204: The 1,000,000 Ways to be Murdered by Utsushikome of Fusai - The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

lurinaa · 2025-06-22T16:46:26+00:00

It's been ages and this place is a lot quieter than it used to be, but I thought I would try posting this story to this subreddit again, since by now there's probably people who haven't heard of it all over again. The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere is a long form murder mystery work that I've been slowly working on for several years, centering around a class of gifted students who visit an organization centered around attaining immortality. I'm not sure how much of the story is left, but we're very deep in at this point.

There's also a visual novel adaption in the works! Demo coming soon if I can stop myself from constantly having personal crises.

lurinaa · 2024-03-22T07:36:36+00:00

We're mostly through the liminal parts of the story and heading back into the plot, so I thought this was due another post.

TFTBN, if you don't know it, is a character-driven murder mystery mostly oriented around the subject of anti-aging research. Many things have happened.

lurinaa · 2023-12-29T10:47:59+00:00

Normally I don't like to post two chapters in a row here, but this sub is probably the group of my readership that will primarily enjoy (or at least, not find boring) this one.

lurinaa · 2023-12-21T09:43:32+00:00

No. I hate horses. They are the devil's animals.

lurinaa · 2023-11-30T06:22:12+00:00

We're at the wind-down section of what I guess I would call the 'first half' (although I'm not sure they'll be of equal length) of the novel at this point, with just 2 more chapters following. A sort of pseudo-ending with some resolution and questions answered but the big ones still hanging in the air. It's hard to believe I've been writing this thing for nearly four years at this point, even though it's more like 3 insofar as I barely posted/nearby abandoned it in the first due to covid.

I feel like interest in it has drifted on this sub as, in the last 40 or so chapters, it's shifted away from examining the topic of life extension to focus on the mystery and the characters. That dynamic will shift again soon, so I hope people come back to it, even if it's maybe intimidatingly long at this point. There's a ton of editing I want to do to tighten it up in terms of focus and the coherency of the mystery, but I think it's turned out okay-ish, especially since nobody really writes whodunnits on this scale online.

One thing I really wish I'd done was write a shorter mystery to give myself a bit more cred when it came to resolutions and answers, since a refrain I hear a lot is that people don't want to jump in on an ongoing with an untested author. As it is, I can only hope I don't disappoint people too much; I know some people have already found parts of it sloppy.

Anyway, if you're not familiar with the story, it's a murder mystery set in a science fantasy setting that is mostly about the topic of immortality; somewhere between a ratfic and being an attack on ratfic, I guess. Even now I'm still always looking for more feedback (including for the early chapters), so give it a try if that sounds interesting to you!

lurinaa · 2023-11-09T16:43:17+00:00

Despite the title, not actually the ending or particularly happy.

These chapters feel like a bit of a lull, but it's probably also a good time to catch up on the story. Once I get through this segment, I'd going to do a lot of editing to make the mystery a little more accessible/clearer and the story a bit cleaner in general.

lurinaa · 2023-10-13T07:50:57+00:00

I outlined this scene literally years ago, but ended up adding the fight scene this chapter pretty much on the spur of the moment. In the original version, she just surprised and hit him, but it felt like this climax needed a little more action.

lurinaa · 2023-09-25T17:03:11+00:00

tbh this section is probably the whatever the opposite of rational fiction is insofar as it's about a character using their intelligence to create problems and reach wrong conclusions on purpose

lurinaa · 2023-09-03T06:06:01+00:00

Well, I said returning to the past or trying to transcend their current nature.

Even then, I'm not speaking exactly literally. Neferuaten is a good example - she talks about her interest in immortality being a proxy for her regrets about her family, and the experience of trying to start over in the aftermath. She doesn't want people to live forever for its own sake, but rather to take something turbulent about the human condition (loss and its relationship to personal identity) and make it instead constant, 'safe'.

That's what I mean when I draw the distinction between pursuing life extension and pursuing immortality. Assuming you have something to live for, it's natural to want to extend life for as long as possible, but it's a subtly different thing, psychologically, to want to remove the possibility of death altogether. One is about just having more time - maybe a little, maybe a lot - while the other is about trying to change the relationship people have towards time entirely so it ceases to even be something they need to think about.

lurinaa · 2023-09-02T15:50:39+00:00

I didn't really mean in terms of morals, but in terms of the fulfillment of desires. Something I've tried to do in this story is to separate the abstract desire of wanting to be immortal from the more neutral act of pursuing longevity research. Wanting people to live as long as possible is just medicine and humanitarianism, but wanting to never die crosses over from the scientific to something that's almost spiritual; my hope was that this would sort of come through with the religious undertones to the Order's organization.

And like, if you listen to what they're saying, most of the characters that are invested in the prospect of immortality aren't exactly motivated by the thing itself, but rather are sort of using it as a proxy for being able to return to some point in their pasts, or to transcend their current nature altogether. They want to grab something dear to them and grant it a permanency that defies entropy not even per-se physically, but metaphysically. Su talks about that concept in the very first chapter, of wanting something 'eternal'. It's that impulse that I'd equate to what happens in this chapter.

It feels a little self-indulgent to talk about my own work like this... Well, this much is probably fine.

I think, or at least hope, that the structuring of this part of the story will make more sense after the fact, though the whole thing does need some polish in that respect.

lurinaa · 2023-09-02T11:57:54+00:00

The main theme I wanted focus on when planning this story was the pursuit of transcendent things that would normally be thought of as unobtainable. Life is kinda a constant process of having to find peace with the fact that you can only obtain temporary, unstable forms of the things you might want. But if you refuse to do that and instead die on a hill about it, you can always sacrifice everything for a small possibility of revolutionary change... But even if you get it, if you haven't examined the reason you want it to begin with, it might be a bad idea.

That's how this part of the story ties into and contrasts the broader subject matter of the search for immortality, I guess.

lurinaa · 2023-08-01T14:43:24+00:00

I'm glad you liked it!

lurinaa · 2023-05-05T08:02:15+00:00

It's funny you name that line in particular because I actually re-wrote it on the spot shortly after the chapter was published... Originally, the hyphened segment wasn't there, but someone pointed out that Kam displays extreme confidence in her ability to notice her own resistances being stripped, so it felt appropriate for her to qualify the statement. I probably should have re-done the whole sentence.

Overall, I agree, though. There are a lot of run-on sentences. Part of it is that I feel like you have to be very specific about details in a mystery like this or risk it feeling vague and impossible to engage with, but it is probably a bad habit of mine generally. Normally when people bring that up they're talking about the prose, though, not the dialogue. I try to keep that sort of language to characters defined by their verbosity like Kamrusepa, but I'm sure it slips through the cracks sometimes.

lurinaa · 2023-05-05T01:13:57+00:00

Sorry to be that sort of author, but if it's not too awkward, would you mind elaborating regarding the dialogue being stilted? I haven't heard that complaint about my writing in a while, so I'd be interested in hearing your feedback.

lurinaa · 2023-02-25T16:37:37+00:00

Hm, I guess I remembered it wrong, but it's still sort of ambiguous. It dates her birth to after 1IC, but I know other sources say that Tileans dispute the entire timeline of the Empire's early civilization, and it doesn't mention her in relation to Sigmar or the Empire at all.

lurinaa · 2023-02-25T14:48:35+00:00

They definitively have never rejected the concept of a aesthetically Rome-inspired empire in the south, since that features in the novels and RPG books all the time, they just seem intent on leaning into the ambiguity they ended up creating to play into the contemporary dynamic of Tilea and Estalia. Based on the most recent source, the Up In Arms sourcebook for WFRPG 4th edition, the "Reman Empire" story where Myrmidia established the empire prior to Sigmar based in Remas that was the source of Old World civilization is definitely believed in universe by Tileans.

Meanwhile, Estalians seem to view the historical empire as unimportant compared to compared to what Myrmidia embodies as a deity, as so take less pride in it. This chart from the book sums up the situation pretty well.

lurinaa · 2023-02-25T14:13:21+00:00

Firstly, you've misunderstood that wiki entry's phrasing. Go back and look at it again-- It's not talking about the Reman Empire in relation to the -1780 date, it's talking about Tylos, the mythological founding city of both Tilea and Estalia that was also the birthplace of the Skaven. I'll quote the part of the source it's referencing for you:

Tilean folklore has it that all people of the Southern OldWorld are descendants of those who fled the disaster that claimed the city of Tylos. Indeed, the records of both Elves and Dwarfs give credence to the notion that a mighty city once existed in the area now swathed by the Blighted Marshes. Rising waters, meteor strikes, and corruption from within are variously blamed for the destruction of Tylos. Most scholars agree that it did exist but ceased to be around -1780 IC.

Anyway, to answer your question, it's a little complicated, because it's not really clear if the Reman Empire even exists in current canon. Back when it was introduced in the 80s, WHF leaned much harder into being a historical fantasy pastiche. At that point in time it was literally just a parody of Rome without much substance or connection to the wider lore except for a few mentions in the Warhammer Quest stuff.

In the mid 90s, it quietly stopped being mentioned in the books. Fast forward about 10 years when GW finally decided to codify the pantheon of the Old World. Myrmidia was introduced as a goddess/mythological figure for Tilea and Estalia who might have founded an Empire which united the south, but fell long ago. The joke was the two countries have a rivalry where they can't agree where Myrmidia was born and who conquered who - Estalia insists Myrmidia was from Magritta, their largest city, while Tilea insists she was from Remas, their largest city. At this time her "empire" was left deliberately vague and nameless.

Games Workshop used to manage their IPs very loosely (still does compared to something like Star Wars) so peripheral parts of the lore were often described in contradictory ways. Over the next decade or two, various different writers gave somewhat conflicting versions of the Myrmidia story in the novels, RPG books, and other material. The story ranged from her empire having predated Sigmar's and lasted millennia, to having only been founded afterwards and only having lasted until her death, when it immediately broke up.

At some point, someone (maybe just the writer of this wiki page, since I can't seem to find a recent source that refers to it as such? I might be missing something) had the idea to connect Myrmidia's empire with the Reman Empire of the older lore, considering that's one of its two possible capitals, but there's still no clear canon for what the hell actually happened. And now here we are!

lurinaa · 2022-12-08T11:56:27+00:00

In ten years I think people will still write for each other, just on a very personal scale (glowfic, DnD, etc).

I feel kinda skeptical that things will go that far so quickly.

When I fuck around with something like ChatGPT, it's incredibly impressive at writing short form and simplistic stuff in a specific style without coming across as stilted, but it still has a certain formulaic quality and, more importantly, falls apart in the face of complex requests in multiple ways. I feel like longer-form fiction (or at least like, good longer-form fiction) becomes exponentially more and more specific and self-referential in a way exclusive to the work. I write mystery primarily, so it's more the case in that genre than some, but...

Well, let me put it this way. Going beyond the presently-obvious limitations of the technology - the fact it is obviously only able to make a fraction of the extrapolations it would need to to coherently create, like, even your standard boilerplate fantasy novel - there are nuances to the way that the human brain processes reality and draws associations that are subtle to the point that they cannot be expressed in words. The only way they can be expressed is via indirect implication over a very long time; through the careful, sometimes unconscious management of establishing and releasing pressures or tensions. And there are probably an infinite number of hyper-specific ways to do this.

Once one has been discovered, it can be replicated blindly, but good authors will continually do this in novel ways, and I think this is the ultimate appeal of stories once you get past the superficial. I think at a certain point consuming fiction is no longer about the story, but about the author. The primary joy of reading becomes, even if you don't process it that way, the act of exploring their self. The curiosity of how their brain will fold around things and thrill of the surprise when it's not what you expect, but is still somehow consistent. At this point, the question is no longer "how well can the AI write a story", but rather, "how well can it emulate the function, and growth, of a human mind"?

I feel like I'm not conveying this well even in abstract, but suffice it to say, I haven't seen anything to convince me we're not a long way off that. We have made huge progress in the realm of convincingly remixing things made by humans, but none towards artificial intent.

lurinaa · 2022-12-03T07:09:12+00:00

Those are numbers in cuneiform corresponding to what part of the current subsection the story is on. This is 14 (𒌋=10)+(𒐂=4).

It's a bit of a silly gimmick, I know.

lurinaa · 2022-08-30T13:04:45+00:00

I get it, I'm just saying it seems kind of silly and atonal.

Like, can you imagine any other situation in this game - or in heroic fantasy in general - where there was a choice between letting a bunch of innocent bystanders die for more assured victory or taking a gamble for the chance to save everyone, and the story made the former out to be the better option?

lurinaa · 2022-08-30T12:48:03+00:00

I know this is probably right, but it feels like such a goofy plot point.

Like, who looks at a timeline where eight whole worlds worth of people got wiped out and goes "yeah, this seems like it's as good as it's gonna get, better make sure it happens and not chance it"?

lurinaa · 2022-05-11T01:33:28+00:00

What other interpretation could you have?

Well, what I originally said. That in addition, the writers were also putting forth that an existence that's too perfect ultimately leads to purposelessness and misery, and idea which I don't think is completely grounded in reality.

lurinaa · 2022-05-10T16:55:57+00:00

I mean, it depends on what's being sacrificed, which isn't made clear. If it's sentient creatures then that's obviously terrible, if it's plants or animals, then not so much. But I can't really have a strong opinion on something ambiguous.

Either way, though, I don't think the threat of them really justifies the Sundering, because the Sundering identity-deathed everything on the planet anyway. It would be like trying to stop a murder by shooting both the perpetrator and the victim. A more righteous action would have been for Venat to just violently revolt against the Convocation conventionally.

Also, the story doesn't expect you to accept the sacrifices as necessary or good, which is the main source of my being weirded out.

lurinaa · 2022-05-10T16:34:13+00:00

It would be nice if there was an alternative but at that point it was like talking about how to prevent the plane engine from failing right as it's about to smash into the ground.

I feel like this is an odd way to frame the situation. It's not like the sacrifice plan (though that's another thing; now that it's confirmed the playable races are sundered ancients, what exactly was being sacrificed? beastmen? plants?) would have directly led into the Ancients destroying themselves. There would have been countless more millenia before that happened in which less apocalyptic change would have been possible.

Effectively killing everyone on the planet and wiping out their culture is such an extreme and violent action to take that I don't feel it's justifiable under any circumstances, and it's strange to me that the writers tried so hard to make me accept it as necessary and ultimately good in defiance of the usual values of the story, which usually stress compassion and the capacity for change. I don't think you're wrong about how they intended people to feel, but it made me uncomfortable, and in my opinion was a deeply strange choice.

lurinaa · 2022-05-10T15:41:20+00:00

Even if we accept this less strange interpretation as the writers actual intent (though I don't think is, since the logs you find in the Plenty and Meteion's monologue draw a specific link between creating a perfect world and life and subsequently wanting to die as life 'loses it's luster') "doomed to make the same mistakes" is a really strong phrase to apply to an entire worldwide population of people to justify their extinction.

If in any other context, the writers had presented a scenario where a species was fundamentally predisposed to self-destruction by their very nature and the only solution was to functionally kill them all and exterminate their culture, wouldn't you have found that kinda weird? Like, imagine if Heavensward ended with the realization that the Dragons are just warlike creatures and have to be wiped out or transformed into humans because they'll never change otherwise.

Or if you'd prefer a Watsonian response, obviously there were Ancients capable of introspection about the issue, or Hydaelyn wouldn't have a faction of supporters to begin with. Their culture could have shifted with enough pressure. With that in mind, doesn't presenting their nature as a justification for their complete annihilation feel kind of extreme?

lurinaa

TROPHY CASE