Turtle trouble! It’s been a year and a half since Sara’s trip to the capital with Nelly and company. Sara’s back in Hydrangea again, working as an apothecary with her friends and a young noble who calls himself her “fiancé candidate.” One day, Nelly receives a report of something strange in the town’s dungeon and goes to investigate. What she uncovers is a mysterious invisible shortcut in the dungeon’s wall, through which monsters from lower floors are escaping to higher floors! The trouble only spreads when monsters begin to escape out into town as well. What’s worse, one of these monsters is an enormous beast—a continental tortoise! It’s time for Sara to return to her old home of Rosa...and a giant tortoise is coming along for the ride!
Straight to the capital! It’s been a year since Sara traveled to Hydrangea, the hometown of her guardian Nelly. She’s trained all that time at the Apothecary’s Guild, and soon she’ll be an apprentice no longer. That’s when Nelly’s father, Riot, suggests that she make a trip to the capital to introduce herself to the king. Nelly and Chris are along for the ride, with Nelly traveling to hunt migrating dragons and Chris tagging along to test a new drug he’s developed as a dragon countermeasure. As luck would have it, Allen and Kuntz are coming too! However, there seems to be something strange about Allen... What trouble will they find waiting for them at their destination?
What It Means To Be The Last Of My Kind As my nature as Spherit Folk is becoming more difficult to hide, I’m faced with a shocking truth: only one race can produce a Holy Woman that can save the world—and I’m the last remaining descendant of that race! With the human war raging on and traffic to my family’s inn cut off during these tremulous times, I must set off to the Mythical Continent to discover my destiny!
Who Are My Kind? Since my stepsister, Nakona Ril, has joined the family, I’ve finally settled into a happy life of cooking and potion brewing at the family inn. But the shadow of war looms ahead, with the fate of the world and my own destiny fast approaching. Monsters are coming, bandits seek to steal my potions, and countries set their sights upon the rumor of a talented alchemist. Why won’t they all just leave me alone?!
Just when I thought navigating high school was bad enough, I woke up to a rotting, post-apocalyptic world! I thought that the poisonous swamp surrounding my small island would have protected me from all the drama, but what did I see staggering my way? A nasty, putrid zombie! With nothing left to lose, I shoved it away! To my surprise, it turned into a living, breathing, not-so-dead human! So, I have the power to purify zombies. And now I’m expected to save this undead world from the zombie apocalypse? Great. This is so NOT my problem!
In the Skies of the Empire, there are only two things more terrifying than dragons: the attentions of the gods, and the machinations of the Fae. Airship pilot Cassidy Durant finds herself entangled with both when a Faerie named Hymn saves her life in exchange for protection against unknown enemies. This complicates her simple life of cargo trading, since affiliating with the Fae is a death sentence in the Empire. Meanwhile, reluctant mercenary Zayne Balthine is tasked by his employer, a devout worshiper of the Desert Goddess, to break into the Imperial Palace. It's not his first suicide mission, but this time, things are different. That he'll die should he fail is nothing new. But if he succeeds, he will be responsible for unfathomable death and devastation. Skies of the Empire is a high fantasy adventure set in a steampunk environment. It is the debut novel by Vincent E. M. Thorn
Twenty years after Doomsday, survivors of World War Three live in an underground world they have created in the subway system of Moscow. The most stubborn of the survivors, Artyom, will give anything to find and lead his own people to life again on the earth's surface.
Paperback version of the 2002 paper published in the journal Progress in Information, Complexity, and Design (PCID). ABSTRACT Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). Where information is the abstract currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained) description of reality. This extension is associated with a limiting formulation of model theory identifying mental and physical reality, resulting in a reflexively self-generating, self-modeling theory of reality identical to its universe on the syntactic level. By the nature of its derivation, this theory, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, can be regarded as a supertautological reality-theoretic extension of logic. Uniting the theory of reality with an advanced form of computational language theory, the CTMU describes reality as a Self Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and self-execution (reflexive read-write functionality). SCSPL reality embodies a dual-aspect monism consisting of infocognition, self-transducing information residing in self-recognizing SCSPL elements called syntactic operators. The CTMU identifies itself with the structure of these operators and thus with the distributive syntax of its self-modeling SCSPL universe, including the reflexive grammar by which the universe refines itself from unbound telesis or UBT, a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational constraint. Under the guidance of a limiting (intrinsic) form of anthropic principle called the Telic Principle, SCSPL evolves by telic recursion, jointly configuring syntax and state while maximizing a generalized self-selection parameter and adjusting on the fly to freely-changing internal conditions. SCSPL relates space, time and object by means of conspansive duality and conspansion, an SCSPL-grammatical process featuring an alternation between dual phases of existence associated with design and actualization and related to the familiar wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics. By distributing the design phase of reality over the actualization phase, conspansive spacetime also provides a distributed mechanism for Intelligent Design, adjoining to the restrictive principle of natural selection a basic means of generating information and complexity. Addressing physical evolution on not only the biological but cosmic level, the CTMU addresses the most evident deficiencies and paradoxes associated with conventional discrete and continuum models of reality, including temporal directionality and accelerating cosmic expansion, while preserving virtually all of the major benefits of current scientific and mathematical paradigms.
It’s been one crazy thing after another ever since Sara was suddenly thrust into another world as a younger version of herself, but she’s continuing her journey with her friend Allen and her guardian, Nelly the Hunter. They’re headed for Nelly’s hometown, Hydrangea. If Sara wants to avoid any more trouble with the knights from the capital, her best bet is for Nelly’s family to become her guardians officially. Despite Nelly and Allen’s best attempts to lure her into the life of a Hunter, Sara’s started taking an interest in becoming an apothecary. In their travels, they stop at a town called Stock, which is having a major monster problem. In the chaos, they meet a man named Thedias, who turns out to be Nelly’s brother! Will Sara reach a crossroads in her life in her guardian’s hometown?
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.
