RANDOM BITS #1
bits i started off with the intent of elaborating on them more (or maybe not even....) but which have just remained in the headlights long enough for me to forget where i was going with them or otherwise get lazy
CASSIOPEIA META
Originally written in the summer of 2022.
as basic as i can put it the cassiopeia message is a brief call for help fashioned by freya, meant to attract rescue off the train. though initially prescribed as a message delivered to the fornax scientists, following constraints surrounding access to the control room and rumination over internal sabotage, it was decided to try to contact the general public instead, which could additionally generate enough outcry to encourage investigation into fornax practices. it doesn’t matter where this message is directed to all that needs to happen is for it to gain the conscious attention of a single other human being who’s willing to report fornax to authorities, using this speech as proof.
the way the message is first sent out in the story is through the evoker. its discovered its database contains a wide array of geographical and temporal information, which can be used to form a communicative window when mixed with an abstract use of clairvoyant code. so olzhas uses eir telepathy to divert the evokers programming for this purpose, freya delivers the speech itself, dalisay is brought along to keep this telepathic window stable since the other two are occupied. this first attempt is destined to fail no matter what and the message only really… kicks into gear in the cassiopeia success end. onomastically evidently.
this ending deals with confronting mazin in the control room after peixin opens it up, though the wider train community is unprivy to it as a result of the trainwide meeting never occurring. instead freya decides to try the control room approach again. and so the three, alongside dalisay, go in and rework all the tech in there. after its fixed freya and olzhas prepare to broadcast the message again, whilst isel and dalisay stand guard a few rooms away in case mazin and peixin try to interfere. the broadcast does work this time but in the midst of it isel dies trying to fend off mazin, whatever, point is the goal’s achieved in this ending. and it is better for everyone if it actually ISN’T.
outside of these two no more grand attempts are made for communication, in any ending. in fact in the perfect end these three harbor a kind of sympathy for dalisay and they actually willingly meld their motivation with dalisay’s ambition for retrieval — dalisay does agree to bring attention to fornax’s mismanagement after they return, planning to utilise their resulting recognition after fixing the train. this is also harmonious with ulises’ demand to have dalisay shut the fornax project down to restrict the chance of her and the octants being rediscovered. good shit for everyone involved. collaboration always does the trick thumps up.
but to get into some like. characterisation stuff and the way cassiopeia functions in that regard…
perhaps the most essential thing to think of when thinking of cassiopeia is that it is, at its core, made up by three assholes trying to interfere with interdimensional magic on a grand scale solely to prove a point. it would be easier to simply go to the control room in the first place and fix the wiring there, it would be easier to collaborate with everyone else on the train for proper escape, literally any other idea imaginable is probably more practical than what these three are wading into at the start. and theres some awareness about this but its ignored in favor of… the presentation, let’s say.
very consciously these three want to do something grandiose. more specifically i guess its freya who’s always had this vague pretence of the magic scene and found it cool but she’s never gotten seriously into it compared to someone like dalisay… she knows all kinds of things are possible and knows how they work vaguely but she doesn’t really want to pay attention to the consequences or conventional methods. she has this semi-detachment just acute enough for her to pursue things that seem sound enough without actually ensuring they are. she has this whimsy about magic, regarding it as a fantastical force — in one regard, she’s right, for this openness allows her to commune with fornax, but at the same time when discussing magic as it is found in the regular world, it is very much a type of math with rules and consequences to consider… her choice immaturity specifically entwining with her lack of experience would truthfully distinguish her as a terrible programmer but hey, it’s not like anyone on the train knows enough or cares enough to stop her from interfering. and this freedom to simply mess around is loopfully what feeds her drive to get weirder and weirder about brainstorming ways to leave fornax.
olzhas’ involvement in cassiopeia serves to contest freya’s notions since e’s basically a living example of magic in its code form… a quick important note is also olzhas being a programming student who detested the art. though e could not care less about proper programming much like freya, e does understand it on a technical level somewhat by virtue of being clairvoyant and both experiencing the spell’s limitations firsthand and reminiscing on the instructions e was given when e first got it. code is quite literally imbued in eir body, e emself is a canvas for code, e represents the spirit of solid written code, whatever. e’s a precise allegory for freya’s desire to meld the world around her as she pleases, and eir relatively easy conceding maybe doesn’t help thon build a solid material ego in the long run.
this does contrast against isel, though, who e’s much more vitriolic about. and that’s partially because magic is this transient thing between the two of them specifically — isel’s partial blockouts of eir mindreading were the thing that initially drew olzhas to him, and conversely olzhas obeying isel’s stipulation to never read his mind and be invasive. the very absence of magic in their relationship sort of signifies their assumed straightforwardness and earthiness — kind of becoming ironic during the outbreak of their communication issues and eventual shared contempt.
as mentioned they can eventually shed their pride to help dalisay out but its like. they still take a lot of the credit and act kind of vain about their contributions. the whole lot. LOL
so isel and olzhas’ relationship on the whole focuses deeply on the idea of like. rescue and saviorship. it initially stated off with olzhas helping isel adjust to train life, and of course when cassiopeia became a thing the script got flipped and olzhas staked eir claim to the role of the “damsel” instead.
a way to describe this. olzhas’ involvement in cassiopeia is at first tangential and self isolating — e believes communication is a waste of time, is grappling with the idea of leaving the train in the first place, and is generally unelated about isel diving into risky investigations once more. e keeps emself ‘separate’ from the other two for months, freya lightly pushing em toward cassiopeia and isel going all out with the persuasion incessantly. he wishes to pull olzhas away from the cold tendrils of cluelessness, believing eir ignorance to just be born out of misunderstanding… indeed isel wants olzhas back more than anything, both because eir clairvoyance is a vital part of the cassiopeia plan and more personally, because he still harbors romantic feelings for em. olzhas however denies, directly despises even, the idea of being “saved”. in general e prefers to get a tactile understanding of something and learn how to do it emself, and there’s nothing more detestable to em than someone sweeping in under eir nose and basically doing eir job for em. olzhas thinks of leaving the train as a personal responsibility, e hates isel making it a big deal for the rest of the world, and e hates isel for trying to pry eir experience out of em.
of course it is only when olzhas actually gets sufficient agency that e decides to join the cassiopeia effort — freya asks em to use eir powers alongside the evoker, which is important both because it’s freya who e’ll do anything for already AND because she pauses eir involvement in the middle… it’s adequate enough detachment because freya only needs em for this one task and doesn’t force em into anything more grandiose. though it’s a little thing, it’s enough wiggle room for olzhas to be content. and in the very end this openness is what leads em to pursuing cassiopeia till the very end.
this proper detachment is honestly what gets the two to see eye to eye with one another eventually. cassiopeia, as a concept, between isel and olzhas is somewhat poisoned by their earlier misgivings — olzhas sees isel as an obfuscative yarn spinner and so lacks trust in his ideas, isel sees olzhas as a coward detrimented by eir own hesitance. there’s a rift between them that they’re both too stubborn to address. hence freya acting as a third party and basically going “hey. you need to get this shit done for ME” to both of them about the opposing’s ideals — with freya independently seeking olzhas out and proposing the evoker plan, and also her wrangling isel’s initial wish to contact the scientists into something far more simple — is what diffuses the tension. this wasn’t really an intentional thing, freya more or less just exploited isel and olzhas’ separate sensibilities for her own sake and that ended up opening both of them up, which further just ended up fixing their relationship LOL.
another thing i want to dwell on is like. i guess the sort of style these three carry themselves with. they’re very much the result of a ‘savior complex’ state of mind where they basically view themselves as all-important and infallible. this belief flows through a sliding scale with olzhas being somewhat apprehensive about this mindset (albeit partaking in it, because that is the way e Is) and the other two having much more conviction in their ‘right’ to send their broadcast and hence their entire purpose on the train. they like viewing themselves as these wise prophetic figures, to the point where they look down on every other train philosophy — and in some cases, everyone else who isn’t a part of cassiopeia.
this is more marrow from their influences seeping into the meat but. there’s a vague sort of ‘religious’ thought to them as well. i equate a lot of (freya especially) talking to fornax as though addressing a god, the entire attitude of being ‘privy’ to the evoker akin to sacredness, even the broadcast itself carries a kind of prayerlike tone. i feel this drags their arc into cliché and so i doubt i’ll stress on it too heavily but… some consideration. perspective.
BEATRIX THOUGHTS
Originally written in the spring of 2023.
trying to think of what the hell i want to do with her.
overall she has this ‘authoritative’ position in the story or at least conducts herself in that manner. kind of being an anti-isel in terms of indeed wanting to project a formal and organised archetype of herself and maybe overdoing it — her fatal flaw is again never wanting to be wrong but instead of people like isel who just avoid sincerity and lean into vagueness or olzhas who’s just deeply bitter and dismissive, she’s much more ‘active’ and tries to find ways to prove herself even after refutation. kind of the principle of ‘she will twist the world around her to match her perception of it’ but not literally… it’s just this thick air of intimidation, she speaks like shes got like a spreadsheet shes constructing going on in her mind all the time… its not even organisation but just. this sense of being very prepared and ready to outline conclusions about anything — it feels like she’s always ready to run an experiment. in that way she also reflects ulises’ tendencies, albeit in a much more harsh ‘set in her ways’ type manner… if ulises aligns perself with the notion of everchanging science and adoration for improvement, beatrix views mistakes as pure missteps that have no material worth in the end… a more scathing mathematical view of things. she has this thing of being very ‘studied’ and contrarian to anything new, kind of reflected in her attitude about magic where she’s super skeptical of it. and also her entire motivation thing of trying to make a proper ‘map’ of the train and fornax and making diagrams and taking notes and shit that kind of goes nowhere. because shes being so overcalculated and unwilling to suspend her disbelief…
conversationally she spends a lot of time prodding people and kind of ‘poking holes’ in their logic, thus adopting a pseudoantagonistic routine with most other characters — it’s often not actual offense thats intended and she’s either just trying to understand someone’s worldview or trying to help them iron it out. she can be very rude about it yet doesn’t care about how she comes off because she has this whole thing of ‘doing it for the greater good’ and ‘forging skills in fire’ and whatever. i suppose a good part of her arc deals with critiquing her own abrasiveness and unnecessary pressure, she’s got her thing of overanalysis and intellectualisation which not only exhausts the people around her but also herself. but she doesnt really know any other way to deal with the world so its just what she turns to instinctively. yknow. dalisay’s own flippantness and whole ideal of hearing people out just starts to infect her own senses and her caution starts to shed over time… for her i do think a huge confrontation scene with someone else would help kind of rationalise her arc since she comes in at the end of the story and a huge majority of it takes place in the intermission anyway… and itd be weird to rush things. thinking about it there’s some unresolved threads between her and somsak that i think could be used to bring both of them to the forefront a bit more. plus theres some stuff i can do in the control room portion of the narrative that could sort of ‘show off’ her progression and willignness to support others
thoughts on marjolaine are basically a vexing frustration with him… “i’ve always been smart so i must have fallen for him for SOME reason and i’m waiting to rediscover it/waiting for him to go back to how he once was” type thing. she backtracked on her divorce specifically because she thought it was something that proved her knowledge and wisdom fraudulent, and though she does still have conflicted feelings about marjo they’re kind of secondary… she views her marriage as an ‘external affair’ to give her prestige and accomplishment more than anything personal. i want to have this strong ambiguity about, at least from beatrix’s side, if these feelings only arose after marjolaine’s isolation and waning self-esteem or if she’s always had this view of their togetherness because i think it’s interesting that way.
a lot i want to go over with mazin also. lol. they were friends for a reason and then they were not friends anymore for a reason. also i dont think i ever gave an actual timeframe for when they sort of split off from one another so actually? i think its interesting if it happens around the time dalisay arrives exactly. adds some edge to mazin’s whole shtick and his desperation to pressure dalisay
she also has a lot of similarities with thuyết which im choosing to textually express only through olzhas. because ow. in a proper regard there’s parallels between their rejection of zeitgeist in fields where it’s like. not about the possibility of doing something but more just social norms that restrict specific experimentation and ways of thinking… thuyết’s weird houses and beatrix’s off-the-wall proposals for fantastical futures bear similarity. they also both heavily look toward the past and sort of get ‘lost’ in it sometimes. and they’re both critical of magic and it’s uses, although beatrix evidently far more so than thuyết — which is where olzhas as a lynchpin in demonstrating this attitude kind of shines… e regards them both as very pushy ‘old’ people who refuse to change with the times and, more personally, refuse to think of em beyond eir clairvoyant ability. which makes em mad because that translates into a lot of contempt and disrespect thrown eir way. which is evidently something e refuses to deal with so e emself gets all bitter about it haha
she also has her whole thing of allegorising the people around her into pre-set narratives and archetypes, showing off her own ignorance and quickness to judge others at face value. and through this i actually kind of want to introduce a parallel to cas with the entire nicknames for everyone thing… though i think in literal conversation she’d actually be very formal and mostly use last names for people (lol) she’d have her own system of nicknames to refer to people in metaphor. im thinking of just very fable/fairytale esque animal likenings for people, but if i want to be REALLY pretentious which is how SHE is, im honestly looking toward jungian archetypes because yeahhhh stupid fucking psychology bullshit shed be into
also has the thing of like. being a kind of ‘judge’ on a metaphor level, a lot of old mythos type imagery with regards to scales and justice and whatnot… her entire thing about rationalisation and sense kind of extends into wanting people to have ‘alibis’ for themselves or she herself crafting one for someone (read: marjolaine). she has a lot of ideas about how things ‘should’ be and acts to fulfil her vision but everyone around her is way too freeform to really conform to her ideals. naturally. so in the end shes this weird idol of authority and rules who’s rules are too contrived and overcomplicated for anyone else to follow, thus everyone else ‘disrespecting’ her and not recognising her as a true figure of authority. even though she very well could be if only she properly considered the desires of the people around her
overall. huge problem with trying to give things structure and being stubborn about it u_u her rigidness makes her stick out from everyone else… she’s most similar to mazin, in terms of writing, but what differentiates her is her pursuit of the truth type thing. mazin is good at improvising and will use it to enhance his image whenever he can and he has no qualms about lying but contrastly beatrix will scour for the truth until she finds an answer that satisfies her… even if it’s a pointless search she’ll eventually just privately give up on.
SEZIM AND FRANCES PERSONAL META
Originally written in the autumn of 2023.
the facsimiles are technically not 1:1 copies of olzhas and marjolaine from back in the day — the formation of those guys’ physical forms involved fornax digging into the living’s respective memories. famously inconsistent and biased facets of life. though in the end i’d say they actually were moulded quite well (since fornax did partially depend on the memories of… well, everyone else on the train too and not just marjolaine, alongside certain ghosts who may have a better active remembrance of certain people in their olden days…) but there’s just like. very mild uncanny valley variations that maybe aren’t even noticeable unless compared to the person the facsimile’s based on directly or maybe when seeing the facsimile’s face at a certain angle. for example frances’ face is much softer than marjolaine’s — and yes part of it is because frances is like 20 years younger but also fornax loosely based itself off of marjolaine’s perception of her old self, which of course she’d see as maybe even more young and “approachable” than she actually was) — although this difference hardly reads as an inconsistency unless one were to like pull up an image of early 2090s marjolaine to compare.
similarly there’s bits of the facsimiles that lack the depth of their ‘living’ counterparts… the most major example that can express this is in fact sezim’s clairvoyance tattoo, which… is an unfinished, dithered block of stray squares that mostly leaves their chest bare. they completely lack any telepathic ability, and possess only limited shapeshifting capability — not that that’s that much of a problem considering their residence in fornax, which grants all its residents such freeformality, but if they were to get hypothetically extracted from fornax and made into an individual guy, it sure would just… turn out mostly null. the reason for this breakdown is simply because the clairvoyance code is so ridiculously overcomplicated that obviously olzhas never committed it to memory visually, nor did anyone else who’s known em and seen eir chest. which is already a very slim amount of people. in a sense fornax just gave up midway through constructing a ‘body’ for sezim and just left them with a staggering inaccuracy there. adding on to that i imagine there’s small things that the facsimiles lack compared to olzhas and marjolaine — something like the mole on olzhas’ stomach being completely missing from sezim and frances lacking a few scars of marjolaine’s.
a very vital thing to understanding frances and sezim’s relationship is that like. the outline for its structure is very hazy and that’s by design, very literally within the way i conduct the narrative but also metaphysically for the two of them as fauxhumans… there’s an innate fondness the two of them have for one another and maybe they trespass over the boundary of friendship into a more romantic shtick one day only for that ‘boundary’ to change into a romantic one that gets trampled on by like. simple affection or even outright sexual desire the very next day, and even then all those categorisations should feel like incomplete categorisations and compartmentalisations of something far more intangible and visceral. if anything there’s this near-medieval, chivalric couple element to their dynamic, where there’s a lot of just. very casual intimacy that kind of goes unquestioned and unthought of… they just have this natural magnetism toward one another that even outsiders can immediately glimpse into — dalisay internally notes that sezim gets much more soft-spoken when discussing frances and sie kind of reveres this fact — it simply makes sense that the two of them conjoin and unite in their own particular little way. furthermore the idea of chivalry also feels potent since it’s a kind of reflection of the general cassiopeiac theatrical motif, but woven into something wholly new and independent. sezim and frances borrow freely from marjolaine’s repertoire of literature and classics and meld that with the aforementioned… connecting them to knighthood and the ideas there of servitude and incubation wrt honing one’s skills feels befitting.
to endure that imagery a bit more. other connections i want to articulate revolve around the whole conception of exile in such writing. depending on the characters the physical space of fornax can completely alternate in meaning — for freya and isel it’s a trove of possibility that can help them manufacture their miracle; for demeter it’s a symbol of remembrance that insists on remaining abstract in their mind, in spite of the fact that by assigning poetic correspondence to the dead is quite materially right; for peixin it’s the site of their death, constantly grasping for their full attention… for frances and sezim, fornax adopts the shape of a so-called ‘sacred grove’ that obscures the majority of their affairs. and naturally there’s no other characters who can better epitomise the ideal of fornax as a respectable, comforting chrysalis — although the two facsimiles have memories of earth and of ‘existence’ they’ve rejected those old lives (and the idea of anthropomorphic life in general) and have freely embraced their existence as newfound embodiments and “idols” of the code that dictates all laws of entropy and logic… so though there’s this rejection of humanity, it’s a vague, sullen castaway philosophy that doesn’t strictly include the abandonment of ‘sentience’. to put it bluntly, the facsimiles have taken fornax and made it their house whilst also being the house itself — and a house is so much more gargantuan and grandiose in physical stature than a human ever could be! and surely that implies a divine acclaim to superseding humanity and paying no mind to its insipid drama and conflict…
by beholding such an attitude, the facsimiles do a couple of things… first of all they kind of ‘tempt’ dalisay to fan out hir sparking ideals for negotiation, painting everyone else on the train as utterly unreasonable and unsatisfisble. which actually does plant some doubt in dalisay’s mind — upon meeting the facsimiles hir internal monologue starts regularly forming odd kinds of affirmation trailing around the point “it would be so much easier if i didn’t go through all this trouble for x and y!” though sie kind of triumphs over a proper injection of defeatism because uhh. the facsimiles come up around intermission times. and at that point dalisay’s already just secured a dozen of friendships with people who have expressedly helped hir out or have been kind to hir. hir thoughts of abandoning hir resolution comes across as a silly pipe dream even to hirself.
secondly this method of proposition intentionally tramples over the ghosts and their much more pedantic insistence on dalisay crafting a web of connections and keeping tabs on people. and even though dalisay’s closer aligned to those wants — not even necessarily out of active allegiance to the ghosts as individuals, it just corresponds with hir want to “do right” by everyone around hir, helping people out became a part of hir itinerary very early on! — the ghosts technically impose a far feebler narrative push on dalisay due to their physical and conversational distance from hir. so even if sezim can very plainly and audibly enforce the idea of throwing everyone to the dogs in dalisay’s mind, the ghosts with their whispers of necessary elaboration and entanglement win out. there’s some commentary in there about pathos and knowing how to appeal to people — entrusting another layer of sediement onto the constant motif of persuasion, sympathy and earnest communication in CCS — perhaps more plainly the idea that “loudness” or even “charm” can’t always take you anywhere you please, especially when faced with sense. it entwines with isel’s struggles of sincerity and manipulation dare i say, at the very least when regarding sezim as the major perpetrator of this facet.
third of all there’s actually kind of a homely expression in the way the facsimiles regard fornax and their place within it. though you could argue certain characters like thuyết are happy enough to reside in fornax, it’s mostly a translocation of misery for the dead. so, once more, and as aforementioned, the facsimiles contrast the ghosts as figures that are quite literally born of fornax and wouldn’t have it any other way. this adoration of fornax as a refuge from prying eyes also extends to an earlier point of ‘narrative privacy’ and the blurry line the duo treads when it comes to interpersonal connection. the facsimiles remain obscure throughout ccs, really, outside of their adamant and boisterous desires to differentiate themselves from their origin points, and that’s kind of because any other kind of menial, plain desire they may partake of remains “undercooked” at this point in time.