--Thunder Bolt--

I hope my post didn't convey the impression that I was ragging on [edit: her] or critical of [her] fanfic, since that wasn't my intention. Without reading the fanfic (no link), I couldn't think of any good advice (you managed though ), since I didn't know what was holding [her] up.

Wait, isn't "Brainwash humanity and destroy civilization" Item #3 on The Gay Agendatm? Sorry, I seem to have misplaced my copy. [/snark] You say that as if it would be a bad thing. I like to use bigot tears for alchemical experiments. --- I'm a heterosexual male, just stopping by to express support and compassion for the LGBTQI (and any other letters I don't know about) community. You go guys/gals/whatever other term might fit! /)* Not being LGBTQ myself, I can't really speak to this from an inside perspective. My perception though, is that a thread like this isn't to make LGBTQ people feel "special," but to help raise them up to feeling "normal" and "accepted" (especially those who are victims of bigotry in their lives, have to stay in the closet because of parents, etc.). We heterosexuals swim in a sea of privilege. Our sexuality is the default. Watch a movie. What's the romantic subplot? The hero gets the girl, or the heroine gets the guy. You and your partner want to hold hands as you walk down the street? No one looks at you funny, or hatefully. Wanna kiss? Nobody squicks. You want to adopt or have a child? Isn't that nice! Want to get married? Lovely! If you're an American, you don't have a whole political party out to insure that you're officially an outcast, by law. You don't have your nation's loudest and most well-organized religious movements as enemies. You don't have people using your sexuality as a synonym for stupid and unworthy ("That's so gay!"). You don't have to worry about having people want to beat you up or worse because of the type of person you're attracted to. You never have to deal with being the only person of your sexual orientation that you know of. I suspect that LGBTQ posters here could go on. In short: they have to deal with all kinds of shit that we are blissfully unaware of, and have to struggle to get a lot of the things we heterosexuals can take for granted. So, no. A thread like this isn't to make them feel "special," like a first-grader who just got a gold star. It's to create a zone where LGBTQ people can have an approximation of the level of unquestioned acceptance we get every minute of every day, without anyone even having to flex their "Love and Tolerate" muscles because no one has to try to "tolerate" us. And no, they shouldn't always have to make a case for their right to exist against anyone who wants to stop by and trot out religious dogmas derived from Iron Age barbarians who thought the world was flat, or 19th Century Bible fanfic writers. You and I can debate Equestrian Scholar's position as an intellectual issue because it isn't our sexual emotions and needs that are under attack from stuff like this all. the. fucking. time. We should not expect LGBTQ people to feel (or perhaps more accurately, not feel) the same way.

I'm not sure what your question is (what you need advice for). What are you having problems with? Somewhat off topic: your description made me think of the start of the Harry Potter series. Aaaaand, then my twisted mind went off on its own little tangent... Letters appearing in puffs of belch-scented green smoke inviting Harry to the Canterlot Academy of Unicorn Magic, and his Muggle guardians' mean and desperate attempts to keep him trapped in their world. Finally they flee to an isolated cabin on a rock outcropping on a stormy night. Then...the rain turns to chocolate, and Discord breaks in, doing a Hagrid impersonation. "Yer a unicorn, Harry!" "What." "Yer a unicorn! An' a right good one too, I expect. Did ye get yer letter from Celestia?" "Celestia?" "Oi, ye don't know who Celestia is?!" Discord says, his red eyes giving the Dursleys a menacing glare. "Bloody Muggles! Celestia is the Princess of Equestria! Great alicorn, Celestia..."

Wow, talk about show-accurate plushies! Thanks, Amazon!

Awash in disorientation, Imojen struggled to think clearly. Should I go with them? If I did, would my time cohere with theirs, or would the dissonance get worse? Cracking her eyes open, it quickly became apparent that she was the only one actually perceiving it. Maybe it's me? she thought. Now that she was tuned into it though, the sensation refused to go away. In fact, it got worse. So this is how Schrodinger's Cat feels. Funny, I don't remember dropping any acid... While the others climbed into the rich guy's car, the demon flew back to his castle, flew off, rigged several nuclear power plants to explode, and returned to his castle...and her body was trying to exist simultaneously in both timelines. What...should I...do? Getting into a car with strangers: a classic Don't Do It move, like starting a land war in Asia or splitting up to explore a scary house with a masked axe murderer on the loose. Trying, all by herself, to stop a really powerful demon who had already (for certain values of "already") accomplished his evil plan...didn't exactly feel like a wiser course of action. Especially with time acting up. Going anywhere near a nuclear power plant? That pretty much had to be the worst idea of all...time. Huh?! As her mind teased at the cracks of perception, hints of another world flickered in visions...another self...an American city? Pages, rattling, falling. Cartoon pictures...a car...a castle... Kanji that should have been as readable as the signs and books she read every day, but somehow, wasn't. Crumbling brick storefronts...a wino with a bottle in a brown paper bag...and...no wings? Strange as it was, there was somehow a certain rightness to it. Imojen opened herself to the new sensations and... ... Mark Sarkozy scratched his scraggly beard and took another pull from his bottle of cheap vodka. Splat. Something hit the sidewalk in front of him. A magazine. Not news or fashion though, more like a comic. His eyebrows scrunched together in confusion as ghostly images of the book appeared above it, each a translucent freeze-frame of its falling, manifesting in reverse order. Then: a Japanese schoolgirl? Her school uniform faded in and out over a black leather mini-dress with a weird waving effect, like one of those 'cloaked' spaceships in a Star Trek episode. Also: she had demon wings. The demon-girl phased back and forth through several stages of materialization in a whole different way. Her image seemed to smear and diffract with the occasional prismatic flash, superimposing on and off of another version--more American-looking, in a lacy black Gothic Lolita dress. She looked about as confused as he thought she should be, given her apparent inability to settle down and be one thing or the other. The bottle of vodka slipped from his fingers and hit the sidewalk with a muffled sound of breaking glass. A bright flash. Mark blinked. The girl in the Lolita-dress was there, solid now, but the magazine fell from her grasp in slow motion, leaving a rainbow-tinged smear behind it as it fluttered to the sidewalk. Splat. It landed on its pages, with its cover open. Mark glimpsed a Japanese-style drawing of two girls standing back to back, one with bright pink hair, the other's, straight and black. The goth girl studied the magazine at her feet, quizzically tilting her head. Before she could decide what to do with it, it started to diffract and blur like she had. In a moment, it was gone. The girl looked up, and her big dark eyes met his. Her expression: Did you see that?! Seeing his dumbstruck expression, she smiled, her eyes twinkling, as if she was letting him in on a secret. A wet slap at his feet. Mark looked down to see a trout flopping on the sidewalk. Slap. Slap. Another on the street nearby, and another; then a wide-mouthed bass. "Sorry. I don't always get to choose when I make people's lives surreal," she said with a smirk of chagrin. She casually pulled one of those telescoping umbrellas from her backpack and popped it open. Its canopy was slightly misshapen, as if it had endured such a rain before. "You might want to get under cover," she said in a friendly tone, then turned and skipped away...on strange, bifurcated feet in specially-made patent leather shoes that gave them more than a little resemblance to cloven hooves. ... At a school in an alternate Tokyo, a dropped manga fluttered down to land on the front lawn. OOC: Aaaaand exit. Sorry everyone, this game moves way too fast for me to follow effectively. Have fun!

Imojen listened carefully to Angelica and Synangel as they tried, and failed, to describe what happened. "Memory loss? I've had...something like that happen to me too," Imojen replied. "Except, I don't remember what it was that I didn't remember...anyway...maybe I can help. Gimme a moment to tune in..." With that, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, opening herself to the subtle currents of magic within and around her. Drawing her wand, she performed a banishing to clear the space around her, then intoned the incantations of the Middle Pillar ritual. The magical currents flowing through her began to gather strength and coherence. She folded her legs up into a lotus position, floating in the air. With Synangel and Angelica's physical forms blocked out, Imojen could concentrate on observing the subtleties of their auras, especially Angelica's, which was still in flux as her transformation established itself. Suddenly, the two angels who had left returned, along with a powerful demonic aura she didn't recognize. As the attention of her inner eye shifted to them, she sensed immediately that something was very wrong. Their vibratory patterns were completely out of sync with the rest of the world, and each other. As their influences washed over her, she was hit with a tsunami of dizziness and disorientation. "Whaa-a-aaaaa!" she cried, as her concentration snapped and she fell to the ground with a thud. Imojen scrambled unsteadily to her feet. A bizarre overload of sensation tried to cram itself into her brain, as if she was simultaneously experiencing each moment in the present, as a memory of a few hours ago, and as a memory from a month ago. Fragments of memories not her own splashed across her vision: a battle over the wreckage of a mansion. Destroying the mansion before the battle, while a butler scrambled to rescue a gun collection and drive a number of cars away to a safe location. Racing across Tokyo from the school to the mansion in a fancy muscle car. And back again, after the battle. Shaping blocks of black stone and placing them to form castle walls, battlements, and crenelations on a high, distant mountain summit. And experiencing all these things, and all of the time it would have taken to do them, as if they'd all happened in the last few minutes, while she, Sole, Synangel, and Angelica had been talking. "Um...gentlemen? I think you might be about to break the Universe. I think it would be a really, really good idea for you to get out of each other's inertial reference frames right. now. Get as far away from each other as you possibly can. Now. Please?"

Though Imojen didn't really have anything against the warrior angel personally (aside from his being a warrior angel), she was relieved to see the last of him and his guns. He seemed like a hothead inclined to shoot first and ask questions later. Then Sole started to lead Synangel away. "Wait, maybe we should see if you can turn her back? If she wants to be turned back," Imojen said. "Do you remember how it happened?"

He thinks he stood up for me? It was that other girl he was defending. The angels hardly knew I was there. Unless maybe he's remembering a different past than me? That'd be kinda interes-- Sensing the same surge of magic Sol did, Imojen followed him to the scene. "Hang on...wasn't she an angel the last time I saw her?"

EMRMAGHERD! ANIME IS AN ILLUMINATI CONSPIRACY TO MAKE OUR PRECIOUS YOUTH WEAR WILD SPIKY HAIRSTYLES! (O.T.: I don't know who the blue-haired anime girl is...I'm guessing she's the Grim Reaper in an anime?)

Somehow, I just never expected the Grim Reaper to be a Japanese teenager.

"Wicked men! You face SILVER SPOON!"

"Pinkie, I see your Twilight Gatling Gun, and raise you a Scoota-Bazooka!"

Okaaaay.... Imojen thought as the demon warrior strode away. It's not like she'd asked him what he was thinking. She skipped along behind him. "Lemme guess: 'Gurls! Fighting! Cars!' Maybe not in that exact order," she said with a mischievous smirk. "It's OK if you don't want to share your deep ruminations of course. But you do seem a bit preoccupied. Have you had an experience of High Strangeness lately?"

---Previous evening--- Once the angels left, Imojen headed for home, deep in thought. After some time of everything looking and seeming normal, she might have dismissed her odd feeling. But someone else had felt it too, so it wasn't just some odd bit of neural fizz in her own skull. Back at her flat, she ran up the stairs two at a time to get to her room. She changed into her Robes, black over white, then took up her smoky quartz wand and performed the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram to cleanse her Circle. She tried her detection spells and some divination, still nothing. Seating herself in a lotus position, she went into meditation. She found her center, but it seemed...off center, somehow. The "off" feeling was elusive, seeming to vanish whenever she tried to examine it. *sigh* Maybe it is nothing, she thought. Finally, she got up, closed her Circle, and changed into her nightgown. --Current Day-- Fresh from the shower, Imojen went into her room wrapped in a bath robe, and started to get dressed. She opened her closet and saw a set of identical blue-and-white "sailor suit" outfits with miniskirts. Again, the odd anti-deja vu feeling. Next to them was a black leather minidress studded with silver alchemical sigils. She put it on, then stepped in front of a mirror to cast Glamour and make sure it would hide her wings and fangs from the humans, her adoptive parents especially. She trotted down the stairs and fixed herself breakfast. She was just finishing up when her mother came out, primly dressed for work. "You're not going to school like that are you?" she said. "Huh? Why n-- Oh." Imojen said. Suddenly she remembered why she had the "sailor suits," to the point that she couldn't imagine how she could have forgotten. Then she felt herself forgetting that she'd forgotten, felt the memory of her earlier confusion about the uniforms slipping away. With a chill of fear, she realized that if she hadn't made such a habit of mindfulness practice, to continually focus awareness on her internal states and the world around her, she might not even have noticed the change...which was becoming more difficult to continue noticing with each second. "Uh..." she said, her mind drawing a blank. "I don't know why I..." she looked at her watch. "Oh...sorry, I can't miss the train, gotta go!" she said, hurriedly rinsing out her dishes and leaving them in the sink so she could rush upstairs for her book bag, then back down and out the door. ... Disembarking from the train, Imojen ran for the school so she'd have time to duck into an alley on the way and extend her Glamour to project a school uniform. Angels and demons would see through it of course, but teachers and other humans wouldn't, which would spare her a lot of hassle. Walking across the parking lot, she saw the angels she'd ran into last night, and wanted to ask them if they'd had any more weird experiences. Before she could summon up the will to approach, they got into a scuffle with a demon and his girlfriend--probably the ones they'd rumbled with the night before, given the apparent familiarity. One of the angels even had guns, as if he thought he was some kind of American cowboy. The big demon looked to be a Warrior also, and appeared fully confident of his ability to handle the situation. Steering clear of them, Imojen went to her locker, unloaded her books and got out her geometry book. The class was incredibly boring--not because she didn't like math, but because she did: she already knew how to construct the Platonic polyhedra from the vesica piscis; she even knew the esoteric meanings of the steps and the shapes themselves, which the teacher wasn't sharing and probably didn't know. Finally, the bell rang. She was the first to step out the door when somebody plowed into her--the big demon from before [sole]. He had a worried look on his face. "Are you OK?" Imogen asked.

Imojen ducked into a comic-and-game store that, like everything else in her Detroit neighborhood, was run-down. Wrought-iron bars bolted over the windows to (hopefully) fend off break-ins, crumbling brick facade, three steps of cracked cement leading to the door. A bell jangled as she entered, but the bored cashier didn't even look up from the Avengers comic he was immersed in. She poked around a little, checked out the RPG section for anything new, looked into the back room in case there were any game sessions that might welcome an extra player. She was just about to head for the door when a manga that had been unceremoniously tossed into the free bin caught her eye. The title and promo blurbs were all written in inscrutable kanji characters, so...no chance of being able to read it. She guessed it was probably a free sample sent out by the publisher. Huh... she thought, noticing that one of the girls on the cover had a bat-shaped hair clip. She fingered her own bat brooch, almost identical in design. Message from the Cosmic Coincidences Department maybe? she thought, picking it up. She held it up for the cashier as she passed so he could see what she was taking, but she needn't have bothered. He didn't even look up. Out on the street again, she opened it up-- FLASH Imojen looked around, wearing a quizzical expression. "I notice that I am confused..." she muttered to herself. Imojen took confusion as an indication that something she believed about reality was wrong; hence, she made it a point to try to notice, and direct her attention to examining the mystery. If deja vu was the feeling of having been in an unfamiliar place before, she was currently experiencing its opposite. The Gakugei Daigaku district looked exactly like it always did. She knew right where she was: three blocks from the train station on the "To-Yoko" (Tokyo-Yokohama) line. So why did it feel like she was seeing the place for the first time? Some weird angelic area miracle? she wondered. Sounds of a commotion about a block away pulled her from her thoughts. Following the sound and peeking around the corner, she caught sight of what looked like the aftermath of a scuffle. There was a grating sensation of energy in the air; probably the auric afterglow of an angelic light discharge. Instinctively, she put her hand on the handle of her whip, in case the angel spotted her and made her the next target. Imojen blinked in surprise. The words came from a pink-haired angel who looked...familiar somehow. She had four wings...a Seraph? Or were those the six-winged ones with the animal faces? Whatever. One of her wings hung limply at an odd angle, like it was broken, and now she was in tears and apologizing profusely. Imojen took her hand from her whip handle and stepped out. "Good thing you got three more where that one came from," she said with a smirk that quickly became a look of confusion. As if taunting an angel wasn't the most natural thing in the world to do. As if...she should have felt... Whatever it was, the would-be emotion slipped away before Imojen could even figure out what it might have been. "Uh...you said...something about losing yourself? I've Noticed Confusion twice in as many minutes for no reason...I haven't felt this weird since the last Pope decided Limbo doesn't exist. Don't get me wrong, weird is good. But if it's not the Lowerarchy, and it's not you guys..."

You had me at "Vrrrrrrrm!"

How "Wyngz" are made. Fire in the hole!