SPIRIT WORLD A.Kelly
[Cat person talking to 3 cartoony ghosts]
The locals can’t really communicate with us.
Most things seem very vague + blurry + transparent
Clouds, trees, fungus are hard to distinguish from one another.
We saw growths I thought were pale trees blow away, and “clouds” attached to buildings by branch-like strands.
[Two stick figures with their thought balloons overlapping. Overlapping portion is labelled “Overlap in the subconscious”]
Miss says everyone’s connections + thoughts + ideas about places and things in Kennet help to make them solid in the spirit world. Then they anchor based on real life locations. This makes the spirit world very like ours.
Less attached locations end up adrift, blurrier, or messier.
[Single house on a small cloud]
Locations important to a lot of people’s selves + Beliefs can be bigger + more elaborate. Churches/temples/shrines.
Pg.2
[Little squiggle ghost]
Small spirits are everywhere. The more you look for them the more they seem to appear. Very simple. All doing their own thing.
[2 vaguely humanoid ghosts]
Bigger, people-sized spirits appear like I’m looking through Grumble’s reading glasses, + they are a bit see-through. Only vague human shapes, no real feet/legs. They each have a “thing” they do.
[More humanoid ghost with a cloak]
I saw only one spirit that might have been a complex spirit, and I don’t think it was as complex as Edith is/was. Patchwork. Like a collage. On our awakening day, Edith said they happened when ghosts mingled with spirits or when multiple spirits with people things as their “thing” got knotted up together. Fragile? Apparently the Ruins are constantly trying to pull them back apart into their original bits.
[Solid black shadow ghost with knife]
Omens look like shadows on a sunny day, but kinda three dimensional. Blurry like other spirits. Is their “thing” stuff that hasn’t yet happened? Or just badness?
[Dandelion]
Plants are from our world, except for the cloudy ‘manna’ plants. Lots of danelions tho. Why? Because they get more focused attention than grass/trees?
Miss called the puffy growths ‘manna’. Cloudy, wispy, cotton-candy type stuff. Food for the spirits.
Random writing everywhere. Maybe it’s the common sentiment that doesn’t have enough physical-ness to become something real?
[Deer masked girl standing in an alley way with a lot of graffiti]
[graffiti reads: “WHAT IS SO WRONG WITH ME?” “WORK SUCKS!” “I SUCK” “Pessimism Ho” “SO LOST” “HELP I AM LOST”]
Pg.3
THE RUINS
[Crumbling building and telephone pole]
I can’t really draw rain so imagine everything here is really wet and hard to see through the downpour.
The ruins apparently capture all the harm + the wear and tear of everyday life, over the years. Everything is at its worst, and even tho it should be depressing I found it kind of really scary-beautiful.
(Very wet though. Beautiful but wet.)
The Ruins apparently hold onto hurt, so the things that will stay standing are the things that get damaged but that people care about. It’s kind of like the dandelions in the Ruins, where they might be common + bigger + more fancy ’cause they annoy anyone who cares about their lawn and grab our attention, but it’s peeling paint + rust + puddles + cracks in the sidewalks. Lots of damaged sidewalks, buildings.
[Damaged sidewalk bordering darkness]
Crosswalks are rope bridges and that might be based on how we have to wait and consider our next steps whenever we want to cross the street. Verona thinks the roads are gone because whenever we’re in a car, we’re in the car more than we’re on the road, and the road gets only fleeting attention.
[Fretting figure pursued by outstretched claw]
Most of stress of these places is for the spirits + echoes. The Ruins are the end that comes after the end for them, like trying to stay above a rising water level. Establishing or geting solid ground (‘hallows’) is a relief
Pg. 4
[Large shadowy figure]
The Ruins seem to be about emotion and the cost of that emotion. The Others are kind of like that. They make you feel stuff but they don’t really show much.
They don’t tend to have faces, or their faces are hidden. They tend to be very dark and ominous, like presences, weirdly solid for a place that’s all aobut things that aren’t solid. Their role is to find + tear down the complex spirits and echoes as a kind of recycling and clean up. I guess if they got their hands on a human, they’d take stuff away?
[Floating ghost lady]
They’re slow and pretty content to let their food come to them but with the ‘rising water’ analogy, and their ties to things like death, and dream, and other fundamental forces of the unvierse + crap, we think they might be really terminator-like. Not like slasher killers (that’s apparently Bogeymen) but slow, steady, dangerous, + they come at you forever.
[Large shadowy figure with eye necklace]
The one we ran into was all about eyes. If echoes are all about specific events, and incarnations are all about like, one major thing, then they might be specialized?
[Shaking ghost, bunch of ghosts melding together, disintegrating ghost]
With Echoes there isn’t much to say. They flicker and relive emotional events. Certain types of people leave more echoes. What we see is the tip of the iceberg and the Ruins are the waters where the rest of that iceberg sits. There, they look all melted together, blended together, and they’re apparently stronger. The ruins are also where the iceberg ‘melts’ to. Echoes disintegrate and there’s a lot of melting + disintegrating echoes in the Ruins. Necromancers will come here to get stuff + some Others (Alpy!) will visit.
[Peace sign ghost with peace out! looking at wolf person sitting on floor and cat person standing behind her]
There’s also Incarnations, which represent concepts but we didn’t see anything except the Hungry Choir.
The “cat person” drawings both have a shirt/top with horizontal black and white stripes. It’s clearly Verona.
The “wolf person sitting on floor” is more likely a “fox person” (Lucy), although the drawings are intentionally crude.
My initial impression of the “deer person” drawing is that she’s standing on a rooftop. On a second look, though, it could be the top of a set of stairs. The graffiti-covered alley picture is to the right of the deer-girl, and seems like a separate drawing to me. There’s more graffiti in a third image to the left of the deer-girl, and that image seems to show the words just hanging untethered in the sky, above some clouds. There’s a small spirit, and a disembodied face that could be a sun to go with the clouds, or just a face hanging in mid-air for some reason.
Consider that they’re in Canada, in the modern day. I’d guess an Incarnation of Peace might go full SJW – there can be no conflict if it uses magic to force everyone to believe the same things and quash all dissent.
I bet it’ll be like eternal stasis and stagnation. No conflict, and perhaps more importantly, no change.
Imagine a Groundhog Day loop where all the cycles are identical, and you physically can’t deviate from the script.
It’d probably the watchful peace of hyper-vigilance and armed bristling peacekeepers tinged with the anxiety that peace is only ever the calm before the storm.
Aww alpy gets an !. That is precious. I like Averys perspective, I don’t think I really got her wanting to travel stuff and it’s link to the practice until I heard her talk about the ruins.
With these “worlds” centered around connections and emotional associations people have to things in the real world, I wonder how fiction plays into this.
Surely “Myth” has been a thing for as long as Others have existed, and the Fae are already loosely “inspired” (in-universe) by tropes of human fiction. But I have to wonder what difference it makes, how we interact with fiction now compared to when it was Myth.
If something is popular enough now, people all over the world will have a relatively concurrent emotional response to it. Surely some people would be invested deep enough for that to make an echo of the fictional scene? The end of Infinity War must have generated a handful of echos, no?
How about widespread associations with fictional places, now that fiction has become largely cemented in consistent visuals? If it’s popular enough, would there be a spirit location for, like, the Friends apartment? Can you visit Spirit Bikini Bottom???
Pale 
Transcription:
Pg.1
SPIRIT WORLD A.Kelly
[Cat person talking to 3 cartoony ghosts]
The locals can’t really communicate with us.
Most things seem very vague + blurry + transparent
Clouds, trees, fungus are hard to distinguish from one another.
We saw growths I thought were pale trees blow away, and “clouds” attached to buildings by branch-like strands.
[Two stick figures with their thought balloons overlapping. Overlapping portion is labelled “Overlap in the subconscious”]
Miss says everyone’s connections + thoughts + ideas about places and things in Kennet help to make them solid in the spirit world. Then they anchor based on real life locations. This makes the spirit world very like ours.
Less attached locations end up adrift, blurrier, or messier.
[Single house on a small cloud]
Locations important to a lot of people’s selves + Beliefs can be bigger + more elaborate. Churches/temples/shrines.
Pg.2
[Little squiggle ghost]
Small spirits are everywhere. The more you look for them the more they seem to appear. Very simple. All doing their own thing.
[2 vaguely humanoid ghosts]
Bigger, people-sized spirits appear like I’m looking through Grumble’s reading glasses, + they are a bit see-through. Only vague human shapes, no real feet/legs. They each have a “thing” they do.
[More humanoid ghost with a cloak]
I saw only one spirit that might have been a complex spirit, and I don’t think it was as complex as Edith is/was. Patchwork. Like a collage. On our awakening day, Edith said they happened when ghosts mingled with spirits or when multiple spirits with people things as their “thing” got knotted up together. Fragile? Apparently the Ruins are constantly trying to pull them back apart into their original bits.
[Solid black shadow ghost with knife]
Omens look like shadows on a sunny day, but kinda three dimensional. Blurry like other spirits. Is their “thing” stuff that hasn’t yet happened? Or just badness?
[Dandelion]
Plants are from our world, except for the cloudy ‘manna’ plants. Lots of danelions tho. Why? Because they get more focused attention than grass/trees?
Miss called the puffy growths ‘manna’. Cloudy, wispy, cotton-candy type stuff. Food for the spirits.
Random writing everywhere. Maybe it’s the common sentiment that doesn’t have enough physical-ness to become something real?
[Deer masked girl standing in an alley way with a lot of graffiti]
[graffiti reads: “WHAT IS SO WRONG WITH ME?” “WORK SUCKS!” “I SUCK” “Pessimism Ho” “SO LOST” “HELP I AM LOST”]
Pg.3
THE RUINS
[Crumbling building and telephone pole]
I can’t really draw rain so imagine everything here is really wet and hard to see through the downpour.
The ruins apparently capture all the harm + the wear and tear of everyday life, over the years. Everything is at its worst, and even tho it should be depressing I found it kind of really scary-beautiful.
(Very wet though. Beautiful but wet.)
The Ruins apparently hold onto hurt, so the things that will stay standing are the things that get damaged but that people care about. It’s kind of like the dandelions in the Ruins, where they might be common + bigger + more fancy ’cause they annoy anyone who cares about their lawn and grab our attention, but it’s peeling paint + rust + puddles + cracks in the sidewalks. Lots of damaged sidewalks, buildings.
[Damaged sidewalk bordering darkness]
Crosswalks are rope bridges and that might be based on how we have to wait and consider our next steps whenever we want to cross the street. Verona thinks the roads are gone because whenever we’re in a car, we’re in the car more than we’re on the road, and the road gets only fleeting attention.
[Fretting figure pursued by outstretched claw]
Most of stress of these places is for the spirits + echoes. The Ruins are the end that comes after the end for them, like trying to stay above a rising water level. Establishing or geting solid ground (‘hallows’) is a relief
Pg. 4
[Large shadowy figure]
The Ruins seem to be about emotion and the cost of that emotion. The Others are kind of like that. They make you feel stuff but they don’t really show much.
They don’t tend to have faces, or their faces are hidden. They tend to be very dark and ominous, like presences, weirdly solid for a place that’s all aobut things that aren’t solid. Their role is to find + tear down the complex spirits and echoes as a kind of recycling and clean up. I guess if they got their hands on a human, they’d take stuff away?
[Floating ghost lady]
They’re slow and pretty content to let their food come to them but with the ‘rising water’ analogy, and their ties to things like death, and dream, and other fundamental forces of the unvierse + crap, we think they might be really terminator-like. Not like slasher killers (that’s apparently Bogeymen) but slow, steady, dangerous, + they come at you forever.
[Large shadowy figure with eye necklace]
The one we ran into was all about eyes. If echoes are all about specific events, and incarnations are all about like, one major thing, then they might be specialized?
[Shaking ghost, bunch of ghosts melding together, disintegrating ghost]
With Echoes there isn’t much to say. They flicker and relive emotional events. Certain types of people leave more echoes. What we see is the tip of the iceberg and the Ruins are the waters where the rest of that iceberg sits. There, they look all melted together, blended together, and they’re apparently stronger. The ruins are also where the iceberg ‘melts’ to. Echoes disintegrate and there’s a lot of melting + disintegrating echoes in the Ruins. Necromancers will come here to get stuff + some Others (Alpy!) will visit.
[Peace sign ghost with peace out! looking at wolf person sitting on floor and cat person standing behind her]
There’s also Incarnations, which represent concepts but we didn’t see anything except the Hungry Choir.
LikeLiked by 3 people
The “cat person” drawings both have a shirt/top with horizontal black and white stripes. It’s clearly Verona.
The “wolf person sitting on floor” is more likely a “fox person” (Lucy), although the drawings are intentionally crude.
My initial impression of the “deer person” drawing is that she’s standing on a rooftop. On a second look, though, it could be the top of a set of stairs. The graffiti-covered alley picture is to the right of the deer-girl, and seems like a separate drawing to me. There’s more graffiti in a third image to the left of the deer-girl, and that image seems to show the words just hanging untethered in the sky, above some clouds. There’s a small spirit, and a disembodied face that could be a sun to go with the clouds, or just a face hanging in mid-air for some reason.
LikeLike
ah yeah, the wolf person should 100% be fox person, just got mixed up. also, those clouds are probably manna, so it’s still part of the alleyway
LikeLike
Title drawing almost looks like a crossover with Gunnerkrigg Court. Fun with Mort & friends!
LikeLiked by 1 person
For some reason I don’t expect our trio to meet an Incarnation of peace in this story.
Weird hunch, I know.
LikeLike
If they do, it will somehow be terrifying.
LikeLike
Consider that they’re in Canada, in the modern day. I’d guess an Incarnation of Peace might go full SJW – there can be no conflict if it uses magic to force everyone to believe the same things and quash all dissent.
LikeLike
What?
LikeLiked by 4 people
I bet it’ll be like eternal stasis and stagnation. No conflict, and perhaps more importantly, no change.
Imagine a Groundhog Day loop where all the cycles are identical, and you physically can’t deviate from the script.
LikeLike
It’d probably the watchful peace of hyper-vigilance and armed bristling peacekeepers tinged with the anxiety that peace is only ever the calm before the storm.
LikeLike
Aww alpy gets an !. That is precious. I like Averys perspective, I don’t think I really got her wanting to travel stuff and it’s link to the practice until I heard her talk about the ruins.
LikeLike
Alpy!
LikeLike
This turns out to be surprisingly useful later.
LikeLike
With these “worlds” centered around connections and emotional associations people have to things in the real world, I wonder how fiction plays into this.
Surely “Myth” has been a thing for as long as Others have existed, and the Fae are already loosely “inspired” (in-universe) by tropes of human fiction. But I have to wonder what difference it makes, how we interact with fiction now compared to when it was Myth.
If something is popular enough now, people all over the world will have a relatively concurrent emotional response to it. Surely some people would be invested deep enough for that to make an echo of the fictional scene? The end of Infinity War must have generated a handful of echos, no?
How about widespread associations with fictional places, now that fiction has become largely cemented in consistent visuals? If it’s popular enough, would there be a spirit location for, like, the Friends apartment? Can you visit Spirit Bikini Bottom???
LikeLike