Idea: Once a Slavetrader, Always a Santa Claus

Cast your thoughts back to the last ice age, for it is then that our tale begins.

Fairieland, you see, is a very cold place, a veritable winter wasteland. Its inhabitants don’t deal very well with heat. It is for this reason that the Good People aren’t so common in modern times, but back in the bad old days they flitted in and out of their Grand Doors to our world (and to many other worlds as well, but for those we humans neither had nor have no concern).

The Journeymen [D]

The Shifting Spirits

The Shifting Spirits are liars who are the sole survivors of a now-dead realm which was torn apart by outsiders— or they themselves are outsiders who have learned to coexist with Creation— or they were exiled from a prosperous series of timelines for their grave crimes— or they have achieved time travel and are working to ensure that the course of events which led to their existence will come to pass— or they are the servants of the Powers Major. Their forms are as fluid as water and revert to solidity with a thought, taking on any form which they would like.

Idea: The Lizard People are not what you think [B]

Continued from Wednesday.

The reptoids of today are a miserable rabble compared to their illustrious forbears. They are scrambling. Their science has decayed over generations of imperfect transmission and many are looking for older records, hoping that we are advanced enough to finally reverse-engineer some of the more crucial principles and grant them either a way home or a weapon to secure their power here forever. We are interfertile, our two species, and the modern race of annunaki is more human than reptoid. The blood is thin, they think in ways and feel emotions foreign to their ancestors, and some are capable of only partial transformations. More and more are freaks, either trapped in a hybrid mishmash form or seemingly entirely without a trace of their starry heritage.

For the annunaki, the apocalypse came thousands of years ago.

The annunaki whisper to their children that they would have been worshiped as gods in the old order but they are impotent scions at best. The truth is that they would have no power, would be peons and footmen, so far have they degraded. And yet still they try to accomplish the dream of their ancestors, a second world order, now as the rising sun but modeled after the first of them all (and who knows what would happen if the old empire, still extant, came in contact with this world again).

And where would George fall into this? As his people have fallen, so has he. His alcoholism was real. His grief over his sister's death was real. Left to his own devices he would hold an anonymous life in a small town on no map. But his life was charted out for him no matter how he tried to drink himself away from it. Perhaps it was cowardly to go along in the end rather than reject it, but he couldn't follow his sister's path. Perhaps at least he could try to salvage something along the way.

And now he sits amid ruins, putting on a face for the world and his peers but secretly glad in a way that he failed to do all that they expected of him. He wonders how many of his peers are in his same position, dissatisfied but too afraid to do anything but follow orders- they've learned, and even the powerful ones know that they can't tear away from the group without reprisal. But they managed to ensure that unity too late in the game and a few of them decide to risk it anyway and sometimes even get away with it.

Meanwhile the bottle still calls to George, and he himself calls out at night to a God that he fervently wishes is real but knows could easily be just the persona of one of his own ancestors. It isn't a pretty life, but he never lied and told himself that he was strong enough to make it anything else.

Perhaps his grandchildren will live long enough to see the blood run out at last, and in that generation his bones will find rest as the plots of the annunaki finally crumble to a halt.

Idea: The Lizard People are not what you think [A]

I think that many men that have done bad things are men that were good men whose flaws overcame them. I don't think that every person that has done bad things would have gone down that road had they been able to foresee its end. Certainly, they at least don`t usually consider themselves bad men. Most people don't think themselves villains.

When I think of George W. Bush I think of a man who wanted to do the right thing (at least as he understood it) but failed, partly because he lost control over the situation (if you could say that he even had control once) and partly because his flaws got the better of him. Most people do end up that way, in that situation. Then you have David Icke, who thinks that Bush is descended from a lineage of shapeshifting blood-drinking reptilian aliens.

A part of me wonders: What if we`re both right? What if Dubya is a reptoid- but has lost control in a way that none of us hairless apes can imagine?

The reptilians know barely more than we do. There was a time when both of us were different from what we are now, but there was war in Heaven and we were the ones who lost. We found ourselves imprisoned, and then we forgot about everything. The reptoids were prison warders once, victors of the usurpation, but they either were betrayed by power-hungry underlings or were those rebellious underlings. Either way, they lost the second war and found themselves in the same prison that they had fashioned. And then their ancestors ran into a mad accident and were left, Robinson Crusoe-style, on this world, isolated from the galaxy-spanning empire that their fellows had created. Once usurpers in Heaven, they were now twice-fallen.

They don't have the industrial base to maintain or reproduce their technology, nor the numbers to maintain a stable breeding population, but they were able to act quickly enough to take control of the earliest city-states and install themselves as god-kings. They called themselves the annunaki. But a small cadre of castaway alien-demons does not a permanent occupying force make, and when they lost control they couldn't get it back. They've been trying for thousands of years to do so, and have occasionally gotten temporary footholds, but the job gets harder with every passing generation. Even when they were monarchs in Europe they couldn't take full advantage of the situation- they hide their nature and plans out of self-preservation rather than brotherhood and whenever they grow powerful enough  some turn on the rest and progress is lost again.

Continued on Friday.

Do you like what you've been reading? Subscribe to White Marble Block to stay updated on the latest stories and ideas. 

Idea: Displaced Time Travelers Taking the Slow Way Back

Yes, more time travelers. Yes, more vampires.

But no stable time loops this time, oh no sir.

Where did they come from? Or when? A long, long time hence, of course. Or tomorrow, or somewhere in-between. But on an otherwise-routine trip their machine malfunctioned and they found themselves stranded in the past. A few seconds was all that it took to confirm that help wasn't on its way. If it were, then it would have arrived before they even discovered the malfunction. That meant that they were totally on their own.

They refused to accept this.

The machine was truly a masterpiece of technology, far beyond anything that we could conceive. That it was unable to return them to the past was a horrendous spat of bad fortune, but that didn't mean that the whole machine was down anymore than a broken engine in a car means that the brakes and battery are also irreparably damaged. The machine was built to affect the biological structure of things in order to produce food and adapt its passengers' bodies to whatever circumstances they found themselves in.

Its capabilities were far beyond what was considered to be required for most missions, but the quasi-singularitarian technology of their day was even more advanced, and it was no trouble at all to outfit the machine with such potential. It was the passengers' one spot of good luck (though perhaps it was no luck at all, but had secretly been intended for just such a contingency as this, some of them wondered) and they used it to re-engineer themselves biologically. Their memories were doubled in their junk DNA, their lifespans were lengthened, and they were given the ability to infect others with this same condition so that their own DNA would be altered in select places. Each generation would carry the memories of the next.

Unfortunately the process didn't work completely beneficially. Errors crept in, consequences of dabbling in sciences a little too advanced than they were familiar with. Their diet, for example, was totally screwed up and they find it impossible to digest anything more substantial than a fine paste. Sunlight will give them a massive case of sunburn within seconds, and prolonged contact with cancer them up like you wouldn't believe.

Their aim is to survive the long thousands of years between where they were and where they had come from, and they're prepared to do it by any means possible. They've been playing with history, pulling these strings and cutting those ones, all to accelerate our advancement (and doing about as good of a job as anyone who didn't get a PhD in historical puppeteering). They don't care who they have to kill, how many lives they have to destroy.

Because in the end? It won't matter one bit.

History can still be rewritten. They're in the alpha timeline, if you want to call it that, the one that simply had to come before there could be a timeline where they were rescued. And so long as they're willing to pull the trigger, they can be the cavalry they knew that there was no point in waiting for.

(note: to be clear, the "vampire" concept is as novel to them as it is stereotypical to us. they messed up history like you wouldn't believe and there were no such stories in their timeline.)

Idea: Ice Age Horror

There is something that is called the Dark Place, where life exists in a strange manner more dependent on patterns than on genetics or physical matter. Occasionally some of these patterns manage to steal away to our world. The Dog People have long hunted wolves and men both, adopting as their own the shapes of the dominant predators in their territories (and in other places the Dog People are not wolves but tigers, coyotes, or jaguars). The Hidden People are as fluid as water, able to squeeze through even the tiniest of cracks. All creatures of the Dark Place are weakened in the light, but the Hidden People are so vulnerable to light that they move in the open only on nights that the clouds block out the moon and stars.

But the most important of all are the Starlight People, so named because of their quiet, instinctual fascination with the stars. They are ageless so long as they have blood, and they are as strong and fast as the greatest of humans, and they never tire. They heal quickly and can see in the darkest conditions. But for all their powers they, like the rest of the Night People, are vulnerable to the light of the sun, which robs them of their powers and leaves them like the humans that they once were.

Some hunt the Daylight People but most, remembering their own prior existence as one of the Daylight People, coexist with them to their mutual benefit. A tribe with one of the Starlight People has a great warrior and hunter on their side, one whose need for human blood is sustainable in larger hunting groups and can be supplemented by prey animals. Even more importantly, the Starlight People are storytellers and shamans, keepers of histories that stretch back for centuries.

Supplementing their diet with animal blood has consequences. The Starlight People are very much human in how they process and store information, and this can only be changed for as long as only human blood is consumed. Only very few of them have interacted with individual man-hunters for so long that they can compare their respective mental states over long periods of time, and fewer still suspect that the reason for this lies in diet. Without a straight diet of human blood the weight of ages will over the centuries crush one of the Starlight People as she buckles under the strain of holding an ever-increasing amount of memories, far past the point that the human mind was designed to bear. When one of them grows tired with the weight of so many memories, it is a great honor to be chosen as her replacement.

• Perhaps in the future towns and cities may be built, and these will have a great enough population that a vampire could feed solely on human blood and yet not overtax any of them. For now, though, it is the man-hunters that are the oldest and wisest of their kind.
• Someone has disappeared from his tent in the night. Was it one of the Hidden People, or other Daylight People that took advantage of the past night's conditions to steal someone away without being suspected themselves? Or did he even leave of his own accord?
• With only few exceptions the Starlight People either hunt or live with the Daylight People, because recluses that feed only on animal blood will start hunting indiscriminately as soon as they lose enough of their sanity. If one were to recover later on and make the connection, how might he handle this? It could prove difficult to "adopt" a tribe that knew that of his past as a man-hunter.