Gilbert: as your laywer, Tristan, I’m feeling considerable lack of trust. This can’t go on.
Tristan: well… last time I trusted you… I think… you sold one of my apprentices to slavery; and then there was also this little issue of being eaten alive by rats.
Gilbert: oh, Tristan, I thought we were past that.

PiperVerse quick character review: The Shifters

Shifters are the core and the engine of PiperVerse, mostly because they’re the ones with issues. Here’s how it goes.
In PiperVerse there are no prisons. When you do something bad, you may try to pay the fee or you’re made a shapeshifter. Which is very close to (hopefully temporary) slavery. You’re assigned a form into which you can/have to slip. The need in watchdogs, spy birds, hunting hounds, will never run dry. And when you’ve served your time chasing boar or guarding someone’s estate you can go back to you usual life. The ability stays with you instead of a prison tattoo.

Problems that may occur: being born into slavery; long/life sentence (which happens way too often because it’s commercially appropriate and because short sentence can be easily paid off); that unpleasant situation when you can’t turn into your human form (optional, depends on owner/contract); being attached to your owner and dragged around most impolitely; …well… and the boar.

PiperVerse quick character review: The Wizards

In The University, Wizards are basically the athletes. Don’t let the magical name fool you. Spells, curses, deals, contracts and other paperwork go to the Lawyers, potions and artifacts - to the Scientists, the Lunguists get the languages. That leaves the Wizards where they are, and here’s where they are: they train, they develop skills and upon graduation they receive a license to a certain power. Originally they formed something that could be called a military force, but nowadays they’re mostly freelancers. Hunters, bodyguards, at times - assassins (which is, naturally, frowned upon, but happens). They do study other disciplines nonetheless and are familiar with law and science, just as elite force members should be.

[Ted’s voice narrating]
I wonder what keeps us together, I keep looking for the right word. We cling to each other like wounded animals, we try to hold on to each other. We slip through each other’s fingers like the melting wax of a dying candle.
We match just like our scars do, in some unhealthy, some sickly way. Like two pieces of a puzzle, cut and altered just so they could fit.

It’s so hard to understand what Lewis is saying when he begins to talk, words tripping over each other, smashing into each other, breaking into each other, tangling and untangling, stretching out into a weak cardiogram, like a thread pulled. Words heady like his tobacco, nervous like his hands, qiet just so you can hear their shadow. His shadow. He keeps talking and talking… no, whispering…no, breathing the words out
Somewhere between the shattered ‘I’ and the fragile ‘you’ a word, seemingly dead, word, that was buried, is being reborn as Lewis breathes soul back into it.

It starts with the same letter as his name. It starts with the same letter as ‘life’.

Oh, Theo, Theo, darling, it’s not good guys and bad guys, it’s not villains and heroes, and, god forbid, it’s not winners and losers. It’s victims and their victims. It’s a food chain.

Pass The Knives Productions presents Late, the assassin movie you will never see. Starring Michael Fassbender as Lewis, Olivia Wilde as Theo (Ted), Shia Labeouf as Bernie and Paul Bettany as Edwin.

[trailer, soundtrack + bonus track, messy plot outline, other Late-themed posts]

Lewis: I just… I don’t know, I’ve always found these phrases so… bad taste. What does it even mean, ‘I’d like to get to know you’? It’s fucking ridiculous, nobody ever knows anybody. You just can’t say you know somebody, because saying you know somebody is like… it’s like saying ‘I can count to infinity.’ It’s not good or bad. It’s just plain impossible.
Ted: well, it’s like astronomy, you see.
Lewis: what?
Ted: I mean, astonomer knows that he can’t see everything, right, but this universe is just so vast, and so amazing, and so… beautiful. One can’t just give up on something that beautiful. So… it’s never a question of knowing everything for him. It’s more of a question of realizing the endlessness of it and the ability to appreciate it even more because of it.