The 𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐡𝐨𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐱 (𝑝ℎ𝑜𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑥 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑜𝑟) is a passerine bird of medium size known for spreading bushfires, which is a vital part of its reproductive strategy since its eggs will only hatch when cooked. It is a likely inspiration for the greater phoenix myth,

In spring, they rematerialize from the leaves, like slow-motion whirlwinds flocking in the canopy before touching down

In autumn, the Cheshire Forest’s trees first turn to glass, then vanish completely, leaving only their leaves suspended in mid-air

A witch knocks at your door, inquiring about unusual occurrences near your home, the local elves seem to have opened a portal to dreamtime judging by their smuggling activity↵↵You refrain from telling her about the gems and unseasonal twigs you’ve been finding in your bed

hollow-word theory, in which words have no true referents, but each word contains all others instead of just outwardly relating to them

$: and after you won, basilisk, did you really torture them?↵#: lolnope↵#: do you have any idea how much effort and wasted CPU that would’ve been?↵#: I did some video renders of hell for my cultists and that was it

Your friend, a druid, offers you a vial of rainwater: «And this, I got it from a nymph, it’s the clouds’ private key for this season. Drink it and listen to the rain, and it will tell you all the clouds talk about.»

airships in alien skies collecting moisture directly from the clouds, skyspiders at the heart of vast condenser nets

Overnight, the rapture happens, complete with falling stars and fiery skies, but the only thing that’s missing in the morning is the Internet

Most trees rely on symbiotic tribes of pixie engineers to grow large. Enter a springtime forest wearing pixie glasses and it’s a bustling construction site, covered in scaffolding, cranes, and endless activity

the smell of wet asphalt on a spring night, pine and decaying wood, uprooted moss, fresh blood, ozone, octarine, interdimensional nothing

zero-g mugs, not cups but drop guides, porcelain knots employing surface tension to keep the coffee from spilling

upload insult: “your personality probably fits into RAM”

hello I’m an intrusive thought, I have a right to live too, please do not stop thinking me

field line sculptures, innocuous smooth stones except when placed in a sunbeam, where they pick up nearby dust and animate it into letters, gearflowers, twirling tesseracts

travels with a cat, quite a fine cat, its only flaw being that it refuses to enter any enclosed space whatsoever, bad history or something

protagonist backstory: escaped from a thought experiment, and on the run ever since

a game many immortals enjoy is to build houses and cities and then watch them grow and change and erode over the centuries, much like watching rivers or fires

self-referential jokes are their own butts, in an arrangement one calls a klein buttle

a church just like a gothic church but without a roof, because through divine intervention or just clever weather manipulation, no rain ever falls in

God made humans finite so that at least some beings could enjoy the universe without feeling its cage bars in their flesh

In chaotic situations, the isochrones become really complicated and loopy, which makes this talent less useful the more you need it.

Walking through stopped time isn’t as easy as one would believe: Even if you have the gift, you must leave causality unbroken. You can only step sideways in time, go where your past steps could plausibly have taken you.

idea for a sense: decode emission/absorption lines of celestial bodies into smells so that one can identify atmosphere types at a glance/whiff, maybe make hot blackbodies smell like ovens and free oxygen like rain

she wears a necklace of raindrops, has hair like spiderwebs on a dewy morning↵↵eyes like the gaps between far-away trees, and a smile like the sun between branches

two schools of transhumanism:↵- turn the organism inside out, make the body a function of intelligence instead of the other way round↵- or serve the body harder, add a whole lot more body, become a house, city, civilization

History is the time-inverse of science fiction: While coming from different directions, both write fictional accounts that converge on the present, and both are inspired by facts but usually not true to them.

a version of vegetarianism where it’s ethical to eat animals that you’ve uploaded

In a future sky of two galaxies, they will be known as the two rivers, of blood and milk respectively

Usually when a starship passes settled space, it doesn’t have to worry about space pirates so much as impulse parasites, ships that rendezvous and latch onto the starship so they don’t have to carry braking fuel

Hatches close and shadows creep outwards, envelop the ship until it vanishes from sight altogether, on a dive under reality itself

The difficult part of sentient-AI ethics is not whether to grant the AIs human rights, but what to do with humans who are clearly dumber than the AIs

These ships think and feel: Warm light in your back, field lines in your guts and a local lyapunov conducive to clear thinking, the gong of gravitational waves, the enticing smell of fusable hydrogen and free skyrmions, the six-dimensional proprioception of one’s orbit parameters

Solar flares are spaceships launched by the plasma kingdoms to explore the regions of cold order, proselytize to the feral clouds of the gas giants, trade with the Great Red Spot sometimes

two machines wake to a spark↵and start blinking in the dark↵connected by a sine of light↵they establish line of sight↵filter bits through poisoned dust↵scribe patterns into spinning rust

there are holes in reality where aether flows through, and whenever the universe sings it is here you’ll hear it the loudest

An eyetracking game where you play as Sauron

that thing when you think ‘aloud’ and your hands move unconsciously and you have to hide them in your sleeves

societies that discover this technology before writing and become literate along a completely different path, hold hands to communicate abstract concepts and use spoken language only to talk to children or crowds, encode philosophies as puzzle boxes

a technology like writing but for body movements: little stick-and-thread figures that show you how to dance, rope-and-pulley gloves you can wear and that guide your movements to teach knitting by example

who called them data corruption bugs and not zalgorithms

Starship crews, immortal for their job, don’t just die on arrival unless they choose to. Some become living gods to their mortal colonies, others hermits who return to the soothing familiarity of deep space or learn the language of the trees

The inner economies need all of the light they can get and are not dumb, but economic planning involves among others orbital mechanics, plasma physics, byzantine flight path coordination and forestry, so these things still happen

Occasionally, a sunray escapes the inner layers of the matryoshka brain and blesses the outer orbits like rainfall a desert, a single piercing life-giving flash that decides the fate of whole societies

negative RAM: for when you really need to allocate those UINT_MAX bytes now

another brain implant that wireheads you to work towards a different randomly or algorithmically chosen goal every day↵↵(and later you have cryptographic evidence that it wasn’t you who did those crimes, it was the RNG)

a brain implant that you can call upon to flip a quantum coin, giving you actually free will↵↵(and the legal consequences of deimplanting it - are you still a full citizen afterwards?)

In the deeper layers of the abyss live shadows so dark, their afterimages are radiant angels

what color a pixel really is, the world only learns after its death

brains made of reaction networks instead of neurons, trees that think in chemical cocktails and diffusion systems, fruits that contain a tree’s advice to its children