#;;probably lives in the woodlands too tbh

[eriqas-fate]

Hey, if it’s not too much trouble, could I please get a LOTR matchup? I hope you don’t mind ;-;

I’d probably prefer a male ship, and I usually use She/Her pronouns because it’s just easier tbh. I’m autistic and disabled with joint pain, scoliosis, asthma and a couple other illnesses. I work as a librarian and have a lot of different hobbies like grooming horses, working out (I actually just bought my first punching bag!), genealogy, witchcraft, foraging, gardening, writing, drawing, cooking and baking, and studying a lot of different topics. I like to call myself an Irl Shounen anime protagonist in the sense that I’m spunky and excitable, and very ambitious about being good at my hobbies and what I like to do. I’m really sweethearted and polite, to the point where people are a bit surprised when they realize how chaotic I actually am. I enjoy making people laugh and am also really wise for my age, and I give good advice and am very introspective and philosophical. I adore taking care of people, cooking for them, and generally making people’s lives better. A huge fact about me is that I am really short, only 4’ 10” (147 cm) tall, and I also have really long shaggy auburn hair, glasses, pale skin with lots of moles and freckles, decently big muscles and I like wearing cool jackets and funny t-shirts. My style switches between masculine and feminine a lot. I love being outside so much and I can’t stand being cooped up for hours on end, I need to be outside at least for a couple hours every day. I’m hyper-empathetic and care for things very deeply, including wild plants and animals. I prefer partners who are chill and not overly clingy, as I like my space but still like spending time with someone. 

Thank you so so much, sorry if this was too long! I hope your day is going well 

Hi hi, thank you for the request! I apologize for the long wait, I had gotten a little busy this holiday weekend.

I ship you with...

Aragorn!!!

It quickly became quite obvious that Aragorn had been developing feelings for you, especially given how easily entertained he was by you. Whatever it were that you had found yourself doing, Aragorn would always chime in his support. He would find it quite interesting your love for foraging and witchcraft. He would often find himself asking you tons of questions about what it’s like being a witch 💜, and would offer to go foraging for you if you needed anything for your craft. Perhaps it started out with a few shared hobbies, such as your shared passion for taking care of animals and your love for nature. Eventually, the two of you could be found together enjoying the simplicities of nature and all of its beauty as you stroll hands intertwined through the beautiful woodland area surrounding Rivendell. Aragorn would feel completely relaxed whenever he is with you and would often find himself lost in the many stories you would share. His favorites being the ones you were creating, making him cherish that for a short while only he may know them. With each one of them making him fall for you even harder. He loved seeing you whenever you were excitable and determined, for it often would inspire him to do his best. Even though Aragorn was quite the confident and determined person himself, he was glad to know he had someone he could rely on and take advice from if ever he would need it. After sometime, Aragorn would come to hope that the two of you would be spending much more time together, through courtship and through life.

I hope you liked reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it :)

feel free to leave a comment 🪴🌿

💜💜💜

[abigail]

hi have you ever told your ghost stories? can i hear your ghost stories

hiiii !!! sorry I just got to replying to this now, I must had missed it lol but yeah I’m assuming you mean when I said recently that I’ve seen two ghosts? :-) I didn’t think I’ve posted about seeing them before but I’ll tell ya !!! kind of long so sorry about that lol ok so

the first one I saw I didn’t realise it was a ghost until after.. and tbh this one might not had been a ghost but I have no other explanation for it.. so context first - to get to the train station where I live I have to walk along a road with huge trees on either side of it (like a mini woodland area), inbetween all these trees on the other side of the road is a huge house, it’s very very old and abandoned, broken windows, mould, everything is overgrown etc. anyway I was heading to the station one early autumn morning, it was around 6:45am ish and it was raining and still a little dark out like the sun was just then rising. I don’t really know why but when walking past the house I had a the urge to look over at it from across the road, I usually don’t because I see it every day and idk it’s not something I think about I guess ?? anyway I do look over and I see an old man in the garden, first time I’ve ever seen someone there, he’s cutting the grass with one of those really big, old lawnmowers. he looks directly at me as I’m passing by and I kinda wave and shout a ‘morning!’ to him (it’s very common and normal for people to say morning/hello to each other like this where I live lol) he doesn’t respond, just keeps watching me as I walk by, whatever ok that’s fine, I think he probably just had not heard me over the sound of the lawnmower. I keep walking and when the house it way out of sight I think hang on, I didn’t even hear the lawnmower on.. and it’s still kinda dark out…. and it’s raining. who cuts the grass in the rain at nearly 7am in autumn when it’s still kinda dark out like… huh?? I really wanted to go back and see if he was still there but I needed to get the train so I didn’t. when I got back later that day though and walked by I looked over at the house and it looked the exact same as always, broken windows and stuff, the grass was still overgrown and hadn’t been cut. so uh yeah.. I really don’t know what to think of it and all I can really think is he just had been a ghost like.. no one’s ever lived there like I’ve never even seen a light on and the place is wrecked so uhhhh yeah ! lawnmower ghost !

the other one I’m certain was a ghost because there’s literally no other way I can explain what I saw and I kind of got it confirmed for me. lots of context to begin with sorry this one will be a longer story. ok so ! I used to work at a cinema, it was a really big one, I’m not kidding it had 20 screens, all the fancy screens too like imax etc. all the staff there (who weren’t supervisors/management) did everything too like, one shift you’d be serving popcorn and tickets and another shift you’d be cleaning screens etc. one of the jobs was ‘screen checking’ where basically you have to go into each screen 3 times during each showing, once during the ads/trailers - this is just to make sure the sound is ok and there’s no one in the audience who shouldn’t be there (like kids sneaking into 18 rated movies or whatever). once just as the movie is about to begin - this was just to make sure the movie actually came on okay and that it was playing fine, if it had subtitles that they were on and for the right film, that the audience weren’t on phones and that no one was recording the screen to pirate it etc. then you’d go in one last time half way through the movie, this one was always easy because it was just to make sure things were ok again and that no one was filming the screen or whatever, it was super easy because if there ever was anything wrong at this point then usually one of the customers would’ve already come out and complained about it lol anyway !!

I was doing that job one shift, it was a very quiet morning in the middle of the week, not many new movies out and all that. I go into one of the screens to do the first check, I write down the time and look around the screen (from where I’m stood at the bottom of the stairs/aisle), the lights are still on but dimmed during the ads so I don’t need to use the night vision goggles yet (yeah that’s a thing too, makes it easier to check on the audience when it’s dark and you can zoom in so it helps in bigger screens, sometimes you won’t need them though like if the movie is playing a bright scene you can usually just see without the goggles), there’s just one couple sat at the back, I looked at how many tickets were sold and it just said two so I guess that’s them. I leave and come back 20 minutes later, the lights go down and the title card comes up, movie plays fine, I get the night vision goggles out and scan the seats for if anyone else was in there, nope! I keep looking and get to the couple at the back, they’re fine and don’t seem like they’re gonna do anything bothersome so alright, I write it down and leave. so far it’s a very easy shift, lots of screens with no one in them or very few people, it’s during school hours in the morning so no kids or teenagers are about (they’re usually the ones causing trouble lol), I keep going to chat with one of my coworkers about whatever tv show we was watching, like.. I’m having a really nice and easy shift tbh

I go to do the final check in this one screen; it’s about 30 minutes until the end of the movie, I go in and yeah, everything on screen looks normal, everything is fine. I get the night vision goggles out and knowing it’s just that couple at the back I just look directly at them, the guy had fallen asleep and the girl looked bored, whatever. I state at them a little longer than needed because in the moment I suddenly felt really off, like something just felt.. different. I wouldn’t usually during the third check but I decided to look through the goggles and scan over the rest of the screen, I don’t know why because I know it’s just that couple in there, I don’t need to do that. I get to about half way up the seats and on the aisle closest to my side where I’m stood, I see an old man.. I think it’s weird but maybe he was just running late and missed the first 10 minutes of the movie or something and that’s why I didn’t see him before (even though only two tickets had sold). I zoom in on him so I can see him better, the goggles are very good quality ones and I can see him clear as day, he was just staring at the screen watching the movie and not a bother or anything. the movie is playing a particularly bright scene at this point and I knew I didn’t need the goggles to see the audience, so without blinking or looking away from where the man sat, I put the goggles down. and he was just.. not there. he was gone.. like he vanished in front of me after I put the goggles down. my heart began to beat like crazy and I started sweating like.. the screen was bright, so bright I could even see the couple sat the back, and there was no one else in the screen, like.. the man was just not there. I got super freaked out and speed walked out the screen and went to my coworker in a panic, he went up to the screen with the goggles and he couldn’t see anyone other than the couple.. he was in there for 15 minutes just looking to see if anyone else was there but no. I then go to my supervisor and tell him, we check on the cameras and no one other than the couple (and me) went into that screen.. but I saw him clear as day, I remember his face and outfit and everything. insane shit honestly.. but it doesn’t end there..

a week or so passed by and staff were all gossiping about me seeing the ghost, half of them saying I was making it up of course (what would I gain from lying about it though ??? lol). one of my managers asks to see me in the office, we sit down and it’s just us in the room, he gets very serious and tells me he’d rather I didn’t ‘make up stories’ about seeing a ghost of a man in that screen.. he continues to tell me that like 5 years before I worked there an elderly couple went to see a movie in that screen and during it the man fell asleep and passed away in his sleep, I vaguely knew this happened but I didn’t know any details, I just knew someone died in the cinema during a movie years ago, but even then I thought it was just a rumour staff spread to freak out new staff. he continues and says he doesn’t want to hear about it because it was very traumatic for him because he was the one who had to try and resuscitate the man until an ambulance showed up and then deal with it all etc. he told me he didn’t want to relive it. I told him I can understand that and I’m truly sorry he had to deal with that etc but I knew what I saw and wasn’t making it up. at this point I can tell he’s fed up and he kinda huffs and says ‘fine ok!’ and tells me to tell him exactly what I saw, every detail I remember of his face/outfit, where he was sitting etc, so I do. as I’m telling him his face just drops. once I’m finished he quietly tells me that yeah, that actually does sound like the man he had to deal with that day who passed away, even down to where he was sitting.. we kinda didn’t know what to say to each other at this point but I tell him I won’t bring it up to any other coworkers again and then I leave.. so uh yeah... he basically confirmed I saw a man who had died 5 years before …. I didn’t like doing screen checks after that and I stopped using the night vision goggles, and I didn’t like to go back into that screen because I was just so freaked out about it.. I’ve been in since though and I even went in on my own to watch a movie in there but I try to avoid looking around it too much.. so yeah, movie ghost !

hmm so yeah this was a lot I’m sorry !! but there’s the ghosties I’ve seen :-) thank you for asking me about it, I love telling people lol

[bottomvalerius]

actually i want to write more trans HC with my blorbos specifically so rapid-fire thoughts let's go:

Damien doesn't get top surgery yet, but eventually when he does he doesn't get nipple graphs and instead tattoos little heart nipples instead (probably a funky color like green or purple to really lean into the 'living dead boy' theme lmfao)

Most of Donna's body hair is natural; their goatee was the only thing they use magic to keep up, and part of it came from Asra daring them to do it and they both agreed they should keep it lmfao

Asra probably would have been the one to crack Donna's egg too tbh LOL like they've never FELT like a girl, they just didn't really know what else to call themself until Asra got them baked and told them about how gender isn't real in the magic realms and it all clicked

Sam's family is actually extremely accepting of him in a "tell me your pronouns so I can insult you properly" sorta way LMFAO Sam's younger sibling Roshni is nonbinary and he has a trans niece that he supports financially as well. Sam is just an asshole LMFAO

Sam didn't know what the fuck was going on with himself for quite a while, and it wasn't until he got really deep into the scene and met other queer folk that things really began cementing for him. like he genuinely believed he was a cis het woman for a good chunk of his young adulthood who just happened to fuck everyone and their mother and also hated being referred to as a woman LMFAO

I've mentioned before that Sam plays around with his body hair a lot. he prefers a more clean-shaven look as he thinks it makes him more snake-y in appearance, but sometimes he will just suddenly be covered head to toe in hair because that's just how he's feeling for the month

Damien gets a hairy butt after some time on T and he fucking loves it LMFAO (this is on the list of things to draw); he really leans into the woodland creature the hairier he gets lmfao

Donna truly doesn't have many preferences for themself in terms of their sex and presentation; they really just enjoy manipulating how their body looks with magic when the mood strikes. Sometimes it's a big tit day, sometimes it's a no titty day, if it's raining it's time for a glittery dick, but if it's sunny the coochie is coming out. they contain multitudes lmfao

[antis-hell]

🛋️ what does your inner world look like?

🎃 - who is close to the front rn?

🛋

This is a good one! Our iw is actually really complicated cus of our ✨️trauma✨️ but the general idea of it is several islands that are fuckin impossible to travel between (courtesy of our programmers being a bitch lol)

Most of our known alts live in the main island that was dubbed Hemlock, which I'm pretty sure is a plant?? But it contains the fronting room, so that's probably why we mostly know ppl from here. Hemlock is pretty big for me it would take a while to walk from where I live to the edge of the island so it's got a lotta shit on it so I'll just list off the main areas of it:]

Mash up mansion: got its name from the fact that it's technically three mansions from fiction all in one(markiplier mansion from wkm, the woodland forest mansion from minecraft and one of our olds hosts OCs mansion) it's basically the common area for our primary fronters since all our bedrooms are in there + most of the more "typically" presenting littles/middles

The vault: a (I'm pretty sure) subsystem that's mostly just persecutors and and a handful of gatekeepers to make sure they're not fucking around too much, it looks like an underground cavern that kinda just tunnels under the main island

The borderlands forest: a forrest that surrounds the edge of Hemlock pretty densely, it has a few moving groups of fully formed alters that chill in there, but it's mostly fragments that hold memories and are content staying where they are

🎃

Fuck really knows lol but I'll list the ppl ik are here:]

Me(Anti): host/sexual protector, so I'm never really far from front

Tyler: cartographer, so he got pulled to front when I was talking about our iw

Dark/Damien: head gatekeeper (and my partner<33) so again never really that far from front if he can help it

Stevie: my mortal enemy and co host so again bitch just hangs nearby a lotta the time

Bing/Erin: memory holder, tbh idk what she's doing here but she is soooo!

And I think that's all:D ty for the ask anon

[not-poignant]

I thought I sent this ask, but unsure if my computer cancelled it, so ignore this if it's redundant! What is your favorite forest and why, if you don't mind sharing?

I definitely haven't gotten this ask before now! So maybe your computer got mad. Hmm, favourite forest, tbh there's probably a few. But I'm extremely partial to the karri forest in the south-west of my state, partly because it's the only tall and dense forest I can access in the whole of the state. I also really liked the rainforest in Victoria, Australia. And I have some photos from there. And and, I was a big fan of the rainforests and forests in Tasmania too. I haven't actually seen many forests otherwise!! I would love to travel around Europe and the Pacific North West in North America and see those kinds of forests, and I'd like to visit some cloud forests (if I could ever handle the altitude) some day too. I'm really drawn to forests but I actually haven't been to them that often!

So these are some of the forests I've visited! (All photos mine)

Karri forest, Western Australia:

Hartz Forest, Tasmania.

Here in most of Western Australia we have bushland and woodland and scrubland. Some of that land does have trees, but they're generally further apart or characteristically not very tall (like Banksia kwongan or paperbark/jarrah bushland, which looks like this):

There are trees! They're just...far apart, and not that tall. I love where I live locally, but tbh I love all forests and I haven't seen many. If you live in Western Australia, like, there are people here who haven't seen a forest in their entire lives except in photos, just like most of us have never seen snow.

[lycomorpha]

The flora of AC Valhalla - Part 1: some botanical considerations

Least yellow sorrel from AC Valhalla, which I’m currently drawing

My last few posts have been about the botany of Horizon Zero Dawn. But right now I’m sneaking in to talk about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Ubisoft), before my collaborator Maria & I get back to freeze-rime root. (Maria is off rn and I can’t be left alone for 5 minutes, apparently). I love ACV and I’ve been drawing fungi and plants from that world too, but it’s a very different environment to HZD.

This post is about the botanical anomalies of ACV - as much to get them out of the way before any real botanists get mad at me as anything! Then next time I’ll share a quick survey of familiar flora from one of my favourite locations – the Temple of Ceres in the Forest of Denu (aka the Forest of Dean)

Lichens in AC Valhalla - probably oakmoss (Evernia species) or a Ramalina species if I had to guess

Video game botany in 9th century England

I don’t wanna dwell on them but there are some plant-related things in this game that may vex actual botanists (I am not a botanist, being an artist-pharmacologist is weird enough on its own). So I want to say; yes, we know about those things, but it’s more fun not to get hung up on that and to enjoy the wildlife as we find it. So let’s talk about that stuff before we get into the weeds (or in this case, the ancient woodland wildlife).

Location

ACV is set somewhere familiar to me – the UK, where I live. A lot of the plants are very recognisable, but familiarity can trip you up. It’s easy to assume you know what something is based on where you find it, without looking closely enough at a plant’s characteristics.

However, it’s not always familiarity causing me double-takes. Many plants have a much more widespread distribution in-game than irl and several of the plants (and a few animals) didn’t appear in 9th Century England where ACV is largely set. Much like Maria (who is a botanist) doesn’t begrudge AC Odyssey those Opuntia and Bougainvillea that prematurely appeared in her homeland… I’m just gonna mention it when it happens & move on. I do not grudge over this kinda shit tbh. Besides, when it comes to animals and skulls, what’s to say they didn’t arrive via trade with Vinland - an area of the game on the north American continent I think - or Europe?

Possible Mule deer skull on a cursed zone marker. Not a species I’d expect here - maybe traded via Vinland? Didn’t stop me sketching it anyway. I drew it from memory before the screen cap so I miiight have made that string of bones a tad oversized. Also I didn’t capture how the skull is attached to the post - only worked that out after zooming in....

Seasonality

It leads to some cognitive dissonance seeing oaks and beeches in their autumn colours next to spring bluebells, summer flowers, and winter fungi in ACV. I kinda like that in some ways - it means we get to see all the good plants/fungi regardless of what quests we’re playing and when. (Big fan of moors & autumn, glad everyone gets a chance at seas of pink heather or fiery bracken). I also imagine seasons are hard from a design standpoint - the UK flora changes so distinctively in time, but the game doesn’t have a fixed time of year or months to go on. It’s open world and the story has no particular season attached to quests, for the most part. (Yes I know… Yule & Ostara in the settlement, Samhain in Gloucester, these are festivals that come with dates... Listen. Half my family are pagan, I’m very done about how accurate those aspects are or aren’t. Pls let’s never speak of this again.) Anyway… Given seasons aren’t essential the story, I think it’s fair enough to somewhat smoosh them into one (sorry botanists) even if it looks a bit weird. And hey, bluebells in autumn woods = all the best colours at once, whoop whoop!

You get all seasons at once around Ravensthorpe

Scale

The size of some plants in ACV is… unexpected. But as mentioned in past posts; if you want to interact with a plant/fungi/insect it has to be big enough for players to see. There are also many plants we don’t directly interact with in the game that are very much larger on screen than they are in reality. Again, I’ll just mention it as and when… (And point at this post to say ‘yes we know’ if any botanists pick me up on my shit, heh.) But truly, I wish we had giant brittlegills and wood sorrels that were as big as me bc THAT would be awesome.

Surprisingly large sorrels & ginormous winter chanterelles

OK that is about as many things as I can think of for this post. Now I’m gonna get on with enjoying the ACV botany!

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Does Archaeology - Part 5

(as per usual, all these posts are collected under the KyidylCL tag)

Pottery and shErds

So, what are we talking about today? Well, I think the next thing is gonna be pottery.  This is where we’re gonna talk about time, space, and dating a site.  Because most people think that the only way to date an archaeological site is via C14.  That’s not true, and actually we don’t always do it.  C14 dating can have some problems, including that the wood used in the fire is likely older than the time in which it was cut down and burned.  It also only goes back 50,000 years, so anything older than that won’t have any carbon isotopes (it’ll have all decayed), and we have to use other things that are more expensive.  And c14 testing itself is expensive - we sent in 2 samples and it was around $500/sample so we spent about $1000 on testing.  Instead, there are other ways to date a site and one of the most accurate is pottery.  

See, like all other kinds of material culture (AKA, stuff people leave behind.  Non-material culture is like...song and story and stuff like that.), pottery follows stylistic trends and trends in how it was made.  And it does this both regionally and chronologically.  Which is great, because if we find bits of one type of pottery we know is made in one place in a settlement in another place, then we know the two people traded with each other.  But I have to explain something else so that determining a date from pottery makes sense.  

Every area of the country has what’s called a “type site” for a given period of time.  In undergrad I was lucky enough to actually get to work on the type site for the Safety Harbour period, which is Weedon Island....ironically enough there’s a Weedon Island period and Weedon Island isn’t the type site for that period so uuuhhh...yeah it’s weird lol.  Anyway, a type site is a site that is considered stereotypical for a given time and place in history.  Usually they’re large and well-preserved, and they’re often the first sites found in that time period/area (but not always, which is how the above weirdness happened.). And so what happens is we dig ‘em and analyze the finds and do testing on those finds.  So now we know “hey, this kind of pottery comes from here and it is X years old”. Now you know when you find it in other places where and when it comes from.  This is all a very generalized explanation, but I think any more is like extraneous detail you don’t need.  Just know that things like type sites help us determine where and when stuff like pottery was made.  Lots of literature usually exists for type sites, but I actually can’t remember the type site for this area for this time period.  

We also use a term called “diagnostic”, which is used much as it is in medicine.  If we find a certain thing that was only made during a specific time period or in a certain place, then it’s diagnostic.  IE, a certain kind of pottery is diagnostic of the late, middle, or early Woodland.  The pottery we have at our site is diagnostic of the late Woodland.  Some of the lithics we thought might be a bit earlier, but honestly I think that was just misidentification by the site director bc we were in the field at the time.  Lastly, identifying pottery has a few components.  Color and decoration I think are easy to understand (they didn’t have glazes, but you can make different colored pottery by varying the composition of the clay and the temperature at which it is fired.). Paste and temper are the other two.  IDK how modern pottery is made, but old ass pottery is made with paste - the main body of the clay, the matrix that contains the temper - and temper. Temper is stuff they’d crush up and mix in to help it not break during firing and heating during normal use.  So we combine these factors to ID the pottery and thus the age of the site and trading habits of the people in question.  One last thing you need to understand about pottery - ancient people used pottery the way that we use disposable things.  They didn’t think it was like an important thing that had to keep safe.  They’d use it until it broke and then toss it in the garbage pit and make a new one.  So it’s really common and we find it all over the place, but TBH in the future pottery *won’t* be diagnostic anymore because our ceramics come in such a wide variety that we couldn’t possibly hope to narrow down time or place.  

Alright, so who wants pictures? You, of course.  Who *doesn’t* want pictures? Here’s some of the pottery we found: 

This is the larger shard that I found in the features I’ve talked about in previous installments.  You can see where I accidentally broke it. >.> Anyway it’s kind of unique bc of the light color outside and the black inside.  It’s like...idk, 4 or so inches long.  

This is a rim piece that I happened to find two matching sherds of.  I always check the rim pieces because the patterns on them usually make them easier to fit together.  Honestly I’ve got hundreds of pot sherds from this site and I don’t have the sanity to try and make pots from them.  

This is the outside and inside respectively of the largest piece we have.  TBH taking this thing out of its box and handling it makes me nervous because of how large it is - about the size of my hand, but I did include my earbuds for scale.  The black is charring from both firing and subsequent use, and it came out of the pit feature I’ve been talking about.  And do you wanna know the cool thing about the inner surface of pottery? Because they didn’t use glazes, the surface was porous and retains the unique chemical traces of what was made in them.  However, the vast majority of the time those kinds of tests aren’t done because archaeology as a whole is extremely underfunded and trace chemical analysis of pot residue is an expensive test requiring expensive equipment and expensive scientists.  Funnily enough I probably could do some of this testing bc I used to be premed and so I’ve taken a lot of chemistry and know how to read a mass spec thing, but I don’t have access to the chemicals or tools to do these kinds of tests.  Plus, they’re often destructive...which....I mean...there’s so much pottery that it doesn’t really matter if one piece gets destroyed but like you do still have to be careful *which* piece you destroy.  

Anyway, you also can see the striations on the outside piece, and that’s decoration on the pot.  It probably also helped with gripping it.  This is a piece of Shepardware, which is diagnostic of the late Woodland period in the Shenandoah valley. Here’s some more cool pottery: 

This is a random assortment of the kind of stuff we regularly pull out of the ground when it comes to pottery.  The most common kind we have is the orange on one side black on the other (3 upper rt pieces), whiteish (upper left 2), orange on both sides (lower left 3) and totally black (lower right 3).  All of ‘em are some variety of shepard or pageware.  You can see the texture on a lot of them, too.  We have a good mix of textured and untextured, and that’s why the composition of the pottery is more diagnostic than the decoration.  Frankly, people can and will put whatever design they think looks cool.  But they made that particular design by wrapping twine around the end of a flat stick and pressing it into the surface of the wet clay.  I also chose those two upper right pieces because they have really visible temper.  Here’s a side shot of one of them: 

You can see how big the bits are compared to my fingers (yeah, there’s dirt under my nails....I haven’t taken some tweezers to them yet after working on the car.). And...wait, I WAS going to try to describe this to you but then I was like “no, they deserve better” and I broke out my DSLR and my macro lens and took some pics.  Here are some macros of the temper: 

The white balance is a little off on the top one...the bottom one is more true to color (they aren’t the same piece of pottery, but they are a similar color).  So you can see that it’s crushed up limestone.  Pardon the depth of field on those...I had to open the aperture pretty wide to get one that wasn’t blurry bc I don’t exactly have bright lights in my room.  

Anyway....so that’s the pottery we’ve gotten at the site and what we can learn from it.  It’s going to take some time before we can start determining patterns and whatnot in regards to style, but we do have some evidence of trading here because some of the pottery we have is from the piedmont culture....

...wait, let me explain what that means.  When archaeologists need to describe a group of people who existed in a given place in a given time based on similarities in material culture regardless of ethnic and social grouping we call it a culture.  This is different than the standard meaning of the world culture, or even the way a cultural anthropologist would use the word.  So when I say the piedmont culture, I mean people that lived in the general area of the Piedmont plateau during the late woodland.  They were of varying tribes, languages, etc.  And we do this to describe the extant boundaries of cultural influence of particular trends in physical objects and not the social groupings of the humans in question.  So, for example, lots of people are familiar with the Clovis culture.  When archaeologists use this term we mean “these are the boundaries of the places we are finding physical objects in the group we’ve named Clovis” not “everyone in this area was a Clovis person”. Like no, obviously, they weren’t.  There were tons of social groups, tribes, etc. that were all distinct and different.  It’s a way of mapping cultural influence via physical objects to see how far they spread and who was using them.  

So, we have some piedmont stuff despite not being in the piedmont area, so we know that they were trading with those natives.  If you’re interested in more detail here, this is the VDHR resource I use for IDing pottery.  It looks like it came to visit you from the late 1990s, but the info is good and it’s easy to use. 

Anyway, that’s it for tonight.  Tomorrow is gonna be rocks and weird stuff, depending on how much I end up saying about rocks.  Probably not much bc we know how I feel about rocks.   ;) 

[the-genesis-caveat]

Hey can you tell me about the creaturae plot? Cause I have no idea what it’s about

hoooo boy, this is gonna be a long one XDD

i'll start with saying that a lot is still up in the air, but there's a pretty solid skeleton of what i want to happen for certain characters and events.

imma put it under the cut because again. l o n g .

in the beginning, there was place where all stories end. a universe dedicated to the fragments and remains of all the stories that had been completed, or that never would be. and in the beginning, there was a grove, tucked into the folds of the universe, a single tree with red, green, and golden apples, guarded by three who did not know where they'd come from before.

paz, rev, and emi only ever knew the grove. each guarded a fruit, and they all guarded the grove together. not that anyone knew where it was to conquer it. one day, paz broke a twig from the tree and it transformed into a pencil, allowing her to access her powers of creation. rev discovered they could build their own creations. soon after, two doors appeared. paz entered one, and it vanished. rev and emi entered the other.

paz's door took her to what was known as a city-fragment. these floating bits of planet were essentially capitalist cities, run by mafia and banking clans and casinos. while there, she unknowingly entered a death-game. upon winning, she became a death-god as all others who won these games were. it was in this city she first met dorian, and while working with faem out of necessity (dorian is also a death-god) and eventually friendship, she used the name iden.

rev and emi landed in a world of magic and fantasy. a fragment of a long-since forgotten magical world. rev learned as much as they could, honing magic and their own power until they could learn no more. determined to gain more ability, they sought out the fabled death-games, participating in one and winning. they too became a death-god, taking on draconic features. the price? they could never return to the magic-fragment, as the citizens did not allow travelers from the city-fragments. rev and emi moved on.

rev had a vision. they brought together fragments and bits of worlds, shaping and forming them into the donut-shaped planet now known as creaturae. creaturae, for it was the last name rev had given themself. some fragments, such as the isolated city-fragments, were left untouched. but iden and dorian sensed the powerful death-god rev had become, and travelled to creaturae to investigate.

the three had reunited. iden took the name parzival, and along with rev and emi explored this new planet. dorian vanished, under the radar, and began to create the labyrinth that phased between worlds and connected creaturae to horrors and wonders yet unknown.

parzival became bored. she decided to create an island. one part of creaturae fully under her control. she found adrian- a character from a story she'd written with others, a crossover into reality. she brought him to creaturae, to the castle on her island, for his story had ended with the deaths of all the others. she formed a city, a replica of one adrian knew well. for some time there was peace, and quiet.

then it all shattered. characters from adrian's story were brought back through the librarian's timeline as fictionals- meaning they could only die the way they had in their story. other than that they were functionally immortal. adrian was reunited with lucien and jay, the three having been married for some time in the previous story (nicknamed the neapolitan trio). others had returned too, and settled into the city. (the story adrian, jay, and lucien are from is the coalition files, which me and a couple irl friends have been working on for a while. it's kind of sci-fi and superpower story thing and also very complicated lol).

disaster struck. other timelines were creeping in on creaturae, and parallels were springing up. those on parzival's island found themselves trapped living plots aligned with those in stories that had already occurred. conflict after conflict, even rev and emi getting involved to try and stop it. by the time it was brought to a close, nothing would ever be the same again. (this part follows dream smp plot points because i was hyperfixating on that when i wrote it, but it's only essential for character development, not a synopsis, so i won't go into a ton of detail).

during a massive battle, jay calls on her doppelgangers from other timelines of her story. two are most prominent: darkjay and white crow, each with powers similar and different to her own, with their own stories and tragedies lived. whit uses fire manipulation to burn away parzival's flight wings, leaving her defeated. she surrenders and is placed in prison under guard of jay. the parallels still raged for some time after this. while in prison, parzival takes on the name genesis, using he/him pronouns. rev isolates themself with emi, trying to avoid the parallels but only being drawn further into them.

it's revealed that the labyrinth, dorian's creation, is the cause of the parallels seeping into creaturae. in a final bid to break their hold, genesis is released from prison and assists rev, neapolitan trio, and the jay syndicate (the group jay and her doppelgangers formed) in finally freeing creaturae of the parallels. the labyrinth remained, but the power was under control.

rev formed an organization known as tahva (it's an acronym, idk what it stands for yet i just like it) to help them protect creaturae, the surrounding fragments, and the universe they reside in. they hire dorian to help them by monitoring the labyrinth, which fae agrees to (he's probably just bored tbh). emi helps rev any way he can.

genesis (once again using the name iden) and dorian mostly separate from the others, basically for everyones' mental health. after all, parzival was the mastermind behind the tragedies caused by the parallels, and dorian's labyrinth only worsened the problem. the two take up refuge in a woodland mansion as minecraft mechanics begin to affect creaturae, lowering the stakes by making death impermanent. dorian spends far less time at the mansion than iden does, travelling between city-fragments to help rev and tahva take down capitalist schemes, wandering the labyrinth, etc. but fae always make time for their friends.

iden has been through... a lot. i gave my sona just as much trauma as i did p much all the other unwilling participants, especially during his time in prison. everything after the parallels are defeated i refer to as "post-plot" because it's largely undefined (deliberately so) and is time reserved for all the characters to heal. because soft as i am, i can't let this end as a hurt/no comfort story. so heal they will, even if there's bumps along the way.

there's a lot i left out for the sake of trying to summarize this best as possible, i tried to include anything plot-important though.

[nostalgicfun]

okay so someone else asked for your favorite books for young/preschool kids, but can we get books for older kids? like second through 4th grade maybe? ;w; thank you and I love your blog sm!!!

Hiiii, and thank you so much for asking! :) I love love love sharing book recs!! However, I have to forewarn you that I am terrible with the ages and skills of kids! I don’t know where the average 2nd-4th grader should be at academically tbh, just like I chose books that were probably too difficult for preschool kids. So! Here’s some books I personally enjoyed during these years, and we’ll go from easiest to hardest! :3 

1. Anything Junie B. Jones! They’re easy and a LOT of fun! And they usually cover topics most kids can relate to or situations that kids can see themselves in. 

2. Ramona novels. These might be a little dated, but that didn’t stop me from loving them! I have great memories of reading along with the teacher during story time in 3rd grade, and how excited I was to check each one out of the library.

4. Baby Sitter’s Club! Their age doesn’t stop them from teaching great values with interesting, diverse stories. also I remember making blanket forts and sitting down and reading whole books in a night bc I had all my sister’s hand me down books from the 80s/90s

5. Goosebumps! Nuff said. 

6. Novels from the Poppy series. It’s been a looooong time since I read these, but I remember they were actually really good! The stories follow mice and other woodland creatures. 

While we’re on the topic of books by Avi, let’s go ahead and throw in Strange Happenings. It’s basically Stephen King for kids--there’s even a story surprisingly similar to “It!” These short stories have stuck with me for years and I still can’t look at bleachers without thinking of this book. 

7. Now we’re creeping into the slightly older territory, with Fablehaven. This series had SUCH an impact on me as a young reader! It’s about kids that go to live with their grandparents and discover fairytale creatures are real. 

8. And finally...the original Coraline novel. I know this one might be a little too aged up for this list??? But I read it in 4th or 5th grade, so I’m going to go ahead and include it. If you haven’t read the original Coraline yet, I super, super recommend it! It didn’t scare me, just kind of gave me that creepy-crawly “eugh” feeling, so it shouldn’t scare the kids in your life, either! Maybe. Possibly. No promises. :) 

I’d also like to give an honorable mention to The Thief Lord, The Boxcar Children, Charlotte’s Web, and The Egypt Game! 

What about you guys?? Any books you’d like to add to the list for anon? :) 

[irene-sadler]

Six Months

someone wondered when the Baroness (a side character from the Tournament aka Sir Reynard and the Red Knight which I wrote earlier this year) was coming back and uh, “back” implies that she ever left in the first place, tbh. spoilers: she didn’t.

anyway so here’s a little something something

its a quick family story plus a story about civilians in wartime packed into a little over 4000 words. rated PG. ft teen romance drama, sheep, grown up romance non drama, and not a single canon witcher character. think Roseanne (original show not the weird remake that died on arrival for Reasons) but in the setting of The Witcher. or don’t if u have no idea what i’m even talking about b/c u dont watch 90s cable sitcoms constantly like i do lol.

Six Months:

The Nilfgaardian soldiers came at night, but they found an empty manor house. The occupants had had plenty of warning they were on their way; the family’s oldest son had ridden nonstop from Rivia Castle to warn them that there had been a coup, that the Queen had vanished and her young son was in charge, and that it was only a matter of time before their old enemy Caldwell came looking for them. Hilde thought they were, in many ways, fortunate - not lucky, because no luck had been involved - fortunate that their son was riding his fastest horse, fortunate that the rest of the household managed to collect what they could and hide the rest without dramatics or incident, fortunate to have somewhere else to go. An old herbalist’s hut in the woods wasn’t much, but it was, she’d said, a roof over their heads. They’d always had a plan, in case everything in their lives went very badly wrong. Everything had, and the hut was part of it.

    Then her son rode off with most of her other sons and the rest of her husband’s knights, on the chance that the Queen was out there somewhere, and left the place somewhat emptier-feeling in his absence.

    “Wish I was going with them,” the Baron said, looking down the woodland road after them.

    “We talked about this, Eldred; you’re sixty-seven years old, your eyesight’s going bad, and your knees don’t bend anymore. A warband’s got no use for you.”

    “I know that,” he said. “Don’t mean I don’t wish I was going.”

    A little flock of sheep crossed the path, with some of her nephews trailing after them, waving sticks and shouting.

    “I’ll be worried about them, too,” she said, as one of the sheep suddenly bolted. Eldred took her hand, squeezed it, and limped off after it.

    The next time their paths crossed he was in a slightly better mood. She hooked her arm through his elbow and looked up at the full moon through the trees.

    “Can’t hear myself think in there, so I came out here for some fresh air,” he said. There wasn’t enough room inside for even half the people who had followed them along. Most of the household had settled around the hut in tents and bedrolls. The inside of the hut was still jammed with the smaller children. They were also fortunate that it was spring, and nobody would freeze to death sleeping outside. No luck involved, again. No army fought in the winter, although she wouldn’t put it past the Empire to try.

    “We’ll have to build pens for the sheep and pigs, tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe some more shelters, too. The farmhands can do it. And I’ll organize some of the women t’ forage in the woods. We’re fortunate it’s spring. We might be living off pottage of oats and chickweed, but we won’t starve t’ death.”

    “You know,” Eldred said, “I was thinking I might get a shot at some of these invaders after all. They might turn up here.”

    “They might.”

    “Wouldn’t want any spies or wanderers t’ spot us and take word back to th’ army that we’re out here.”

    “No.”

    “Anyhow, with all these boys out here, I thought I might train ‘em up a little, just in case.”

    “That’s not a bad idea.”

    “Might take some of these girls, too,” he added.

    “Even better,” she said. He smiled down at her.

    “We’ll be safe here.”

    “Of course we will, with you around,” she said.

    ———

    Wars were just a part of life. She was born and raised in Rivia; she’d grown up watching her brothers and father ride off to war with Lyria, over and over again. Her father was killed by a Lyrian archer when she was twenty-three. She’d watched her mother’s face while they buried him. She never wanted to know what it took to make someone wear that hard, dead expression. Over a decade later the King married a Lyrian princess and those wars stopped, but more took their place. There had been the rebellion, after the King died, led by her own disgruntled brothers, who refused to serve a Lyrian; her husband’s promotion from petty knight to Baron was a direct result of the glory he’d won putting it down. That war had almost destroyed her marriage, but they’d pulled through, in the end. Then there had been bandits, minor invasions, civil unrest; it seemed like there was always something to fight over, but never anything new. Whether Lyrians were killing Rivians or Nilfgaardians were killing Rivians, they always had the same damn excuses for it. The older she got, the less patience she had for any of them.

    ———        

    Smoke from cooking fires floated through the newly cleared area around the camp. The forest echoed with the sounds of axes hitting wood and more trees falling. The pigs slept in the shade out of the heat, watched over by a pack of skinny boys from the village. The herbalist’s hut sat surrounded by a dozen almost identical buildings - buildings, children, chickens, dogs, a donkey that someone had brought in, loaded down with rushes -

    The Nilfgaardians hadn’t found them, but a whole lot of other people somehow had. Some of them brought livestock or food, but a hell of a lot of them had nothing but the clothes on their backs. Hilde refused to turn them away, even if a few of the hands muttered darkly about spies and famine. More was better; more people meant more hands to work and more eyes to keep watch. Eldred’s little force of skinny teenagers with homemade bows and farmhands armed with handaxes had grown in size, if not, in her opinion, in quality. He seemed pleased with them, at least. Some of them were standing watch at the edges of the clearing. She was pretty sure none of them were asleep.

    It turned out they weren’t; a minor racket interrupted the idyllic peace of the summer afternoon - some kind of argument, she thought. She abandoned the shirt she was mending and headed to the north side of the buildings, where she found a pair of youths shouting at each other. One, she noticed, was her own youngest son, waving a bow and turning an impressive shade of red. The other was a dark-haired girl. The latter spotted her before the former; Hilde watched with detached interest as the girl’s eyes widened and her stance shifted from aggressive to frozen fear.

    “Herron,” she said. “It’s -”

    “What’s this about?” Hilde asked.

    “- your mother.”

    Herron deflated, visibly.

    “We were just - we were talking,” he said, staring at his own feet.

    “I heard.”

    “Just a - a disagreement over the watch schedule,” said the girl. She raised an eyebrow, considered telling them to cut the shit, and then decided not to. Whatever it was, it was probably harmless, and it wouldn’t be improved by her involvement.

    “If you have an issue, take it up with the Baron,” she said. “Meanwhile, quit disturbing the peace.”

    The girl bowed and escaped at not quite a jog. Herron stared after her, still beet red.

    “Who’s that?” she asked.

    “Nobody.”

    “No?”

    “She’s just - she wasn’t at the right guardpost.”

    “Whatever you say,” she said. Herron was shifting uncomfortably, showing the usual signs of a teenager who desperately wanted to escape.

    “Go on,” she said. “Get back t’ work.”    

———

    Herron had begged to go to war with his brothers. He was only fourteen, and although he looked like a skinny, lanky, teenage copy of his father, he had none of Eldred’s athletic ability. The best that could be said for him was he was a decent shot. Maybe he would have survived the battlefield, but she didn’t want to take the chance. Besides, he was her baby boy; she felt like he had been ten years old only the week before. She couldn’t let him go, and Eldred had taken one look at her face and hadn’t argued with her. The resulting angst had taken weeks to wear off.

    Whatever Herron was up to, she was just glad he was finally speaking to her again.

    ———        

    The rainy season hit exactly on time; a genuine stroke of luck, because the rain would keep their ever-increasing hideout a secret for a little longer. The pigs were happy, but the sheep and humans less so. Hilde and her selected lieutenants kept the place running anyway, despite the endless mud, the nonstop damp, and the weather that ranged from a drizzly mist in the mornings to downpours in the afternoons and evenings that were so heavy Eldred stopped making his militia patrol the forest for fear they’d get lost or drown in a flash flood.

    During one of the downpours one of the militia members came splashing through the mud and into the hut. Eldred stopped scrubbing rust off his sword.

    “Something going on?”

    Hilde thought he sounded a little too hopeful.

    “Nothin’,” the man said. “Not really. Just, we had this kid come up t’ th’ east guardpost just now.”

    “Ask around; has t’ belong to someone around here,” Hilde said.

    “Don’t think so, milady, on account of it ain’t a human child.”

    “Oh. I’ll take a look,” she said. “Go on, I’ll be there.”

    Eldred shook his head slightly at her as she stood and pulled a cloak around herself.

    “What?”

    “Nothin’.”

      She could barely see where she was going, but she managed to slop her way through the muck between the huts and made her way the guardpost. A little pack of militia stood around the spot, watching a single, very small shape that huddled under a blanket. The shape didn’t look up when the guards all spotted her and stood.

    “Honestly,” she said. “How many people does it take to keep an eye on one five-year-old? Don’t you all have work to do?”

    “We were thinkin’ maybe there could be Squirrels about,” someone explained, awkwardly. She rolled her eyes; the expression might have lost some effect in the pouring rain and dark, so she added a little of it to her tone.

    “Yes, well. If so, I’ll protect you, Jenny. Get going, all of you. Find something else to do.”

    Most of them trailed off, muttering among themselves. One man stuck around; she raised an eyebrow at him, which he seemed to take as a sign. He stumped off a few yards away and stood squinting out at the dark woods. She rolled her eyes again and crouched down.

    “Hello. Who are you?”

    “I’m six,” the huddled shape said.

    “What’s that?”

    “You said I was five.”

    “Oh. Sorry. It’s hard to tell for sure, under that blanket.”

    “I don’t want t’ get wet.”

    “What’s your name?”

    “Ailfe.”

    “My name’s Hilde,” she said. “If you come with me, you can get something to eat and sit in front of a fire. What do you say?”

    “Alright.”

      Ailfe sat next to the fire, inhaling a steaming bowl of barley and dandelion leaves. Hilde offered seconds after the first bowl was done, bided her time, and, finally, asked, “So - Ailfe. Where are your parents?”

    The girl shrugged, took just enough time away from eating to say, “Dead,” and went back to it. Eldred shook his head again, slightly, when she glanced at him; he had looked less than surprised when she came in out of the rain lugging a bundle. He was trying to look like he was wearily embracing the inevitable, but she could see a hint of a smile in the corners of his mouth. She smiled back.

    “Where are you from?”

    “Dravograd,” Ailfe said.

    “Ah.”

    She’d heard rumors, in passing, through the militia, who’d heard them from the merchants on the roads. Hilde knew enough to believe them.

    “Well,” she said, “You can stay here, if you like; it’s not like we don’t have the room, and you can help my nephews with the sheep. How’s that sound?”

    “Fine.”

      Not twenty minutes later, the girl was dead asleep. Hilde pulled a dry blanket around her and stretched out on the pallet in the corner next to Eldred.

    “Couldn’t let her starve,” she said to him.

    “We’ve had stranger things than elves in our family, I suppose,” he replied. “Remember my uncle Egbert? Th’ one who turned into an enthusiast and became a priest of Pareplut?”

    “I always wanted a daughter.”

    “I know,” he said, kissed the side of her head, and added, “I love you.”

    “And I love you, Eldred,” she said.          

    -——

    When she’d decided she was going to marry him, her parents hadn’t been too sure about the idea. She was twenty and he was slightly more than a decade older, but she’d seen him in the tournaments, and she’d heard about him outside them. He was very often the best knight on the field - perfect form, an undeniable talent - and he was a close cousin to the King, and her aunt’s husband had it on good authority that he was as capable an administrator as he was a fighter. It was true that he wasn’t much to look at, but she wasn’t foolish enough to care about his missing front tooth, or the scar on his chin, or his crooked nose. The day he’d won yet another tournament and gallantly offered her the prize with a gap-toothed smile, she knew nobody in the world was going to change her mind about Sir Eldred Greenwood. Her parents would just have to get used to it.

    ——

    The rain stopped for good and the sun cooked all the water out of the air. She started sending the kids and donkeys off to the stream, a mile away, every morning and evening to fill kegs with water. Ailfe trooped along with the others, wearing a shapeless cap that covered her ears, looking as filthy and half-wild as any of them. She had forgotten about the incident with Herron completely.

    She was sitting on the top rail of a fence in the twilight, watching bats flutter through the smoke and lights of the camp and chatting about nothing in particular with Eldred. Anything resembling privacy was hard to come by, but most people seemed to be off doing something, somewhere, and nobody was near the sheep pens. At least, they didn’t think so, but they were wrong. Right around the time she lost interest in the bats and they ran out of things to talk about, something interrupted the forgotten background hum of insects and humanity.

    “Wynn?” a voice said, from the nearby guardpost, out of sight past a shed. Eldred jumped about three inches and, to her mild disappointment, stopped kissing her.

    “What the hell-”

    She covered his mouth with her hand, quickly.  

    “Shush.”

    It was only Herron. She recognized his voice. She didn’t immediately recognize the voice that responded.

    “Hi Herron. You on watch?”

    “Yep.”

    “When do you get off?”

    “Uh, in around an hour. Why?”

    She figured it out, after some thought; it was the girl he’d been arguing with, weeks earlier. Eldred raised an inquiring eyebrow up at her. She shook her head at him.

    “Do you want t’ get dinner afterward? My folks are cooking a chicken that quit laying.”

    “Oh,” Herron said. “I already ate.”

     After a brief pause, the girl said, “Um, well, have a good shift, then. I’ll see you later.”

    “Later,” Herron replied.

    Hilde waited a minute, then sighed wearily. Eldred looked pained.

    “That was the single worst thing I’ve ever overheard,” he commented.

    “I’m thinking you ought to have a talk with our son,” she replied, quietly.

    “First thing in the morning, and not a minute later,” he agreed. “Anyway, what were we talking about?”

    “We weren’t.”

    ————

    They’d had five sons. The oldest, Hal, had a wife and children of his own. He was at court, most of the time; Eldred had sworn off the place as soon as Hal was old enough to go without him, and only went up for holidays and emergencies. Edgar and Robin, the twins, were five years younger and as unalike as they could make themselves. Edgar was a wanderer, had barely been home for most of the last decade. She wasn’t sure if it was fortunate or not that he had been home during the spring. Robin had just gotten married during the winter, and had a position at court. Jack, the fourth, had died of consumption when he was four. Her youngest son was a surprise; she’d been over forty when he was born, and nobody had expected both of them to survive the event, but they’d been wrong. Herron was weedy, but he was as strong as an ox. He looked like his father, crooked nose and all, but he acted just like her long-dead oldest brother - kind, loyal, brilliant, and unbelievably easy to manipulate. It worried her, sometimes, but she knew better than to wonder if her youngest son would come to a similar end. There was nothing to be gained by dwelling on the past, and even less by trying to predict the future.

    ———

    The dry spell continued. One evening the donkeys and children went off as usual. An hour later as she was helping finish butcher one of the pigs, one of the boys scrambled out of the woods. Hilde balanced the knife in her hand and glanced at the trees behind him. Nothing seemed to be following him - at least, not very closely.

    “What’s wrong?”

    “They’re comin’,” he said, wide-eyed and shaking.

    “Who?”

    “Black Ones. We was on our way back, and - and -”

    She swore under her breath and turned quickly; she would have told one of the others to get Eldred, find the militia, but it was too late; someone had already gone.

    “- they took all the donkeys,” he continued, “Even Donny.”

    “What about all your friends? The other kids?”

    “I don’t know; everyone was running around, and there were soldiers, and nobody was payin’ attention to me and I just ran away.”

    Herron raced up, sweating heavily.

    “Ma, someone said th’ enemy’s here, and dad says t’ get everyone inside th’ stockade-”

    “Yes, I know what t’ do,” she said. “There’s a bunch of kids out in these woods, somewhere.”

    Her daughter was out there, somewhere. She had to go find them.

    “I’ll go look for them,” Herron said. “I’ll find them.”

    He looked terrified. She couldn’t send him - but she couldn’t not send him; she knew she couldn’t really go herself. What would she do out in the woods? Get lost. Get killed. Herron was, if nothing else, a good shot, and a halfway decent hunter.

    “I can do it,” he said. He looked even younger than he actually was, but he sounded confident. She breathed out and nodded.

    “Please be careful.”

    “I’ll try.”

      The stockade was barely a wall; it was a fence with a gate, but it was better than nothing. They’d built it to head height with the sharp ends of logs pointed out toward the trees, and it wouldn’t stop an arrow, but it would stop a horse. Hilde stood by the gate, looking through the holes in the fence at the path her husband and a bunch of teenagers and farmers had taken into the woods. He had trooped out with a sword in his hand, smiled at her under his helmet, and hadn’t looked back. She told herself he would be fine, and Herron would be fine, and the collection of women armed with axes and pitchforks and old spears left over to defend the entirety of the camp would be fine.

    Hours passed, and nothing happened. The feeling of stretched nerves in the air turned to one of faint boredom as the afternoon wore on. She took to pacing the perimeter of the fence, watching the trees for movement, listening for a sound other than the endless rattle of cicadas and crickets and the noise of livestock and people. The shadows got long, and nothing happened. She sternly told herself not to worry, or, at least, not to imagine horrible things that could be happening very far away.

    “Horses,” someone suddenly said. “I hear horses comin’.”

    She stared out at the woods, clutching the makeshift spear she’d armed herself with. There were horses out there; she heard a rumble that could only be a line of heavy cavalry, dozens of armored horses and men. She’d heard them a thousand times in a thousand melees, and she could imagine exactly what they would do to her mass of barely-armed, unarmored peasants if they broke through the fence.

    “Get ready with the spears,” she said. “Just like we practiced.”

    Spears was an overstatement; more than a few of the people who lined up behind the fence with the points of their weapons facing toward the trees were holding pitchforks, but Eldred had thought they’d do just as well. She had her own doubts, but they didn’t have anything better. Any side conversations ended as the sound of the oncoming cavalry rumbled louder; they stood and sweated and waited until the first horse appeared on the narrow road between the trees. She squinted at it; it was hard to see in the dusk, and she wasn’t very familiar with Nilfgaardian armor, but she didn’t think the rider was wearing black. In fact, the knight riding up at the head of the column had a distinctly familiar seat. She breathed, finally, and leaned the spear on the fence.

    “Those are Lyrian banners,” someone said.

    “It’s a trick,” someone else replied, shakily.

    “No,” she said. “No it isn’t. Open the gate.”

    She trooped up the road, met the column, found Herron limping along beside them with a bandage on his leg, a pack of children surrounding him, and Ailfe in his arms.

    “What happened?”

    “I did it,” Ailfe announced. “I saved the day.”

    “Oh?”

    “Well, sort of,” her son replied. “She did keep the Blackclads from catching her and the other kids -”

    “-we climbed a tree,” a boy announced, smugly.

    “-and then I found them and they caught me -”

    “Herron fought like a good one,” said Ailfe. “He got wounded, look.”

    “- then Dad and the lads turned up and attacked the Nilfs -”

     Ailfe finished the story in an excited shout.

    “- and then, durin’ the fight, th’ army came!”

    The knight from the head of the column pulled up and stopped.

    “Not that we needed help,” he said.

    “No, of course not,” Hilde replied, rolling her eyes at him.

    “- anyway, it all ended more or less well,” said Herron. “And they’re saying the Queen’s back.”

    She looked up at Eldred, caught a gap-toothed grin on his face.

    “Oh?”

    Eldred nodded at her.

    “We can go home soon,” Herron said.

    “Home?” Ailfe asked.

    “I’ll tell you all about it,” he said. “Come on, let’s get down to the camp. Ma, are you coming?”

    “In a minute,” Hilde said.

      “Well,” she said, in the comparative quiet after they left, “Did you see any of our sons?”

    “Not in this unit - these people are just scouts, really,” Eldred said.

    “They’re all alive, at least?”

    “Far as I know. We’ll see them soon enough, if all goes well.”

    “That’s a relief.”

    “Can I give you a lift back?”

    “A ride from a noble knight? I can’t say no to that,” she said.

    The camp was swarming with Lyrian soldiers, Rivian civilians, donkeys, barking dogs, and runaway goats and sheep. Eldred reined in the horse at the gate and overlooked the chaos. She thought she caught a glimpse of Herron and Wynn, ducking out of sight behind a hut, and quickly pointed out the leader of the soldiers.

    “Ah,” Eldred said. “Well, I suppose we could wade into this mess and talk to him -”

    “You’re the Baron,” she interrupted. “You can’t just sneak off by yourself with all this going on. Also, it’s getting dark.”

    “I wasn’t going to go by myself.”

    “Oh,” she said.

    “What I’m thinking is we go off somewhere and come back after this has a chance t’ calm itself down -”

    “I suppose I can always pretend you kidnapped me,” she said. “Someone has to maintain an appearance of responsibility around here.”

    “I promise to have you back before dark,” he said. “What d’ you say?”

    “It’s a deal.”            

    “Someone told me our Hal’s a Colonel, now,” he said, turning the horse around. She wrapped her arms around his waist and propped her chin up on his shoulder to see the road ahead.

    “Is he?”

    “Not that it’s a surprise; he’s just like you.”

    “A social climber?”

    “A pragmatist.”

    “You always were a romantic, Eldred.”

    “I’m a lucky man. We wouldn’t have made it all these months without you.”

    Luck had nothing to do with it; they’d planned and fought and were, again, fortunate that it had all worked out in the end. She buried her face in his neck and let him think it had, anyway.

    “I can’t wait to go home,” she said.

[nebulousjoy]

Valerie?? Shes so pretty!! Also if Kalos is pokemon france, it'd be pretty close to Galar, so it makes sense that they could meet. How did you get into this ship??

(SDHGHGHDSHG Sorry if I seem excited here anon, this is the first time anyone’s ever asked me about it-)

She is 😭 And same thought! I headcanon that Kalos isn’t too far away from Galar, because of where their real life country counterparts are located. How I got into it though is kind of tricky to describe (and I’m sorry in advance for the length 😂):

So, I love Valerie. She’s one of my favorite gym leaders, right next to Milo. A little while after Milo was revealed in the first trailer for SWSH, I just....started thinking about them? And then I started thinking about the dynamics they could have.

Val specializes in fairies and lives in an otherworldly city off in swampy woodlands. Milo specializes in grass pokemon and lives out on the countryside. They each got a real close tie to nature in both senses, so imo they can connect to one another over that. 

Second, I honestly have this fun lil headcanon that Valerie’s actually a faery / faerie (the mythological creature, separate from fairy pokemon), because I mean...look at her. And, the thought of a faery falling in love with a human, especially one close to nature, really appeals to the “immortal x mortal” ship lover in me tbh. Think of it like those “angel / demon x human” stories that’ve been done a lot, though a faery and a human would make a great focus in a medieval / fantasy love story ngl if it hasn’t been done already.

Their professions outside of the gym leader roles also fit together in an ironic kind of way. You would probably see Valerie as an elite or noble, widely respected in Kalos for her fashion design work and recognized globally, while Milo’s just a simple farmer who doesn’t have an extravagant life. In that regard their different social classes are almost sheer opposites, but then again, opposites attract.

Lastly, I think their personalities would gel really well! It’s canon that Milo’s a gentle, sweet guy, but I’ve formed my own interpretation of Valerie (since so little of her is shown in XY, and I don’t watch the anime or read the manga). 

I think of her as a kindhearted lady who's a little airheaded and detached at times, having a habit of daydreaming, but she has an honest nature and possesses a gentle aura in her own right. To me, Milo and her would go together like milk & honey.

[borisbubbles]

22. UNITED KINGDOM

James Newman - “One last breath”

Ha! Funny! Only now, as I’m sitting in front of my desktop writing this entry, do the paralells between Lesley and James hit me.

Both bring a pleasant, if somewhat anonimous sound. Both are attempts by their shit broadcaster to establish themselves as cool. Both are performed by terminally haggard people who would’ve done way worse than they deserved. Only apt they were ranked back-to-back and I actually didn’t plan it that way. However, despite ranking him adjacent to Lesley, I feel like James’s song is a lot better?

Song Analysis

I AM NOT AFRAID OF DEATH. I AM AFRAID NOT TO LIVE. EVERY MOMENT SHOULD BE LIVED LIKE IT WAS YOur last b r e f. .

IT HAPPENED, THE BBC ACTUALLY PUT EFFORT INTO AN ENTRY!!! I can’t believe this is the BBC, tbh. They flew out to some Polish woodlands mid-winter to record their VC and hired a Dutch woodsman as a staging prop? They paid man to PERFORM LITERAL SPOKEN WORD in the VC and possibly on the Eurovision stage as well <33333 so extra, so ridic, so perfectly viable for Eurovision and approx zero musical paths outside of Eurovision <3

Btw, a BBC entry which has a continuous storyline, characterization and depth? The concept of the BBC entry having a concept!!!! Does this count as “conception” i think it does, as it may conceive a turning point in how the UK is perceived by the fans should their continue. 

Granted, I’m not in love with it, but look how far the UK have come.  Compare this to how dire the UK Decides entries have been. How eyerol-inducing Storm’s lyrics were? How fucking repetitive and bland and Xfactoresque “Bigger than us” was? How “You’re not alone” vaguely touched upon bromoeroticism before withdrawing into a permanent status of catatonia? “One last breath” blows all of these songs out of the water by comparison.

So good ideas and good effort led to a good song, right? If that’s so, why don’t I like it more? 

A lot of“One last breath”’s novelty for me comes from its Union Jack banner - The UK were the country that unironically sent Jemeni to a contest and were  shockpikafaced when they bombed. However, I’ve found that this novelty factor wears off very quickly. By the time I reach the first chorus, to be precise, my mind reaches a state of “oh, this is *that* sort of song” and I zone out each and every time. “One last breath” may be better than what I’m used to from the UK, but it also can’t hold a candle to the music I hear on the radio on a daily basis. 

As for Eurovision 2020′s entries, this is where my biases come in: A dumpy 30-something man with an okay pop song from a mehburger country is never going to entice me as much as... well, look at all the colourful entries still left in this ranking. Why would I settle for a sponge cake, when I can have a merengue? 

"Onel ast breath” made for a decent entry, but I never saw it as more than the role it probably would have played in ESC 2020: that of likable filler. 

UK 2020 & UK 2021

“One last breath” absolutely deserved to rank in the top 20 and avoid that dreaded bottom five, but I doubt it would have happened. I am still shook by the utter lack of second-hand embarrassment, but that’s largely because the BBC have dug themselves a wormhole into the seventh circle of failure hell over the years. After decades of pain, nobody has any expectations of the UK anymore, besides more of the same palpable lameness we’ve learned to love and expect from them. 

This also makes the UK entries a harder sell than they normally would be - even the British reviews, such as this one by The Guardian, cynically recognise that while “One last breath” is a full tier ahead of the regular Brit entries, it won’t change the general perception that the UK entries aren’t worth getting excited for. 

Personally, I hope the BBC continue taking the contest seriously in 2021 - talent has never been the issue - the problem has always been the lack of  a song worth voting for. “One last breath” was a step in the right direction and hopefully the first of many. 

No word on 2021 yet. I don’t expect James to stay on, but I do expect another internal selection (anything than letting the GBP decide - years of following BBUK under my belt and still I am sometimes shocked by how wrong their decisions can be) 

Freaky! Friday! Factor!

“One last breath” is far from brilliant and I have since come over my inital shock of how alright the overal product is... that said, given how often the UK have slung steaming piles of faeces at our faces (Scooch are still considered a national treasure somehow and honestly, that’s all which needs to be said.), it is SO REFRESHING to actually see them take a more relaxed, mellow route. You may find the score to be too high, but “One last breath” is so UNLIKE the UK (and actually more in line with France's repertoire) in all the right ways and that’s what the Freaky! Friday! Factor! is all about. 

Score: 4 Senhits out of 5. 

[hiddenhearthwitch]

📓College Witch Tips📓

I’ve gotten a lot of asks for college witch tips and small living space witchy advice. I wasn’t practicing while I lived in the dorms but I did start practicing(in secret) while I was rooming in a studio apartment my sophmore year of uni so I figure it’s sort of similar. Anyways, I hope this helps someone out there ~ 🧡

🕯️So, no candles, I totally get that and it’s a fucking bummer. You can always get fake candles though! There’s such a wide variety of picking between pillar sizes, tea lights, or you could even get ones where you pick the color so you can use it for any spell. 

On another note, have you tried string lights? It doesn’t matter if they’re fairy lights, Christmas lights, or bulb strands. I had a specific set of white strands that went around my part of the room and whenever I want to do a spell/feel magical/etc. I would turn them on ~ bonus you can get fake ivy and flower garlands at the Dollar Store to braid with them and it’s suuuper cute.

💧Water magic is a pretty sneaky go to! No one is ever going to be suspicious of water. You could leave a water bottle out near your window “on accident” for Full Moon water! There’s two big areas I think of so let’s break it down!

Bath magic! Everyone has to shower at some point. Without anything else, pure hot water is wonderful for a pure cleanse of your energy, mind, and body. @beau-witchery has a wonderful post on shower magic you can find here. You can also bring some of your crystals or something you want to charge into the bathroom with you(assuming you have private shower stalls) and let the steam from your shower charge them! You can even sprinkle some salt on the shower floor to help you release negativity and feel charged.

Water bottle magic! This is super universal tbh and I use it for so many things. You can put crystals in your water bottle to charge your water with whatever you need. Red jasper for strength and vitality, quartz for charging and cleanings, amethyst for magic and protection, rose quartz for beauty and love, etc. There are a lot of water soluble crystals so please do proper research first. I would inherently recommend not using anything under a hardness of seven, so do your research!! You can also put in fresh herbs or slices to fruit to enchant it with corresponding properties or to boost your energy.

📚Speaking of research, it’s a fundamental part of magic and college! Use your university library! They’ll definitely have books on the alchemy of plants, gemstones, and I’ve been able to find a few on magic at each uni I’ve visited so give it a look. You can also check out your local library and check to see if your library has an online database for e-check outs. The Akron Public Library has a huge database for online books, PDFs, and articles to “check out” and read online. See if your library or one in your county does as well - it’s typically the main library.

♌Sigil/stave magic, I know this is probably the most recommended thing for college witches but they’re honestly so helpful. You can design your own sigils/staves or use one that other witches have created.  Here’s a link to a tumblr tag for college/student based sigils. 

Now what to do with the sigils? Well, this is up to you. You could stitch or draw a “sigil to stay safe” on the inside of your backpack, draw a motivation/focus sigil inside your notebooks/binders, draw a good grade/”I’ll do well on tests” sigil on your pencil pouch or draw it on the side of your pencil! There’s so manyyy things you can do, just be creative and don’t feel obligated to do it one way just because someone else is.

🌱Plants may not seem like your first choice since you live in a  dorm but there’s a lot of small, low maintenance plants out there. You just need to know where to look. Keeping a plant in your room can help keep you grounded, feeling closer to your craft if your nature/plant based, and generally help keep the energy and air pure. You can also keep plants around for their metaphysical properties ~

Here is an online database to find local plant nurseries. I always suggest going through a nursery vs. a home or grocery store because the workers actually know how to upkeep the soil, when to water them, feed them, repot them, etc. plus I find they tend to have less root mold or disease when coming from a nursery. Some suggestions for small and low maintenance witchy plants would be: lucky bamboo, air plants(specifically Tillandsia maxima, Tillandsia bulbosa, Tillandsia ionantha, and Tillandsia chiapensis), small breed cacti and snake plants.

🔮Crystals don’t always have to be a giant slab of quartz on an altar. We’ve already talked about how you can use them in your water but you can also, carry small tumbled ones in your pencil pouch, wear them as jewelry, put them in your planters if you have plants, and so much more! You’re not limited to the “traditional” use of crystals. Think outside of the box! If you want to labradorite to keep you safe on campus make a key chain to hang on your bookbag or something like that! Some of my favorite crystals in uni were amethyst(memory), clear quartz(knowledge, cleansing), rose quartz(self love), labradorite(magic/protection), and sunstone(joy, knowledge).

☕Drink magic kind of ties in with water bottle magic but it’s more varied! Drink coffee or black/green tea in the morning to start your day off with grounding. When making your coffee or tea draw a sigil on top with your spoon before stirring. If you’re using honey draw it on the bottom of the mug first. Stir counterclockwise to bring in positivity. Use the properties of your tea, coffee, or creamer in your morning magic.

✨Enchanting would work with just about anything. You could enchant your backpack to keep your grounded, your pencils to keep you motivated, your doorway to ward off negativity, etc. If it’s an actual item you’re enchanting I used to do in secret by using water. For example, I enchanted my favorite sweater to help me feel motivated confident by using the machine cycle as a way to cleanse it + instill positive energy and the dry cycle as a way to infusion act and warmth. I mumbled some words about motivation and stuff when loading the clothing in. You could also use warm water to “clean” a water bottle, gemstone bracelet, set of earrings, etc. as a way to enchant something. 

🎮You don’t need an altar to be a witch! I don’t know where this misconception came from but honestly fuck it. If you would like an altar anyways and can’t have one out in the open you can set one up inside one of your drawers, a shoe box, or even a jewelry box. You can make small portable one’s with Altoid tins or other small boxes like match boxes! If you’re tech friendly and want too, you can say fuck it to all of the above and just make an online altar via a tumblr blog, pinterest board, etc. 

Bonus: do you like vidya gamez? You can do a lot with altars to both deities and for witchcraft in video games. You can build an altar in Minecraft or the Sims. You can build homes dedicated to your craft and gods in Skyrim, Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, etc. be creative! 

💖The rest of these suggestions are small things anyone can do to feel more connected to their craft or “witchy”. It can be really hard to feel connected to your craft or like a witch at all when you don’t have time or energy because of school, work, depression, etc. So these are just some of my favorite low effort suggestions.

Meditate in bed for five to ten minutes before getting up!

Put cute witchy stickers or washi tape in your agenda, notebooks, etc. use colors and symbols to correspond with your intention

Go for a walk! It can be around campus, your local graveyard, tbh you could just use your walk to class as a chance to feel connected to nature and refresh your energy.

Witchy!! Playlists!! Seriously, get jammin’.

Star a grimoire or bos! It can be a word doc, tumblr blog, or an actual notebook. Whatever works best for you. ✨

Meditate! In the shower, on the way to class, when you wake up, when you’re making breakfast, whenever. Find a few minutes a day when you’re by yourself and focus on calming your thoughts.

Use ambient videos on youtube to help ground you and feel more connected to your craft. Basic ambiance w/moving video links: Forest w/waterfall, Woodland, Night, Ocean, Rain & fireplace, Nighttime train ride, Sunrise, Wheat field, River, Campfire, Swamp, Snow

Wear colors that correspond with your magical needs.

Hide your pendulum as your necklace or just use your favorite necklace as a pendulum!

Look on amazon, clearance racks, and thrift stores for tapestries and blankets to hang up that make you feel witchy! 

Wear scented oils ~ different intentions for different days

Pls love yourself and remember I’m sending you so much love

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[fueledbysprite]

abandoned wips masterlist

so not too long ago i did an insta poll asking if i should expose all my abandoned fic drafts cause i mean it’s not like theyre ever gonna see the light of day otherwise. i was going to do it when i hit 3k kudos on ao3 and i did so i suppose it has come time for me to expose my mistakes

for obvious reasons, don’t repost these (idk why anyone would lol) but if you really like one of these and want to see it continued, just hit up my ask box and i may or may not consider~

Miscellaneous Fandoms:

Ninjago: Zephyr - a Morro backstory fic bc the hageman bros refuse to feed me more content of my son. barely started it but yknow its there

Miraculous Ladybug/BoBoiBoy: this failed attempt at a fanginette fic bc @secretagentspydetectiveninja got me invested even tho writers block is a binch hahshs

BoBoiBoy:

kokotiam gang angst that reminded me i cannot for the life of me write emotional angst (or any angst for that matter oop)

ramenzo (and kaifang) angst that i churned out on a saturday afternoon on a writing spike instead of doing homework bc I Do Not Control the Writing Juice

au where bbb is a forest guardian(?) and fang just wants away from Society (same fang same) i will probably be yearning for woodland aus till the day i die bc who *doesnt* wanna ditch everything and go live in the middle of the woods amirite?

ramenzo n boifang water fight bc you cant convince me these idiots dont get up to ridiculous shenanigans on their downtime

abandoned draft for the sequel to the og ramenzo fic (dont bother reading it literally nothing happens i swear)

i literally don’t remember where i was going with this i think it was supposed to be fang introspection but idk??

uhh kaifang with ramenzo vibes i think this was gonna be? i genuinely don’t remember anymore oop-

RAMENZO IN QUARANTINE yes this one was regular au (i mean duh) and it’s a shame i never ended up finishing it-

i am actually goboifang t r a s h...until i realized im going to have to make all the food by myself and i never learned to make food :’)) (fr if anyone provides me with any kind of fanon gbf content i will love you forever pls)

this...exists even tho i honestly prefer it didnt but ramenzo is ramenzo n ramen has freckles i will fite u on this (dont read it pls)

if anyone wants ramenzo crumbs (and i mean that quite practically) then feel free to consume the Specks

dont read this pls im begging just dont lets yeet it into the void it doesnt exist~ I Do Not See It

update: i discovered this uhh kaifang post-bora ra incident thing in my other drive

Miraculous Ladybug:

okay forewarning there are wayyyy too many of these so im skipping the ones that are sequels/dependent on other fics for context just to spare myself from having to sort through this mountain

i was planning to participate in chlonath week 2k19 (unfortunately for chlonath nation I Do Not Control the Hyperfixation oop) if you want context then ask

marcnath crumbs thats it thats the doc

oh look allya is self projecting again (writing is still pain) (marcnath)

for the one who requested chloenette with the dialogue prompt i am so sorry

idk why this feels like something ive posted before but then again all lovesquare is the same to me (dead) so who knows im not gonna bother checking hshsh (marichat)

chlonath go to comic con or sth idk chloe is tsundere as always (or would have been anyway if i ever ended up Finishing this)

i *think* this was based on a @terrible-miraculous-ladybug-aus post but heck if i remember now- (lukanette??)

i have absolutely no recollection as to where i was going with this but if anyone finds the concept interesting then by all means go ahead n snatch it- (manon finds the miraculous i guess?)

this is a great. opening. to a chloe fic. that doesnt exist. oof :,)

caline bustier’s home for orphans amirite (i mean she basically already adopted the whole class so)

im genuinely not a fan of the jealous!lover trope but someone in the marcnath server wanted some at one point so i. attempted. and failed but you know thats to be expected at this point :’3

oh look allya is projecting her writing struggles onto marc again is anyone surprised?

theres probably a museum brotp story in here but it doesnt exist and at this point it never will rip

oh good lord not this again i genuinely managed to forget about it for a while until now-

i just read the first line and im already reeling what the heck is this nathanette(??)

WHY IS THERE MARICHAT IN MY WIP FOLDER WHAT

allya stop projecting onto emo weebs challenge failed

i really wanna know where the context for chlonath skiing trip came from i literally have 0 recollection of this at all??

YO I ACTUALLY REMEMBER THE CONTEXT FOR THIS ONE anyway nath n aroace!alix arranged marriage au anyone?? well too bad cause i abandoned it oop-

ahahahahahahaha wdym i wrote 7k of chlonath and then ditched it i would never do that lmao-

i think this was a hunger games au uh

something something marcnath

marcnath angst i guess? *allya pls stop trying to write angst we’ve already established that is not a thing you can do*

something something chlonath

im never gonna forgive @powerdragonmoon for the fact that i thought “beecock” while glancing over this to figure out wth was going on. cholaon works here too tho so that is what i shall call it //sideways glare at moon

take your otp. now put them on a trampoline. but heaven forbid you ever finish the fic- (chlonath if it wasnt obvious)

nathanette doll au from forever ago with @lotus-duckies that was a real concept its a shame i have 0 commitment

i wanna call this lukanathanette but i honestly don’t remember where i was going with it so idk

hi uhm what is this and why is it so depressing allya fr quit self projecting on emo tomatoes oml

chlonath established relationship i guess??

museum brotp go skating?? is that what this is?

how much chlonath do i hAVE also chloe u tsundere

nathaniel is Yearning n tbh i dont blame him cause same (ft. marc)

i could swear this was gonna be luklonath (chlolukanath??) but i wouldnt be able to remember-

if anyone can figure out what’s going on with marc pls tell me bc i dont-

cholaon but theres no context

Oh god im finally done good lord that’s all of em i hope i never have to look at a mlb doc again in my life anyway pls be grateful n enjoy the crumbs n stuff thanks i sacrificed my sanity for this-

[puppy-the-mask]

OK! Premise time (got a bit carried away tbh)

Vaguely midieval setting, Mc is from a family of hunters and so knows her way all around the forest, befriending crows and ravens via scraps (because that is a dream of mine). Plot kicks off when homegirl’s brothers get snatched by the monster kingdom for trespassing onto their land for what was assumed to be nefarious reasons when really they just got a bit lost and nobody believes them. Back home Mc tells the knights what’s up and is promptly told to sit the fuck down because they have more important things to do. So she goes off on her own instead, armed with a hunting knife, a bow, and a walking stick she plans to sneak in and break her Bros out. Along the way she has to free herself of multiple well crafted traps and once she finally gets to where she’s headed (with some help from her very smart brothers leaving traces) she’s confronted by the Boi himself. With the capture of humans their town has sorta gone crazy, fighting to determine who will take them to the king. For now they’re kinda subdued but peace is flimsy. Mc ends up getting found out and into a pseudo sword fight (aka blocking for her life with a walking stick until an opening to book it) with our favorite skeleton while ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE. Since Edge is distracted the other townsfolk take this as their cue to try and swoop up the prize, this goes splendidly terrible when the building they’re being kept in starts to collapse. Homeboy quickly figured it’s better to have at least 1 alive Human and manages to catch up to MC who is about to book it into a collapsing building like an idiot and pull her back before she gets crushed. I say collapsing but I wasn’t that much, as they could still get down to the holding cell and *surprise* the boys are gone~

Now! For what was happening with the boys. Seeing as how I’m the one daydreaming these are My brothers, the oldest of which is a very social person. So obviously he’s chatting with the only other person there, Red. Meanwhile middle brother is trying to think of a way out. This goes on until things start getting dicey and the house is rumbling. Red gets hurt but the three of them escape (because who are we kidding, of course there’s a secret emergency exit) and so are stuck together for the time being relying on each other.

Back to the duo, upon seeing the empty cell and majorly f-ed foundations they leave the house and end up begrudgingly having to work together because of their shared love of and willingness to do whatever it takes to help their family and find their brothers.

Some scenes that popped up were- Edge being a dick to birds and Mc lecturing him about Corvids and their ability to hold grudges. This may have plot relevance, because yes

Edge getting stuck in something and REFUSING to ask for help. “I’ll help you out, but you a) have to ask and b) have to use my name” he ends up passing out and waking up to her ranting about him being an absolute prideful idiot. This leads to an argument because she wasn’t exactly being nice either. This actually leads to a civil apology because CHARACTERS CAN ADMIT WHEN THEY’RE WRONG AND BEING PETTY. Eventually some themes will become recurring until they’re close enough travel companions to admit their faults/insecurities and why they keep acting how they do so they can better themselves.

Meanwhile with The Bois, so many Hijinks have insued and it’s glorious. I can’t say what but you know they are Best Buds by now and are up to absolutely No Good

When they finally catch up and have their reunion, it’s to the most awkward and hard to explain scene that the duo has just walked in on. Mc is keeled over laughing, barely standing by leaning on Edge, and Edge himself is just sighing resigned like “I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN” because ofcourse his brother was doing dumb shit the whole time he’s been looking for him, what else would he be doing?

But don’t worry, there are emotional reunion moments between the bros, just when less people are around to witness them. Meanwhile Mc’s Bros just rounded the corner and she just fucking busts out crying and hugs her brothers because, unlike certain spiky companions- she isn’t bad with public displays of affection. A little bit of rest and a few tankards of ale later and they’re sharing stories around a campfire.

Oh, and did I not mention? Pre-reunion There was only one sleeping bag MWAHAHAHAHA!!!! I mean, Mc was prepared for a long trek after her Bros, and then gained a party member who was decidedly not. He refused to share until a good ways through their journey of course, cause right off the bat when they still loathe each other’s existence it’d be real weird. So it was moss and bunched up leaves for him.

Imagine, they’re about to go to bed when someone brings up their lack of sufficient sleep equipment. Only 3 for 5 people. Previously the Bros had combined theirs into 1 big pallet but... what about them? Kekeke. The two- having forgotten how most people don’t cuddle adventure buddies since it’d just become the norm? And also how damning nightly snuggles seems to people who Obviously won’t get that they’re TOTALLY FRIENDS WHO JUST DO SO OUT OF NECESITY. (And comfort)

Mc kinda drops the ball- “I don’t know about y’all but I’m a big fan of cuddles” cue a smack upside the head and ‘OOOHHH’s to ring in some heads. A little (sorta) tactful talk from both sets of siblings and our oblivious duo- in trying to defend that it’s totally not a thing- realize they totally have a thing going on and oh Fuck I Like It . they’re both oblivious cornballs who’ve been too focused on sibling retrieval to pay attention to their growing bond with their travel partner and now that they see it they have no idea how to handle it.

Now, you may ask, how can this end? If the kingdoms are separated and such then how shall they live in peace? WOODLAND CABIN BAYBEEEE!!!!!! Who tf goes into the woods? Not just anyone if they don’t wanna get lost. Plus it’s neutral ground. What about the siblings? They can build their own or visit- up to them. And since both town’s are in visit distance, edge can probably just commute/go on buisness trips if he has to go places for guard things. Mc is a hunter so her job is the woods so that’s easy.

Anyways, enemies to lovers is good when done right. Slowly and through comradery

[tfw-no-tennis]

hxh RESUME

back at it again w/the hxh, heres my recap of the last few eps 

ok so i totally forgot to recap that one ep at the end of the hunter exam arc lets see what i remember from like 3 wks ago lollll

i thiiiiink i left off in the middle of ep 21 lol. i really dont remember much tbh so im gonna skim the ep to refresh

exposition time! its so wild that if you lose ur hunter card That It like u cant get another or retake the exam hgabjdfuhasjf Ls 

also the fact that you can sell it is rlly interesting 

leorio & kurapika backing up gon as he confronts illumi again :’) good lil family 

illumi u fool. gon is a shounen protag. he can do anything he sets his mind to

the fact that gon thanks illumi for telling him where killua is....hes literally THAT polite like...what a perfect boy 

hisoka just fuckgin stepping out of the shadows....ok bitch 

the fact that gon fucked up illumis arm that bad with one hand....boi is STRONK 

AUGH AUGH AUGHHHH HISOKA IS SO CREEPY AUGHHH I HATE THIS BIIIITCH 

ok but like is illumi implying that hisoka is a fr p*do bc uhhhhh thats so nasty oh lord. pls stay away from gon, and killua, and like everyone as a matter of fact 

EWWWWWWWWWW I HATE HISOKA HES SO NASTY. PLS STOP MAKING P*RNO FACES IN RELATION TO 12 YR OLD BOYS. 

no but rlly what IS hisoka gonna do now. im assuming he’ll show up p soon (tho probs not in the zoldyc arc like i thought bc its shorter than i thought) 

ok the fact that they have the internet is hilariously wild to me for some reason....it just seems like this would be one of those fantasy shounen worlds with very little tech (a la one piece) but lol nope we can just google shit hvbhjdhjdfks

gon: it was fun when you beat me up for 3 hours and broke my arm! seeya dude!

i love gon he is so chill and doesnt seem to hold grudges except when it really matters (like hisoka and illumi) 

hanzo has.....ninja business cards....thats amazing hvbhsdjkujfnd

dont worry pokkle, leorio was basically carried thru the hunter exam by various people and also won by default. he still deserves his license tho

an exotic game hunter sounds pretty cool! i wonder if we’ll see pokkle again. kinda doubt it? that sounds pretty firmly non-combat based, and therefore probably pretty far from any plot lol

so gons dad is a bigshot huh.....whatever hed be a bigger deal if he didnt abandon his son tbh 

gon swinging his feet on the bench....sooo cute 

so ging could restore a bunch of ruins but he couldnt raise his son...ok

im just gonna be bitter at this guy for abandoning the most perfect boy vhbhjfbsjhdhbfsk sorry dude but being a good hunter doesnt make up for being a shit father 

gon is so precious ;_; 

WHAT WAS SATOTZ GONNA SAY TO GON???

why does it look like theyre googling things on MS paint 

ah yes, padokea, on the continent of Africa But Sideways 

idk if i talked abt it before but the world map is WILD lmao i love how its all the continents/landmasses scrambled around.....im super curious abt that weird island in the top center of the map, thats the only thing that immediately sticks out as not having a real life equivalent 

the music in this show is so charming :’) i love the main theme sm 

gon is sooo precious i literally cant get over it. and his hurry to rescue killua is so sweet....and i love how naturally charming/charismatic gon is....pretty much everyone he meets likes him, especially leorio and kurapika, who basically adopted him after knowing him for like a day, and continue to be completely taken by him

ok wtf is satotz & co talking abt......do they know something abt ging that they arent allowed to tell gon???? shouldnt gon have access to the same info now that hes a hunter? i need ANSWERS

i bet this whole thing abt the hunter exam not rlly being over is a metaphor abt the hunter exam NEVER truly ending bc youre always being tested, or st

ok the ED continues to be So Much like especially the last shot where the 4 main characters look like theyre posing for a JC Penny catalog while the singer goes FULL metal-screamo

ok ruth and i just rewatched the next two eps woohoo

i love that there are tourist busses that take people to the front gates so they can like pose for pics and stuff vhbhjafdsfkj and its like ‘ah yes here are where the local assassins live!’ thats so funny yet it makes so much sense

i love that leorio passed tf out during the bus ride. big big mood 

gon is so cute...hes like ok yes i understand that we’re not supposed to go in but i think they can make an exception for me bc im very polite. 

those 2 dudes r so ugly and so dead god bless

that bigass buster sword....sir please 

ruth and i rlly thot that the old guard guy was gonna turn out to be grandpa zoldyk or st lol

the fact that the dog managed to eat All their flesh but left some clothes....skill 

also the dog is named mike but it sounds like the guy is calling him miku hvbjdfssk

this cant be the first time some morons have been killed here likeeee 

i cant believe nobody has visited the zoldyk estate in 20 years damn they all rlly b havin no friends. depressing 

the whole gates thing is wild. also that part where gon gets the math wrong on the weight.....BIG mood kiddo 

ok the part where gons on the phone w/the butler is soooo good oh man. i love how gon just calmly dials the phone again after hes hung up on the first time and then YELLS....and leorio and kurapikas faces r so good 

also the butler guy unfortunately has a point, it isnt foolproof that gon is here Legit....but he IS let him see his tiny bf :( 

as ruth pointed out, the butler guy is reminiscent of kuro from one piece. same vibes 

maybe if leorio was jacked like he is in the manga/1999 anime he couldve opened the gate that first time around....Ls 

god i love this shows approach to Everything so far,....as ruth put it, half the time its like ‘oh wow they should do [x]/i wish theyd do [x] but ofc they wont cause its a shounen’ but then they DO do [x] and its like damn thats dope 

anyways i love how gon is increasingly approaching situations with his Plucky Shounen Protag Attitude in full swing, and he pretty much gets shot down every time. BUT his general determination to see killua bc killuas his FRIEND and hes gonna RESCUE HIM is still a good and pure motivating force 

like here, when hes climbing over the wall and hes like whatever i dont wanna have to deal w/being tested thats bullshit, i wanna see killua, my intentions are pure, im gonna try my luck with the dog....i was like ok yeah he’ll get over and like tame or defeat the dog and the guard will be suitably impressed bc nobodys ever done That before, and then gon will continue on to get killua 

but NOPE instead the guard calls him down and explains that gon Will Die if he tries that, and then the guard will die too for letting that happen. and gon is like oh shit my actions have consequences for people other than me, wow. 

and THEN the guard takes them in to meet the dog. and hot DAMN that is a scary creature. not even really a dog tbh. they did an excellent job making the dog Legit Scary and not just like, big and flashy looking....those eyes are so soulless, and the proportions are freaky 

and the guard says exactly what i was thinking - that gon would use his Country Boy Woodland Creature Skills to workaround the dog....but then the subversion - this creature is NOTHING like the woodland critters gon is probably used to dealing with. theres no way gon stood a chance here. the guard just saved him from a really unfortunate death 

i love all the Super Heavy Stuff in the servant house that seems so inconvenient vbhjdkfasjfld. also forgot to mention earlier but the guard guy being Absolutely Ripped was wild and kinda funny 

training montage! gon continues to be so cute. and i love so much how leorio and kurapika are like no, you rest, we’ll take care of this. good parents!!!!

and then!!!! they sync up and use the power of gay love to almost open the gate. but then gon uses the power of Improbable Shounen Protag Healing Speed to toss that arm sling off and help out

i feel like leorio was side-eyeing gon like w8 a sec u broke that arm like a few days ago that aint right.....

oh man i almost forgot abt that scene with the zoldyks torturing killua :( :( this poor kid he doesnt deserve that 

also mom zoldyck seems truly awful but i must say her aesthetic does fuck. the victorian-lookin outfit paired with the futuristic cyclops visor thing....excellent. also im betting this face bandages are from killua cutting her face 

this family is so fucked up hvbsjdhjfbakdfn

killua telling his mom that gon is definitely gonna make it there :’) hes got such unshakable faith in his bf thats so good.....

back w/the gang, and immediately they run into more trouble in the form of the young girl butler, whose name i dont know, but i love her....her design is SO good oh man. a non-caricature black person? who also isnt sexualized? in MY anime??????

 i love how gons approach to conflict is currently ‘let more powerful person beat me up for hours straight in hopes that they get tired or something idk bro’ like....i love him lol, is it in an effort to show how determined he is? he doesnt even try to dodge her blows or get around her....id be tryin to hop that fence lol 

oh shit the tiny zoldyk kid from earlier is spying on them....she was w/the mom so im sure thats not good

when he punches the rock part and it breaks....strong boiiii 

oh man that little flashback from when killua first came back and told her that he made a friend ;_; bruh 

i love butler girl :( she wants to let gon but knows it isnt allowed....and as soon as she starts to waver BAM here comes mom zoldyck JFC that was so sudden and jarring....im assuming butler girl isnt dead cause that would be lame and anticlimactic 

also IS THAT NEN??? NEN>>>??? NEN??? HM? NEN????????? 

im so annoying abt nen i need to make one of those ‘is this a pigeon?’ memes w/’is this nen?’ bc thats me anytime anything remotely weird happens lmao

i do think its rlly nen this time tho

anyways shit is wild, cant wait to meet the full zoldyck family 

PREDICTION CORNER: 

as i said above i doubt hisoka will show up now bc this arc is a lot shorter than i anticipated. also im doubting that illumis even gonna show up honestly 

i think we’re gonna have this OP for a while, as the part just at the end shows gon and hisoka fighting in what looks to be an arena, and ik the next arc is the heavens arena arc, which im assuming is the tournament arc....

also i have no idea what that weird building in the OP is but my guess is that its the building w/the heavens arena in it bc its tall and,,,,heaven 

i predict there wont be much fighting in this little arc bc how tf else is it so short. at this point i rlly think gon is just gonna grab killua and go lmao. im super curious abt how thats gonna go down, considering that killua is currently strung up just bc he wont apologize...so i cant imagine his family would just let him leave w/gon. i wonder if killua will fight them, or if gons determination will impress them and then theyll let killua go (doubt it)

thats basically it....we’ll see abt the next few eps holla