vespidazed

Battery Acid (Jolteon)

  • she/her

Profile pic SpoonyCatt@twitter

🔞 34 y/o + plural + bipolar 2/PSTD

Headline will be name of person in icon.

Just some bug therians chasing a kinder world.

CWs: frequent drug use talk.

(Kisses @QuakeRoc, @NONBINARY, @QueerFurries, Beas, @FlyFeline)


This is a musing about a little detail of a little thing that's stuck in our head for years upon years now.

The younger Vespies were just as into the shapes of TTRPG as we are now. We lived on message boards picking them apart and putting them back together, ever-lurking as the shape of indie and story games continued to evolve.

There was one that had buzz for a while, and with it a window of our hyperfixation. It's called 3:16: Carnage Amongst the Stars.

The game itself, on the surface, is a very direct nod to the movie version of Starship Troopers. It's a game about war and genocide that takes the tack that These Things Are Bad.

Mechanically, it's pretty minimalist. You're a bunch of space marines that do life-erasing preemptive strikes on alien planet after alien planet. The population against you is represented by beads or counters, representing abstract blips of movement on a radar.

The game is basically all conflict. You have a few of the pool of blips to kill off. You have A little radar chart that says "close, middle, far". You move something representing your character between the three. Of the few things on your sheet that matter, you have two things to roll depending on what you're doing: Fighting Ability, and Non-Fighting Ability. (Again: Simple, blunt.)

One of the things that lingered with people is no given weapon does damage. What you roll for is kill count. How many lives you take on managing to pull the trigger.

This matters because this is what gets you medals. The military of the game - and the game's mechanics - rewards you for being The Best Genocider and also whoever gets the very last kill of the very last person. Doing good gets you new toys that kill better, with the upper echelons letting you wipe planets without ever entering conflict. No rolls, just done.

We'll get to the tool it gives you at the highest rank, in a moment.

Your characters in the game are fragile. You'll churn through them frequently as you play. If you can hold on, gradually, you get one-time-use chances to drop flashbacks and backstories on your sheet as a get-out-of-jail-free card from death. These are all open for you to define, except your very last available moment of weakness, the last one you can ever use.

The last weakness is just three words: Hatred for Home.

Now, back to those ranks. The highest rank you can get - at the helm of this whole military - gives you a single tool. If we recall right, it's just called something like The Device.

"When this button is pressed, it dissolves everything in a few parsecs around it into rich star-forming elements."

You learn that War is Bad. You learn to resent the people that sent you here. If you're good enough at the war that is bad, you get a sword to fall on that'll take everyone else with you.

I honestly wouldn't seek the game out, now. The thing feels gross, in hindsight. From what we recall the designer did a runner on another follow-up project, and we think the content of that was also pretty sketch. If you're going to really insist on checking it out, seek creative alternate means to do so rather than cashing out for it.

Our first apartment went from an 8-year relationship dream to a place where we'd failed someone and been abused by another. So when the resentment and guilt for the place grew too much, we left.

We regrettably once worked for the military, and came out as trans right before the ban pushed us into a quit-or-be-fired situation. Locally, we encountered hostility. Friends and family both pushed us away. So we grew to resent it, and we left.

We moved up to Canada. Our first apartment was crashing with our ex before their landlord physically threatened us out a week into the stay. The second had a landlord who was a creep, to say nothing of the crash and burn at the end of that relationship. Our time back in the states with the Quakes necessarily had a clock. The place after that had bedbugs.

I don't think there's been more than a contiguous three years we've lived in any given place. Sometimes it's been under a year. Sometimes months.

The Pandemic. Bigots rising up. The looks at the office, the threats of the trans ban. Arguments, breakdown, safety.

I can't remember the last time we really felt that a place would be patient with us, assuredly keep us forever.

Vancouver itself doesn't feel like it. We thought it would be, once. But it's just a place, and it's a place that's taken as much from us as any other.

The scenario repeats itself. We find ourselves passing a street we've passed a hundred times before. We think to what we know now about where we are that we didn't know when this place was the star on the horizon. We look at the ways it would ask us to scatter ourselves and fundamentally become part of it.

Our memories fall back to a time where the only thing we had to worry about was classes and curiosities. Before we got just how much a place could pretend to be one thing and soak up everything else. How places pretend to be the people in them, the people that have always things we really cared about.

The words reach us again from a game we can't stand, twice-bitter from the reality of the military, of blood on our hands. A phrase stolen, absurd in how seriously it echoes itself:

Hatred for Home.


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