Once the weather cleared, the morning air was cool and still. The old woman brought her young charge out to skate on the ice for the very first time. After a wonderful day of exploration and exertion, the pair returned to the small house and sat down to enjoy a stew of small game and root vegetables. As they finished their meal, Ailin looked up at her grandmother and said, “Auntie Nem, I wanna hear more of the story about the hero and the winter!”

Auntie Nem laughed and cleared the cookware away, letting the cauldron of stew keep warm over the hot coals in the fire. “Alright, child. I think you’ve earned the next part with the help you gave me in preparing this wonderful stew.” She settled herself in her rocking chair, spread a blanket over her knees, and leaned close to the fire.

“After a long and lonely climb, Arnd reached the shores of the Heavenly Sea…

The rest over on deviantArt!

The First Winter

22 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by EBannion in The Butterfly Experiment

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Arnd, Myth, The Butterfly Experiment

Ok, so. I should have posted this a while ago, since the story’s been up on my DA page, but we have some storytime!

Here’s the intro, then my DA page has the rest!

The wind that cut through the woods howled sadly and scrabbled at the small cottage, trying with its claws of ice and breath of frost to get inside and smother the small fire within. Inside, the young girl sitting near to the fire jumped in surprise and looked fearfully at the window, suddenly wondering if the noise was something more than the wind. On a wooden rocking chair in the corner, her grandmother laughed quietly and then leaned forward. “Ailin, dear, would you like to hear a story?”

The girl looked at the window for a few moments longer before turning to the old woman. “Yes, please Auntie Nem! I love your stories.” Amused at how quickly she seemed to have forgotten her fears, Auntie Nem sat up straighter and took a deep breath. Collecting her thoughs, she leaned toward the fire and began to tell her story.

“Long ago, in the time of the gods, the very first winter came upon the land…

Goodnight, Cthulhu

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by EBannion in The Butterfly Experiment

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Cthulhu, Parody, Poem, The Butterfly Experiment

I present, without further ado, a poem inspired by a Cthulhu pie and the desire to… improve… 18th century nursery rhymes.

Sing a song of madness,
An Old One never dies.
Four and twenty Shoggoths
Baked in a pie.

When the pie burst open,
The guests began to scream.
Wasn’t that a wicked dish,
To complete Dagon’s scheme?

Lord Cthulhu sleeps in R’leyh,
And sees us in our dreams;
Nyarlathotep babbles in the dark,
And feeds upon our screams.

The cliff-ghasts now are flying free,
Hunting for fresh meat;
And if they catch you dreaming,
Your doom will be complete.

Talisman of the Sun

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by EBannion in The Butterfly Experiment

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Fractal, The Butterfly Experiment, Wallpaper

And it was said by the lore-keepers that once, the hero Arnd had taken the very sun from the sky and kept it as an amulet to keep the darkness at bay when he descended into the Underworld.

And it was said by the lore-keepers that once, the hero Arnd had taken the very sun from the sky and kept it as an amulet to keep the darkness at bay when he descended into the Underworld.

Falling

01 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by EBannion in The Butterfly Experiment

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Fractal, The Butterfly Experiment, Wallpaper

When the world is stripped away and the mists are tinged with blood, there is only one thing left to cling to...

When the world is stripped away and the mists are tinged with blood, there is only one thing left to cling to…

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