The Letter to Franziska

(This was originally posted on my now defunct Sygnus blog, which was originally a Discordian cabal headquarters until I got bored of the joke.)

The Cabal of Aeris (un)Risen petered out a long time ago, once people got bored of it. It is the end I expected of it-only fitting really. So this blog has lain vacant. I have decided to revive it as a more conventional blog, a space for me to ramble on. I do get Ideas sometimes, after all.

I decided this after receiving a revelation, In the bathtub, as it happens.

I felt I had to get my thoughts in order so as soon as I was out of the bath I went and wrote a letter to the person who was responsible for the sudden revelation. Unfortunately the Postal Service do not deliver to her address. But it helped me figure things out, to write it, at least.

And since it must be somewhere, it is here.

Franziska von Karma

Somewhere In Germany(Or Possibly Los Angeles)

Another Earth

Eight Years From Now

Dear Franziska

You will probably never read this letter and if you do you will not like its contents. I am from the world where you are part of a game and considered unreal. I do not agree with that assumption. That is not what I am writing about. I am writing about something else.

You get mad a lot. Everyone knows this. And when you get mad you hit people with your whip. Everyone knows that, too. You hit Phoenix Wright when you think he is being stupid in court, and you hit him when you think he is being smart in court and will make you lose the trial. You hit him over and over when he has won a trial and you have lost. You hit the judge when he doesn’t agree with you. You hit witnesses when you don’t like their testimony. You hit Detective Gumshoe when you think he is being stupid or talking about something you think is irrelevant. You hit a lot of people for talking about things you think are irrelevant. You hit people for talking about things you don’t want to hear. You hit people when something bad happens to you, even if they had nothing to do with it, because you are angry and want to take it out on someone. Maybe you even hit your brother. I heard him talking to Phoenix once and he called you a wild mare and grinned. I think he might’ve said something like that to your face before now, and you might’ve hit him for it. I think you really might.

But maybe you never have hit him. Maybe you are angry that I think you might’ve. After all, he is your brother. I know you love him. And he loves you. Maybe you are horrified at the idea you would hit him, like he was an ordinary annoying person. If you haven’t hit him yet, though, I think you will. Someday soon he will say something or do something that gets you so mad you hit him and then afterwards you will be sorry but you won’t be able to take it back once you’ve done it and you will feel guilty about it for the rest of for ever!

But if I wanted to talk about that sort of thing, then there are a lot of things I could write and they would take me ages to list. I could write and write about how you are not a good person. I could write how you will not be able to go on this way without tripping yourself up. I could write about karma. It is in your name, so you should be able to figure it out.

And at the end of it you would probably say, ‘So what? I don’t believe in karma. I am karma. I am punishment.’

(I could quote at you then, though. You don’t care if people are innocent or guilty, you just want to punish them anyway. C.S. Lewis said that to act like that is to volunteer for the post of Satan in the divine scheme and that if you do his work you must be prepared to take his wages. Which I assure you are not good. But you would probably not listen to that either.)

You would say, ‘I know I am not a good person. I don’t need to be or want to be. I am not a wishy-washy, bleeding-heart, goody-goody, foolish weakling like Mr. Phoenix Wright. I am a von Karma. I am fierce and strong. I am perfect. I take what I want and the rest of the world has to obey me.’

And there are so many things wrong with this way of thinking that I cannot even begin to list them, but if you really want to be evil I cannot stop you.

There is one thing, though. You aren’t a strong, fierce, perfect von Karma. Nobody thinks you are either. Absolutely nobody.

Everyone thinks you are the crazy girl with the whip.

They don’t respect you. A lot of people are scared of you. Phoenix and Dick Gumshoe and the Judge and practically every witness you ever called to the stand and lots more people too-they are all scared of you. But when you have gone they laugh at you. They don’t think you’re clever or strong. They think you’re out of control. You don’t come across to people like your dad did. Your dad scared people like anything and made them hate him but they didn’t think he was crazy. They thought he was evil, and they were right too, but they didn’t think he was crazy. That’s because your dad didn’t hit people like you do, in front of everyone, even though it doesn’t help a bit. When your dad got angry he controlled it. He thought about what would be the cleverest and best thing to do in the situation. And then he did that thing, even if it meant not getting instant revenge. The one time he didn’t think, the one time he did a revenge without thinking if it was sensible to do it, he had to spend ages and ages and lots of effort covering it up, and even so it eventually got found out and came back and bit him!

Your dad was evil and very stupid about a lot of things but he was right about controlling anger. If he had let anger rule his mind like you do he would not have gotten anywhere ever.

And hitting people like you do doesn’t just not make people respect you. It doesn’t help you feel any better either. It just makes you feel even angrier, and every time you think about what happened you get angry again, and it eats up your mind and you can’t think about anything except how angry you are.

If you are still reading this, then you are angrily thinking, ‘How do you know?’ The answer is, I know because I was like you.

People would pick on me at school. They did it a lot because I was different. I was maybe one of twenty non-white students in the school of fifteen hundred people. And I was a fantasy geek. So people picked on me. They called names and laughed. I hated it when they laughed. I hated being made fun of. So I hit them.

I didn’t have a whip. I hit people with my fists. Or I threw things at them. I scratched them with my nails. I kept the key to my locker on a longish piece of string, and it was metal and sharper and harder than my nails so I took to scratching people with that. Or I swung the string like a very small mace-and-chain. These were the best weapons I could find. If I had had a whip I would have used it. If I had had a sword or a gun I would have used them too. I wanted to hurt the people that picked on me. I wanted them to be scared of me.

They weren’t scared. They just laughed harder. So it carried on for ages.

My mum and the teachers and everyone kept saying what I have said to you. It makes people laugh at you, they said. It makes you look stupid. I didn’t believe them. I thought that the reason they laughed still was because they were bigger and stronger than me and I had never won a fight. I had never managed to really hurt them. I thought if I could really hurt them then they would be scared of me and respect me and never laugh at me again. I went on thinking that way for years.

Then this week, only a couple of days ago, some people who had picked on me at school found me in town and called names there. That happens every time I come back to my hometown. I don’t go to that school anymore but they remember.

I thought I was going to get mad and scream. Maybe not hit them. I didn’t have anything I could use as a weapon, and I was carrying some fragile stuff. But I thought I would be angry.

I wasn’t. Or, I was, but not hot and horrible angry. I was tired-angry. Tired and annoyed and sad that they should be so unfair. I told them to shut up. I didn’t yell it. And I asked them ‘Do you even know why you’re doing this?’ I didn’t yell that either. They didn’t shut up and they didn’t respond to my question. So I just left. I had been leaving the area anyway. They didn’t follow me.

It wasn’t a fluke, cause a bit later on the same day some different kids started picking on me. And I did the same thing. Told them to shut up, and walked away.

I have never been able to do that before. People have told me to ‘Ignore it’ lots of times but I have never been able to till now. I have always been so angry. Too angry to ignore it. Even when I tried a couple of times I was still so hot with anger and I’d start crying, I’d try not to let the tears show where they could see me but I’d start crying and crying as soon as I was someplace they couldn’t get me. Being angry like that spoiled my life. It spoiled the food I ate and the games I played and the books I read and the music I listened to. I couldn’t ever get away from it.

I wondered what had changed, that I could suddenly ignore things. My mum said I must have had a subconscious epiphany. Then I thought of something. I had been replaying your game. I had been watching the trial of Maya Fey. I had been thinking about Phoenix and Maya. About Pearl Fey. And Miles Edgeworth. And you.

The subconscious mind does a lot that we don’t get informed of. I had been watching you.

I think I decided I don’t want to be you.

You are strong with your whip like I never was with my pitiful makeshift weapons. And people are scared of you like they never were of me. But they still don’t respect you. And behind your back, they laugh at you.

What would happen if you weren’t strong and scary anymore? If you still got angry and tried to attack, but couldn’t do it effectively?

They’d laugh at you to your face. They’d call you names. Spaz, they’d yell at you. Franziska the spaz! Needs locking up! Wild cat!

You’d get angrier and angrier. You’d kick and scream…You’d end up being escorted away by the bailiffs.

And people would say; You have to control your temper, Franziska. No-one will take you seriously unless you learn to control your temper.

And people would say; You can’t appear in court unless you learn to keep a lid on your anger. Maybe you should think of some other career, because while you react like this when you get angry you’ll never be a prosecutor.

And people would say; You’re an intelligent girl, but when you act like this you shame yourself. You act like a little child. We thought you were mature enough to be trusted with an important job, but obviously…

And there would be new insults, too. People would try to press your buttons, so that they could laugh at how angry you got. They would have material.

Your hair is blue. On my Earth, that would be impossible; even in your world, that is uncommon. You wear it cut quite short, for a woman.

You wear unusual clothes.

You are German. When you speak English you have a slight accent.

You have a mole near the corner of your eye. It is not very big, but it is noticeable.

You are an aristocrat. You were born in a mansion. Your family are old-moneyed, with a name that goes back generations.

These are just the small things. There is a big thing too-your father was arrested and imprisoned for murder. And during his career there were rumours that he did not play by the rules. Maybe there are rumours about you too.

But even if your father was free, and still practising law to this day-even if there were no rumours about falsified evidence or the like-the small things would be enough for people to use to make fun of you.

I don’t think the small things are good reasons to pick on you. Not just because it’s unfair. But because they are such small things. They don’t really matter in any way. They are things I note about you that are simply brute facts. They don’t strike me as being in any way funny.

Only if-as I have postulated-your power of fear over people was gone from you, and they began to tease-these small things would be things they would make a meal of. They’d try each of them, and others, till they found something that made you angry, and then they’d keep on needling you with that.

I have a very clear mental image of this happening. I can imagine how it would be. I don’t need to imagine hard. I just have to exchange the classroom corridor for a court lobby. The English village street for a wide sunny Los Angeles boulevard. Their insults. Your screams. Your hopeless attempts at retaliation. Your defiant tears.

When I think of that, it makes me want to hug you, hold you tight. But I know in the same breath that you’d hate to be shown pity.

I know also that your reasons for getting angry-your first reasons-are not good ones, compared to mine. You get mad for no good reason at all. You are cruel, irritable and impatient. You are not actually evil, I think, though you have rather tried to be. You could go either way. Your brother, though, thinks that you will figure things out eventually, and he is both the person who knows you best and a person so pessimistic he outdoes even a friend of mine who I recently heard referred to as Worst Case Senerio.

But, again…Effectively evil people know to restrain their tempers. So do effectively good people. So do simply effective people who don’t care much for great charity or great depravity but get along well enough in the world-‘neutrally aligned people’, in D&D parlance.

So maybe this wild temper of yours is just a basic character flaw. Rather worse than mine. But not insurmountable, surely. It doesn’t mean you are a pitiful person, either. You have so much going for you! You are intelligent, smart enough to pass the bar exam at thirteen years old. You are wealthy and wealthy twice over, both from your aristocrat’s status and your own high-paid career. You are beautiful. You are most certainly not the small, impotent person you feel like when you are in the grip of your own anger.

Franziska, when I saw you I saw my own behaviour magnified. At first I was deceived by the fact that you succeeded in inspiring fear where I failed. Now, though, I see the truth. It doesn’t make the people that picked on me any less deserving of getting punished, because they do deserve it. And it doesn’t mean that what you did was okay, or justified, because it wasn’t. You have a lot of ground to make up. You have a lot of growing up to do.

But I empathise with you, for it is no fun living with rage bubbling in you constantly. And even though they only dare laugh behind your back, they still laugh. You have not gained anyone’s respect…and I think you know that. You’re not stupid. And I pray that you will be able to master that rage-to look at yourself, or at someone like yourself, and realise what you look like to other people. And I am grateful. I am grateful that your example allowed me to examine myself.

As I said at the start of this letter, in all probability you will never read this, or even know it was written in the first place. But maybe. Thus I commend this letter. From my hand-

-to the Fairy Fey(who sometimes walks this world, I know)
-and from the Fairy Fey to the Phoenix bird
-and from the Phoenix bird to the Questing Blade
-and from the Questing Blade to you.

With my love.
Aquila Chrysaetos.

The Tiger and the Prosecutor

Now seems as good a time as any to introduce the world to Tigris.

Tigris is not a figment, not one of the little-spirits. He is me. This is the most important bit, the bit you must understand. He is a part of me that has been around for as long as I have. I have only recently personified him, but he's no newcomer.

He is what is called a Holy Guardian Angel by some.(See Promethea for more info.)Personally I think that's a bit of a misnomer. He doesn't guard me in the sense of stopping bad things from happening to me, he just tries to make sure I'll be strong enough to stand up to bad things myself.

Tigris is always right. This can get annoying sometimes, but that's my problem. He's just and true, fair, and humourous to boot. He is, in short, the best part of me. The goodness on its own, undiluted. That's what his sort of thing is. I like the term 'inner angel', or better yet, 'shoulder angel'. Everyone has one. We don't hear them much. But that's because we don't listen, not because they don't speak.

I think of him as a big old marmaladey-golden saber-toothed tiger, with a very English voice.(The voice, in fact, of the fellow who was reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe on this old book-on-tape thing I had when I was tiny. I remember listening to it in bed, after lights-out...)But this is just a sort of shorthand, a quale. It helps me to personify Tigris like this, is all. It's the image that fits him, in my mind. It's easier to pay attention to him when I think of him as a being in his own right.

It's also easier to identify his opposite number when I personify her.

Her name is Franziska, and she is my shoulder demon. Again, not an actual demon, not an otherworldly being. Just me, in all the worst ways.

Unlike Tigris, her face and name are stolen directly from a character from a video game. Franziska von Karma. An unhappy and almost-unlovable little prosecutor-prodigy who I felt a sort of resonance with.

Franziska is weak and scared and angry about it. She is violent, out of control. Her self-esteem is in negative numbers, and she covers that by making like she's got a disgustingly large amount of pride, and lording it over everyone else. She is lonely and suspicious. She cannot bring herself to trust anyone. She's self-centred, too...can't see outside herself, and hates it. She is stuck in the hell of herself.

She is the voice in my head that is Tigris's opposite number.

She coalesced into an entity shortly after a revelation I had and a letter I wrote because of that revelation.(I shall post that here later; it used to be on my old blog at Sygnus before the site moved and everyone's blogs were axed.)And it's strange.

I don't seem to be able to hate her, now.

Oddly enough, neither does Tigris.

The Ambassador's Turnabout

I spent too much time with the spirits as a kid. I still do.

'Too much' not by my standards, never by my standards, but by the standards of The World At Large. For some reason introverts are frowned upon, particularly introverts that play video games and read fantasy.

These things are my life's blood. They are what makes the difference between living and just existing.(Of course, there's Ash. But she's not always there, through no fault of her own...And the spirits were first.)

Once I desired nothing so much as to leave this world for the world of spirits. Tuatha de Danaan, I called them; the everyoung, the lovely ones, Danu's children. A name borrowed from Celtic mythology.

These days I have things worth living for in this world, old muddy Thulcandra. But still...

...the silent planet doesn't do it for me, really. Too quiet. I want to hear the music of the heavens.

Back then I picked my penname; Ambassador Garnet Leona Alexander. Garnet and Leona from a boy with a gunblade and a girl without a horn, spirit people that I loved. Alexander from the eidolon mighty, defender of men. And Ambassador. Because I hoped to be an ambassador to that world.

Thing is, though, this girl wanted so much to be Tuatha, she got her wish. Yeah, my body's still Milesian...but I've spent too much time hobnobbing with spirits to be totally Milesian. And was I ever Milesian, down in my soul? I am as nervous and uncomfortable and halting with the people of my blood as I am expansive and cheerful and at ease with the little spirits with whom I speak.

(In the context of Thulcandra, within one little world, they used to call that sort of thing 'going native'. They sneered. Maybe some of 'em were jealous.)

Ambassador, I named myself, and ran away to Tir na n'Og, and oh how I hated Thulcandra's soil. Oh, how I hated her people. It was blood hot hate. It was the hate of the smart kid stuck with the mean jocks, taking refuge in pride.(That deadly sin.)It was the hate of a fox fleeing baying hounds. It was the hate of the panther with the collar chafing his neck. Ambassador, I said. But was I?

Ambassador brings part of England to France, part of France to Germany, Germany to America, and so on, you get the drift. Ambassador speaks for his country and brings it to the foreign place. Ambassador has a tiny, tiny bit of his native land to live in, a detached speck, and as soon as he steps out the front door he's Abroad again.

I didn't do that. I didn't want to bring any of Thulcandra into Tir na n'Og. I wanted to purge Thulcandra from myself. Let no speck of it taint the faerie world.

Which was really not fair to any of the parties involved. Thulcandra, Tir na n'Og, or myself.

Anyway. I was no Ambassador. Not then.

But now I look at that pen name, and I think. Maybe it's time I turned it about, flipped the situation on its head and did the (w)right thing by all parties.

Why shouldn't I become Tir na n'Og's Ambassador to Thulcandra?

It is right. I can tell. It is.

But it will be so hard. For an Ambassador is a diplomat. I must be fair and just and polite and understanding with Thulcandra, with the Milesians, with the world and the people who I still have to remind myself not to hate. I will have to make allowances for them when they don't understand me! I am not allowed the luxury of blind hate!

But then, no-one is, ultimately.

This is the right thing to do, and I must do it, and keep reminding myself to do it.

I am Ambassador of the fairy realms to Thulcandra.(Embassy still pending construction.)

A Resolution

Prompted by a screaming fit that my mother's boyfriend had at me recently.

When I have children, they will act up. Everyone's kids act up. I will tell them off for it, because that is the right thing to do.

But I will never, never say 'Aren't you ashamed of yourself?!'

I might say, 'Aren't you ashamed of what you've done?!', but there is a big difference there.

Little things like that are important.

The First Post of Postness

This is the blog of Agla, which will contain most things that I wish to talk rubbish about that do not belong anywhere else. Expect videogames, religion, occultism, food, and silliness.

I declare this thingamajig open!*Smashes bottle of grape juice against it*