THE NATURE OF PHANTASM ALLEGORIES

Originally written in Autumn of 2022.

so this is a bit of rumination about things ive thought about for… months at this point but have only now really figured out how to word.

very first thing i will say is the way spells are designed in the worldbuilding i… intentionally kept them hazey, adaptable and nonspecific. whether between the different spells or different characters relationships with them. this is because i find direct allegories like meds or drugs or whatever inaccurate and unhelpful, because i want to drive home the idea of this being an innovative part of futuristic cosmetic science never before explored, and because i follow what feels natural for different character arcs. as with everything there’s many ways to read these constructs but my intent, plainly put, is evaluated here.

regardless. on a characterisational level spells always have one thing in common and its that they impact the projections characters have — which, considering self-perception is an integral theme of ccs, is fairly important.

easiest to visit because its just like. very plainly part of her character arc is faris’ relationship with her lycanthropy. faris has always been a very schizotypal sort of person, she’s always struggled to think of herself as a living breathing person instead of just some nebulous foggy collection of past experiences and thoughts. over the years this emptiness has broadened into a general concotion of dysmorphia and dysphoria… she’s long been flippant about the way she looks or if she’s injured or anything of the sort just because what happens to her body isn’t something that really affects her in a meaningful way. which is why she tossed herself into wrestling quite eagerly — her lack of desire to look out for herself made acting as a ruthless foe easy and her ‘unbreakable’ attitude was something people were quickly endeared to, which… only enabled her to indulge in this hardiness. she found a lot of fulfilment in this for better or for… the more accurate worse.

eventually, in some fucking way… she sees an ad, she overhears someone talk about it, whatever, when she’s around 21 she finds out about the phantasm spells being open to public and starts to feel this intense draw toward lycanthropy. she’s still very much grappling with her humanity in a way of detriment and so her superego’s pounding around ‘you are so strange that you are not a person! you are a beast!’ type anathema at her. she’s at the peak of her derealisation and so she forms this deep fixation toward attaining the ability to miraculously, be able to shed off her human skin for what she’s internalised she is. fixated, she sets aside as much money as she can for the procedure and, within a few months time, manages to get enough to go through with it.

as a quick detour since ive never fucking mentioned it i should say most spells are like… not luxuriously expensive but they still cost quite a bit. like the phantasm collection in particular probably costs slightly less than a car. what makes them ‘exclusive’ is the application process SOMEWHAT and also an inertiatic phenomenon where a lot of people resign from the procedure last second for no apparent sensible reason. in truth it’s something about magic rejecting a person and basically scaring their brain away from synthesis with it. whatever. point is like 50% of people who sign up for spells tattoo-style cancel the appointment. people who have spells are a very very small margin of the world and the fact that there are three on the train is already kind of abnormal LOL

anyway. back to faris in particular.

she adjusts very quickly to her wolf form and genuinely wishes she could use it like. all the time but the general imaginable impracticalities that come with being a 7 foot tall wolf man kind of limit that prospect. regardless she very quickly decides she’s going to make her gimmick her lycanthropy because hey, it’s someting never done before and it’s not like there’s any rules against it. this propels her into further zeitgeist and fame, once more cementing her idea of inhumanity being… something she should limitlessly embrace, for lack of better terms.

years later she’s… i wouldn’t say in as much of a bad spot as she was before she even had lycanthropy, but a new discomfort’s settled where she’s burnt out on her old visage of ruthlessness and endurance and all. she’s grown to detest the way her lycanthropy’s been positied to the general public and so takes a break from wrestling to come to terms with basically everything she’s simply been discarding. this isolation quickly leads to frantic thinking about using her lycanthropy to do something ‘good’, as vaguely defined in her brain as it is here, and so looks around for something she can ‘fix’ with her powers.

she eventually finds out about fornax and, having thoughts along the lines of ‘what if the reason the train’s stuck is because something or someone is holding it back, i know how to fight people i can do that and save everyone who’s still alive and hence finally find some meaning in my sad sad life’. and so she propels herself into this task only to find that on fornax, her powers are practically revoked. so now she’s in an unfamiliar place and she’s also lost the one thing that’s given her any sense of stability in her life. her misanthropy and hermitry therefore take over once more, returning her to her younger sullenness…

since the two’s journeys are conjoined i’m stepping into the way valerie regards her vampirism now.

so a lot of valerie’s early life was basically just drifting between different kinds of arts, being regarded as a kind of prodigy in her local area — considering the emphasis on aesthetics and design in ccs times this is exceptionally prestigious… in a sense she was kind of regarded as a renaissance person who had a great future ahead of her, and she was enthused to work under this mantle at first. she enrolled a multitude of courses and classes whether based on visual arts or drama or dance and she worked to balance them. though her talent gave her a good upper hand this amount of strain meant she often had little personal time for herself and she spent most of her time working towards this polymathic ideal she’s been conducted toward. and truly she enjoys the work she does she’s just… thrown a lot of it on herself asynchroniously. and it’s no good.

by the time she was an adult this pressure had like… mounted into an overbearing fatigue and as a result val became extremely out of touch with reality. she decided to put a pause on all her work and spend some time travelling under the guise of an ‘inspiration break’ as not to concern her family and friends, though truly it was a matter of trying to ‘force’ her exhaustion out of her mind by changing her scenery. she very pointedly didn’t want to abandon all her practices at once and deemed this a pause indeed, but at the back of her mind there was this vague enticing idea of her abandoning all she knew whilst on her travels and taking up a completely different line of work. though tempting she knew it wasn’t what she really wanted, and she simply let this fester into daydream.

few months later she decided to stay in boston, her first destination, indefinitely. during her time here she got an offer to design a clothing line which she took as an opportunity to test her abilities freely, and after relative success, she got a job about it, details aren’t important what is important is that it was the start of her sticking to a single thing and being able to relax… it’s her finally settling into her craft and finding independence in the menagrie of the artistic world. she views all her knowledge in her past studies as simple experience instead of responsibilities she needs to undertake all at once.

a side effect of her overwork however has been a shift into a more… nocturnal lifestyle, so to speak. because she grew accustomed to spending a lot of daytime sleeping and most of her productivity arising well into the night, even after returning to stability she maintained this schedule, which she felt was a better exercise of her abilities. she also developed a fascination with nighttime in general, often finding it inspiring to walk around in the city late at night, or sometimes, even take small voyages with the train system, visiting foreign places and coming back home by daybreak.

she had a passing knowledge of spells and actually often used temporary ones for aesthetic purposes along the years, though only around this time did she properly discover the phantasm collection. vampirism in itself was posited as a product for insomniacs which val very much was LOL. and so on a whim she decided to get it for herself to support her night wanderings… the nature of this attainment is far less weighty in contrast to faris (and even olzhas kinda. once i get to em) and it’s very much a case of like… vampirism being representitive of val restructuring her life and finding autonomy in all she does, she is clearing a path for herself and becoming more aimless to her own benefit. she got a magic spell just because she could! why not!

it didn’t take long for her to grow accustomed to her powers and she was genuinely amazed at how much smoother her journeys became following application — night vision was helpful for obvious reasons, extendable claws were a comfort if ever she felt unsafe, her pseudo-telepathy worked well in tandem when she was trying to find directions to places or simply wanted to find someone to talk to… it’s helped her feel better adjusted and more in control which was something she’d, evidently, been looking for for ages.

outside of this val’s perception of her vampirism doesn’t change much after this point, beyond maybe her indeed finding it more cosmetically cool as time’s gone by. it’s really just another progression in her self-confidence… what does change however is her attitude toward her visits. though initially they were a source of inspiration and freshness she’s spent so many days sifting through every locale that she’s unable to draw anything new from them and so she enters a relatively heavy period of burnout that frustrates her… which ofc eventually leads to her choosing to enter fornax as an environment not even experienced by most other people, the exclusiveness of which she finds intriguing enough to pursue. and then the octants are mostly inaccessible and even after witnessing the fornax reality she still feels as dull as ever. sad!

this is where val and faris’ friendship kicks in… they both felt foolish about their pursuits and very easily bonded over that. there’s also an interesting contrast in the way their spells exist and manifest — faris who basically depended on her lycanthropy for proper livelihood, val’s vampirism was an aid she could do with or without, and it’s val who maintains her powers whilst faris doesn’t. i’ll probably get into this some more in an individual chapter between them because their dynamic is very interesting to me… but that’s the gist.

now for clairvoyance. which is kind of busier. naturally.

olzhas’ telepathy is, almost entirely, a diplomatic possession. the entire reason e got the clairvoyance spell in the first place is because e never really understood other people and the way they operated — e acknowledged this as a personal shortcoming and flaw, e broadly thinks e’s at a disadvantage compared to others, for em attaining telepathy is a sort of ‘stair’ to place em on even ground with the everyman. though e’s notoriously one to complain e was never really one to gloom around with no hope for resolution — e pressed aside eir mild resentment towards others and their refusal to listen to em, and instead looked for the most productive and quick solution to eir social problems. which was indeed clairvoyance. 

EVIDENTLY as the years have gone by, both because being stuck on a train ride for years with the same 10-ish people does shit to you and because people naturally improve with time, olzhas has matured far more and shed this assumption. though e used to use eir telepathy pretty much 24/7, barring times it was naturally shut off, by the time the story rolls around e utilises it more like an occasional tool in casual conversation. e’s now more willing to fill in the gaps of trivial stuff using eir own personal thoughts and overall just accepts its impossible to always respond to people with what they want to hear. and this sort of early mindset was fashioned again out of years of noncomittalness and dormancy. arriving to the train expanded on eir confidence, eir faith in eir own readings of others, and overall eir dependence on eir clairvoyance.

however there’s a contrast to this. technically never comes to fruition in the story as an epilogual thing but there’s setup for it and easy parallels to make. so dalisay gets the clairvoyance spell applied to hir a few months following the train journey. hir motivations are far more… pragmatic, so to speak? a major part of hir personality is frustration with others and a need to always be aware of everything going on. however, oppositorily to olzhas, sie thinks anytime sie misses something it’s not a personal falling but instead, a failure on the people around hir. and so sie seeks telepathy as an elevation — sie’s antisocial and wishes to cleanly ‘pry’ thoughts out for personal projects as not to fiddle with others and waste time, or in other words, ‘bother’ anyone… sie seeks essential communication, so quick it’s like automation. which is exactly what telepathy allows for. 

another matter is the shapeshifting thing. to establish whenever i first made olzhas and decided e was going to have shapeshifting powers i immediately decided ‘ok. this guy’s barely going to use them.’ and when i asked myself why i ended up coming up with like… a very precise line of thought about how shapeshifting as a concept is kind of terrifying if there’s no default ‘state’ of yourself to return to unless manually shaped. which is a concept i find very interesting and rarely executed in media… “if something alters who you are entirely why should it remember a nondescript form of a concept rendered nebulous and flimsy by the willing adoption of vagueness.” to reword, shapeshifting is something defined by constant change — is it uncomfortable to be so rootless?

and so olzhas is someone who rejects this burden, not through the ‘i’ll embrace my constant changes’ mindset i find overdone but instead through a compulsive avoidance of the full extent of eir ability to remould emself. e’s someone who very distinctly had to toil to become happy with who e is, and e views shapeshifting as a way to tear emself away from all that effort. effort and experience, in general, are olzhas’ main principles and wiping everything indicative of that away for a clean slate naturally ends up perceived as something nightmareish! 

additionally the only things olzhas ever alters are like… not even minute details, but things that have a sort of disconnect from either feeling like something that’s being ‘fixed’ or it’s em giving emself traits that aren’t naturally attainable by humans. like e keeps eir teeth sharpened, e occasionally extends eir nails like claws, the most ‘typical’ change e undergoes is changing eir height but even then e thinks of it as a utility thing and moreover, changing a ‘whole’ rather than fiddling with minute fixtures of emself. its things that don’t rupture eir individuality or, otherwise, would cause discrepancies in eir selfhood to change.

as a followup i can’t imagine dalisay using shapeshifting much either. which is perhaps indicative of most traingoers being weird insular freaks who are very content with who they are as people. anyway. though not as sensitive about their perception of themself — they believe so long as the mind is intact a person remains the same regardless of whatever changes — dalisay also finds it strange to try and use shapeshifting as a way to ‘fix’ oneself just because, plainly put, they’re fond enough of their appearance already. they also probably find the whole setback of ‘you need to study and understand how a certain altered body part works before you can shift it out’ too cumbersome to bother with. all kinds of grievences to the point where if they could they’d just redo the clairvoyance code and ask someone to apply it to them but that’s highly illicit LOL

i feel like ive talked about olzhas’ powers on eir page an excessive amount but to briefly compare them to dalisay’s hypothetical ones, i think overall olzhas still maintains the higher level of telepathic stability whilst dalisay’s far better at subverting the limitations of clairvoyance (such as automatic shutoffs). dalisay’d also be far more precise about when they’d mindread as to avoid detection, whilst olzhas of course just brute forces mindreads regardless of awkward conversational silence and whatnot. also olzhas notably excels at thought broadcast and i don’t think it’s something dalisay would be interested in matching since they have way less use for it…