what if garak made little build-a-bear-esque outfits for kukalaka. but he doesn’t say anything about it. just one day julian walks in his quarters and kukalaka is wearing a tiny little outfit that looks suspiciously like something from garak’s wardrobe. julian questions garak abt it but he’s just like “why would you think I had something to do with your bear’s charming little number, my dear doctor? I’m just as confused as you :)” while wearing an outfit that is identical to kukalaka’s
Last one before spooktober takes over
spaghetti ice cream is german??!?!?? is it not a thing in other places or
no????? what????
you’re telling me you guys DONT have spaghetti ice cream??!?!??!?!!??!?
04 of 15 - Modern Compendium: Full Moon - Beast Phantom Cat
Although cross-cultural myths are becoming more common these days, thanks to ease of travel and the internet’s increasing ubiquity, there are still very few stories that appear in a wide variety of disparate cultures. The Phantom Cat, which can be seen from North America to the United Kingdom to Denmark to India, is one of these myths.
Generally speaking, the actual story behind the Phantom Cat is pretty mundane. Typically someone will be out for a walk, or even just looking out of their window, and see a gigantic black cat in the distance casually skulking through the brush. In more extreme cases, people have claimed to see them near the carcasses of recently deceased farm animals, tying them to mysterious cattle mutilations. Although responses to these sightings vary, it’s not uncommon for the local constabulary to be called out – in England, where Phantom Cat sightings are fairly common, there have actually been cases where the Royal Marines have been called out to search for the beasts.
Explanations for Phantom Cat sightings are about as varied as you’d expect. Cryptozoologists are convinced these animals are surviving Ice Age fauna, the general population seems to view them as escaped exotic pets wandering the suburban landscape, and skeptics look at the vast majority of Phantom Cat sightings as dark-colored ordinary domestic felines. And to be fair, humans are really terrible at judging the size of things, especially small objects, from a great distance.
At any rate, the cross-cultural ubiquity of Phantom Cats puts them way up high in the Beast family – right at the top, in fact. They aren’t hugely powerful, as is typical for the Beasts, but the Phantom Cat does get one of the Absorb skills, so its not a total loss.
For more info on this and every other demon in the modern Compendium, have a look at our extensive Data File, right over (here).
03 of 15 - Modern Compendium: Full Moon - Lady Black Annis
The true origins of what we think of as the stereotypical modern witch is a winding, complex trek back through history. Involving everything from plague memories to religious persecution to culture-bound misogyny and even actual gods and goddesses, the pointy-hatted, green-skinned hag we know and love is the product of a long history of cultural cross-pollination.
Black Annis here represents a surprisingly large piece of the puzzle, contributing a number of defining features to our modern witch’s identity. Derived from an old English boogeyman myth, parents in eighteenth century Leicestershire would tell their children of the flesh-eating old woman who lived up in the hills, whose solid iron claws could rip a man limb from limb, and how the blue-skinned hag would hang the skin of her victims outside of her hovel to dry.
Today, scholars are firmly divided as to where Black Annis actually comes from. Some point to Celtic goddesses like Danu, others to the Germanic Hel, while some actually go all the way back to Egypt for a glimpse of Isis-Hathor or the Greek Demeter. However, Black Annis’s most popular depictions today come from the Goddess Movement and neopaganism, where it is speculated that this hag’s true roots lie in an actual person by the name of Agnes Scott.
Agnes Scott was an Anchoress (that is to say, a female hermit of sorts) whose life of prayer and seclusion was twisted during the religiously polarized atmosphere of the Protestant Reformation into a tale of a wild woman with a taste for flesh. Of course, there’s not a huge amount of evidence for this theory either, but it found strong traction in the arena of matriarchal religion.
In terms of her position in the Compendium, Black Annis’s main problem is that she’s been slowly going out of style for a long time now. Neopaganism and wicca don’t like to see depictions of witches as cannibal monsters, unsurprisingly enough, and so Black Annis’s stock has been falling as people look for more positive representation. And so, although she has had a big role in shaping the way people think about witches, Black Annis ends up near the bottom of the Lady family.
For more info on this and every other demon in the Modern Compendium, have a look at our Data File, right over (here).
02 of 15 - Modern Compendium: Full Moon - Holy Foo Fighter
The ultimate genesis of UFOs in the public consciousness is frequently pinned on a wide variety of events. Some people point to the sightings of Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting of discs over Mount Rainier, some to the crash at Roswell later that same year – heck, some even point to the halos and angels in medieval paintings as evidence of UFOs in ancient times. But from a sociological point of view, UFOs were born in the skies of World War II. Never before had a war been fought so intensely in the air, and for the first time during that conflict, people all over the world looked to the sky with fear of what they might see.
This was especially true of the pilots who fought in those skies. Pilots reported seeing bulbous balls of light floating in the sky, sometimes hovering out of range, sometimes engaging the pilots with complex maneuvers that defied the laws of physics. There were, and indeed still are, a variety of theories as to what Foo Fighters actually were. Atmospheric phenomena is a favorite, aliens too, naturally, but there’s also a theory that Foo Fighters were some sort of bizarre German super weapon, concocted as a last-ditch effort by the Nazis as the Allies started to breathe down their necks.
The most popular theory these days seems to be a combination of those last two theories; that the Nazis somehow got their hands on a downed UFO, and reverse-engineered it into a wonder weapon that could fly rings even around jet aircraft. These days, the Foo Fighter represents a foundational part of many UFO belief systems, as it introduces the idea that humans can reverse-engineer alien technology, and reinforces the idea that this is what the government of the United States is now doing.
Foo Fighters enjoy a certain level of popularity amongst UFO buffs, but really only as an interesting piece of history. Certainly no one reports seeing Foo Fighters anymore. So despite their place as a rather important part of UFO history, they fit rather low in the Compendium, sitting near the bottom of the Holy family.
For more info on this and every other demon in the Modern Compendium, have a look at our Data File, right over (here).
01 of 15 - Modern Compendium: Full Moon - Beast Rods
Rods are just weird backwards and forwards. They occupy a place in mythology which is very modern; creatures born out of quirks of technology, created when a large population interacts with complex gadgets that they don’t fully understand.
See, the first Rods were sighted in the mid-90s, as the first really affordable mass-market video cameras hit the streets. People would take camcorders on vacation, record some landmark far off in the distance, take it home, and suddenly notice these weird elongated winged things in the foreground of their recording. As always happens, people began coming up with stories to explain away the unexplained, eventually settling on the term “Rods.” These creatures, the stories went, were either an undiscovered insect capable of supersonic flight, or very small UFOs, or – and this is my personal favorite – they were extradimensional beings who lived on the Sun.
In truth, Rods are an artifact of the way cameras work. People assume that the camera just takes a huge number of perfectly clear pictures, and then runs them back at very high speed to create the illusion of movement. In fact, modern cameras take alternating pieces of pictures at extremely high speed, which are slotted together while the video plays back. This allows for a much higher frame rate and smoother movement, but also creates bizarre illusions when small things move through the camera’s field of vision very quickly. Basically, Rods are small critters whose high rate of movement leaves their image spliced across several frames of film.
In a mythological sense, Rods are genuinely bizarre. They have little connection to any other established mythology – even the UFO connection is little more than a glancing blow – and the technological nature of their sightings seems to make people uncomfortable associating them with actual religion. Without any connection to Spiritualism or paranormal tales, Rods are kind of like non-ghostly Orbs, which leaves them seriously wanting for a Family in the Compendium to fit with. In the end, the popularity of the “mysterious hypersonic Cryptid insect” theory means the Rods get dumped in with the Beasts.
As cameras have improved over the last decade-and-a-half, Rods have fallen somewhat out of favor. They just don’t show up as much without the interlacing video of camcorders and cheap VHS tapes. Rods do still have some fans, though, so they drop in on the Beast Family around Lv. 50, with some genuinely bizarre skills for that group.
For more info on this and every other demon in the Modern Compendium, have a look at our Data File, right over (here).
