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woke up this morning, rolled over, and very confidently tried to blow out my alarm clock like a candle. absolutely no precedent for that.

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Dude

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I loveee fantasy settings doing magical exhaustion:

burnt out pyromancers emitting steam and smoke

tired cryomancers shivering with visible foggy breath

weary necromancers looking ill and hearing voices

frazzled healers receiving the same cuts, bruises, and injuries of their patients

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IDK MAN IM A SUCKER FOR SPLIT IMAGES....

anyway so for Light Fingers we needed to either appease a giant snake who lives in the dream realm's sky (long story), or ally with the cats to overcome said snake amalgam. Peter and Sam chose differently here, meaning Peter was granted the honour of being legally a cat, and Samuel got to, uH.... sHED HIS SKIN AS PENITENCE?????

(Peter is @little-red-notebook's guy, Sam is mine!)

bonus drawing/thoughts under the cut:

HE HAD TO USE A KNIFE AND TOOK SEVERAL WOUNDS, WHICH TRADITIONALLY IS NOT HOW SHEDDING WORKS, but by some snakey machinations there was new skin underneath, with the slightest sheen..........

supposedly it's so subtle that nobody would notice it, so obviously that means I immediately have to add faintly visible scales to every drawing I make of Samuel forever. I like to imagine it doesn't really show in the general gloom of the neath, but under more direct light or in the Parabolan sun, Sam's allegiances are a little more obvious....

The timing on this choice was fun, because just a few days before, Peter had shared with Samuel that he and his ACTUAL boyfriend had become engaged, they were just keeping it a secret so as not to make Peter's real fiancé a target for Poor Edward. So, while Sam did not know exactly what he was getting into when he chose to apologise to the giant sky snake, he still knows the reputation of the fingerkings, he knows bargains with them are risky, and he knows Poor Edward just announced his own skin-shedding bargain and following in his footsteps seems tremendously unwise........ but he was very much operating on the idea that PETER had a future that he needed to be okay for, so Sam needed to be the one to take the choices that would likely have Consequences.

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I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".

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"And yet it moves. A piece, emission, or work of the Dawn Machine. "

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Read enough stories featuring characters who very notably wear glasses, and you start to notice certain trends in romantic scenes.

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Im usually much too shy to send asks but you gotta be the change you want to see, and i agree that asks need to stay so: would you rather right 1 horse sized rat, or 100 rat sized horses?

ah yikes... so my knee jerk reaction is "the 100 rat-sized horses, certainly, as those can be picked off one at a time." however the risk of my conscience catching up to me by the 30th or 40th horse is too great. how much death could I inflict upon these rat-sized horses before I vow to see death no more? even if pure survival instinct drives me through all 100, what of the aftermath? surrounded by the carnage of 100 tiny horses with only my own wet breath among 100 still chests? inconceivable. war is hell.

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thinking about how klingon courting works by the female roaring and throwing heavy objects and the male reading love poetry