The other leg of the double crisis Aloysius is obliged to deal with involves something icky-squicky even by the standards (?) of this site, so I’m running it, for the first time, below a fold.

To quote the handbills that appeared the Duke put up all over town in Huckleberry Finn:

LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.

“There,” says he, “if that line don’t fetch them, I don’t know Arkansaw!”

That said, Aloysius’s failure to anticipate that his reverse-engineered version of the Apsinthion Protocol might fall into the wrong hands and take on a life of its own really does lead to a major mess (although this discovery will turn out to be a life-saver for Aloysius and his friends later on, just you see.)

I know of one precedent for this, although I don’t think it was my inspiration, at least it doesn’t seem to be from looking back at old journal notes.

At the old Galaxy of Terror fanart site, now sadly long gone [update on May 5, 2018: not gone, still saved by the Internet wayback machine] there was an artist working under the name “Atomica” who worked out an elaborate quasi-mythology involving a body-liquifying pleasure substance called “Liquid Skin,” which was somehow connected with alienoid creatures called “hydra” that would either eat you or which you could turn into, especially if you were a pretty young woman who used too much Liquid Skin.  Which is something you could do be accident, apparantly, as one of the few images I’ve been able to find of the series shows.

This squicky thing is one of the most direct parallels of the Apsinthion Protocol I’ve been able to find.  I wish I could figure out what happend to Atomica, and vis images.

Strange stuff indeed, but what exactly would you expect on a site that takes its name from the movie that contains this notorious scene?