Religion is not at the foreground of the stories I tend to tell, but it is in the background, part of the “vibe,” so to speak. I tend to stick to versions of a specific cosmogony (Creator+quasi angels+quasi devils), partly because it reflects my own Catholic beliefs, but also frankly because my world-building energy is limited, and most of the time, I’d rather spend it elsewhere.
To be honest, I was not an admirer of his papacy. He struck me as a shallow man, enacting the will of the faction that elected him, and doing no good at all for urgent issues such as the sex abuse and financial corruption scandals in the Church. But too many of the Pope’s detractors tended to talk as though he were some kind of uniquely bad prelate who came out of nowhere, or whom perhaps his electors had summoned from the Plane of Torment. In actuality, “Papa Bergoglio” was a symptom rather than a cause of the problems in the Church. His poor formation as a priest and repeated promotions beyond his level of competence were due to bad administrative and pastoral decisions, going back generations, by previous popes and the Church hierarchy. Somehow, his critics tend to be unwilling to address that.
In any case, please pray for the repose of his soul, if you are the praying kind. If you are the kind who obsesses about papal conclaves, this website tries to provide a relatively neutral guide (although the webmaster’s own preferences are plain enough) to the current cardinals and their stances on certain hot-button issues. Also, this news article from The Pillar offers a pretty clear view of the procedural stuff related to the passing of the Pope and what comes afterwards.
The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. First I helped Maxim kill a werewolf, then I kissed him, and then I insulted him when I found out that he was roughly twice as old as he looked. Now Maxim is about to be crowned King of the Stormcrows aboard a luxury airship, and he has invited me to attend. But this ship feels more like a cage with each passing hour: a passenger’s horse has turned up missing, a crewman has turned up dead, and before it all started, I heard noises in the cargo hold. But Maxim has a mind as sharp as my banishing dagger, and between us, we aim to put an end to whatever monster lurks aboard the ship, no matter how awkward we feel around each other right now…
My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. With my coronation mere hours away, something stalks the shadows of this vessel: a monster that answers to a human being..but who? And for what purpose? Despite our recent…complications, Chloe’s courage and loyalty make her my strongest ally as I pursue our enemies, and brace for the dreadful pomp and circumstance of my own coronation. The crown of the Stormcrows may await me, but first, we have a mystery to solve – together.
Disclaimer: I think Claude AI is pretty good at what it does and I am grateful to Anthropic for making it useable for free. But seriously, it and the other LLMs are basically random word and code generators powered by complicated algorithms. They have no concept of visual or written art, or the logic behind coding, merely a concept of “these things go together” based on the datasets used to train their algorithms. They have no bodies, so no concept of physical pain, and no algorithms designed to understand emotional pain. They can probably simulate pain if prompted, in the same way that they can be used to simulate characters in a roleplay context, but that’s all it is. The people hiring an “Ai Welfare Researcher” at Anthropic are either approaching Adeptus Mechanicus levels of superstition, scammers trying to psyche out the rivals’ investors, or they are, hypothetically, dealing with some kind of entity (call it a noncorporeal alien or whatever you like) which is masquerading as an LLM, and which should be automatically suspect because of it’s dishonesty.
Seriously though, to any powerful old people reading that story and searching for access to young blood, just don’t. You’ll find out just how fast the peasants can pick up their torches and pitchforks. The video below is not an introduction but a warning:
Jaglion Press 