#(its probably just a big (average sized) river

[molabuddy]

lost at sea ....

[gladiatorcunt]

MARLBORO REDS - ANAKIN SKYWALKER

cause good men die too, so i’d rather be with you

summary: mechanic dilf!anakin x gender neutral kindergarten teacher!reader

wc: 8.4k

cw: “soft” dark content, made padme’s death vague on purpose, anakin has the vibes of a married father of 4 hitting on you while you��re waiting on their table at olive garden, daddy kink, anakin imagines killing someone, MALE MASTURBATION (the most graphic fantasies are skull fucking and anakin kinda hoping you’ll tear when he puts it in), bra mention (reader does have a fem style but i’m nb so that’s how i see it and men can also have a fem style), it’s not mentioned but anakin is going through cigarette withdrawals, anakin’s canon typical inability to be in a healthy relationship, possibly predictable plot twist (?), i wanted to be a lot grosser, anakin is 42 and he’s depicted as such, age gap (reader is in their early 20’s), this takes place in the U.S.

requests are open (read the rules first)

block & move on if uncomfortable

do not repost or translate!!

The exhaust fumes transported him for a moment, somewhere tropical with a cigar in one hand and a tit in the other as a wet body slid adjacent to his. His hard-earned vacation went up in flames as a shrill car horn hunted down his eardrums. Anakin snapped out of it and stared through his brittle bangs with dead eyes. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, how to act like a normal human being one of them. 

"Alright, that should be everything. Since we just needed to rotate your tires and do an oil change, we're looking at about 142 dollars."

"Thank you so much, I'll just go pay at the front desk. Have a good one!"

Anakin sighed and gave a half assed wave that she didn't even see. He has nowhere near as much spunk as he did back in the day, but his energy is always shot to hell long before he sees his last customer of the day. Luckily it was just a routine maintenance type of thing, he would've just bashed his head in with a wrench if it was anything more. 

Puddles of blood trot after said customer, he’s amazed that they can drive so well considering they have a bullet in their head. 

There’s no bullet or rivers of blood in actuality, but a man can dream. 

His knee joints creaked as he got out of his squatting position. He groaned from the effort while smearing his fingers in more grease trying to wipe them off on the pants of his overalls. The whole workshop smelled like garbage and he probably smelled even worse. His trusty grease rag was subsequently discarded on top of his portable tool tower. He noticed that a tub of lighter fluid was on its side so he prevented that big mess waiting to happen and screwed the cap shut, picked it up, and set it back on the shelves in the storage room. He had to remember to leave one of his employees a post-it notifying them that they were almost out. 

His sleeves were shucked up his soft muscular forearm to check his watch. His eyes nearly popped out of their sockets like moles in a whack-a-mole machine when he saw the time. 

SHIT! 

It was 4:30, the time he's expected to be at Alderaan Apples Elementary to pick up his twins. He didn't have the time it would normally take him to drive 20 minutes back to his place for a 10 minute shower, and then drive 30 more minutes to be at his kids' school. He normally didn't work that late, since he owns the shop he can choose his own hours. But Anakin lost track of time obsessing over work and now he'd have to embarrass his kids by showing up covered in it. Their teacher would probably be there to chew him out, but in his defense this really didn't happen all that often. 

That teacher being arguably the biggest reason why he hated that they’d see him looking how he did right then. They're awfully pretty, with a chest that he's pictured slapping and sucking while their thick ass recoils from bouncing on his uncut cock. They had just moved to their average sized town at the start of the year, they told him at the parent teacher conferences at the beginning of the school year. Something about yearning to get away from their lackluster small town but also being too afraid to venture out into any kind of big city on their own. 

They were making the cutest little gestures when they were shyly talking his ear off too, shifting their thighs together as they swayed and never letting their eye contact stray too far away from their freshly polished mary janes. Anakin was very careful about remembering everything he could about Luke and Leia's first real school year. Hell, he was more scared than they were. But there was just something in the way this new teacher did their best to soothe any worries the kids might have. 

"It's okay, we'll be going on this new adventure together. And I'll do my very best to be there for you every step of the way. I hope you can be brave and look after me too!"

Luke nodded timidly but with a newfound sense of determination. Leia shouted an affirmative, being more extroverted in comparison to her brother. 

Their teacher was young, somewhere in their early 20's. Most likely having flown into town right after getting their degree. It made something in his gut swirl and simmer, imagining their delicate finger tracing his crow's feet and tugging on the gray in his hair. Their head nestled gently in between his squishy pecs, some of his muscle definition was lost with age but he had a feeling you'd like how much the slight softness of his belly highlighted the muscle underneath. 

The cliche apples in the blouse their teacher was wearing seemed to have Anakin in a trance as he zoned out. He grunted in acknowledgement when he needed to and slipped every form and newsletter he was given into his satchel. When it was time to head home, Luke and Leia clung to their teacher's legs. Anakin rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly and bent over to pry them off. He explained how sorry he was, being a single dad meant that whether or not he meant to, the kids still looked for a mother figure. 

He'll never forget the way your eyes widened by a fraction, flicking up to make eye contact with his feigned nonchalant stare. You seemed.... happy to hear that he was single. But that could've just been an old man getting wrapped up in the delusions that he still has it. 

"I'm so sorry to hear that, Mr. Skywalker. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you how hard it is to do what you do everyday, but let me just say that I think you're doing an excellent job."

He thinks you'd do even better. 

By the time he had finished reliving that fond little memory, he could spot the street sign for the street the school was on. Ruffling his hair, he made a sharp right turn and slowly pulled into the parking lot. His black chevy truck performed beautifully like always so he gave her a solid pat on the hood. He turned on his heel, immediately seeing his children hugging either one of your legs. He was only 10 minutes late, it wasn't any better but he would never make his kids feel like he abandoned them. He never wanted them to go through what he had gone through when he was their age. 

He adjusted his collar and made a last ditch effort to wipe his fingers off on his clothes. He heard a  quiet cough. He shot his head up to catch your unamused eyes. A wry smile appeared on his face as he jogged over to you. When he reached  the three of you, he immediately crouched and placed a hand on Luke and Leia's shoulders. 

"Dad's really sorry, okay? He just lost track of time but he rushed over here as fast as he could as soon as he realized what time it was."

Luke peeked out from behind your leg, "Like the Flash?"

"Yes, Luke, like the Flash." Anakin chuckled, slowly opening his arms wide in the hopes that his kids weren’t too mad at him. 

Thankfully he was instantly overwhelmed by two bodies slamming into him, almost knocking him onto the ground and tumbling down the concrete steps. Luke was clutching onto him so tightly and Leia was giggling up a storm. He stood up and gently ushered his kids into holding one of his hands so they could stand beside him. 

He cleared his throat a few times before finally addressing you. 

"I'm so sorry, I don't know if you overheard but work was really hectic today and I didn't want to waste more time cleaning up. Please just think of me how you did before, I won't look like this tomorrow."

You sighed, shaking your head with a small smile. Your blouse had a floral pattern today, blue covered in peonies and apple blossoms. Your pants were some kind of plaid thing but you make them work so well. Anakin had  to actively keep his eyes from eye fucking your wide hips and oggling the expanse of your butt in the tight pants. Just thinking about how little must be left to the imagination made his cock ache in his overalls. But he restrained himself, he was going to ask you out when he was in a much better and.... cleaner state. He pushed the thoughts down and settled himself down with daydreams of the near future. 

"It's alright, Mr. Skywalker. I understand your situation, so long as it doesn't happen frequently and the children don't have to wait too long, we won't have a problem." You gently admonished the older man, not hiding the protective tone in your voice but still looking up at him with bashful warmth in your eyes. 

Stars, the way you were already so protective over his kids made him even harder. He briefly wondered how you'd be with their younger siblings. The image made his heart flutter and a wide smile stretched his lips. He shuffled from one foot to the other, praying to whatever God is out there that he's able to hide his boner in his baggy overalls. He still had quite a few years before he even wanted to think about having the birds and bees talk with the kids. He adjusted his overalls quickly and reached out a greasy rough palm to you. 

"I swear this won't happen everyday, thank you for being so kind. I definitely won't forget it." He murmured with a wink that was open to interpretation. 

You bit your lip as you leaned forward to slip your smooth palm into his. A sharp shiver traveled up Anakin's body and butterflies erupted in your stomach at the contact. You clicked your heels together and shook his hand, the weight of it made certain kinds of thoughts pop into your head that you'd rather not deal with at the moment. 

Reluctantly Anakin pulled his hand away, making sure it lingered more than was necessary or appropriate. He put his back to you and double checked that Luke and Leia had one hand in each of his and their other hands on the strap of their backpacks. Luke had one with planets on it while Leia had one with dinosaurs. He looked down at their feet to make sure that they were going slow and steady on the steps. They reached the bottom of the steps and walked across the parking lot to Anakin's truck. He opened the back seat, lifting Leia first and waiting for her to settle in before nearly throwing out his back bending down again to help Luke in. He buckled them up and made sure their seatbelts were fastened properly. He took a few steps back and gingerly closed the backseat door on Luke's side. His back was screaming at him on the trip around the back of the truck, it especially burned when he haphazardly threw his door open and climbed up into the driver's seat. 

The drive home was the same as it was everyday. Leia excitedly told her father all about every single detail of her day and Luke needing less coaxing to talk about his as the school year progressed. Luke was upset when they ran out of apple juice at lunch because that meant he had to have grape. Leia bragged about the rock she painted during craft time. Anakin listened intently, no matter what kind of depraved shit he felt for their teacher, he wanted to take extra care that both of his kids felt heard and appreciated at the end of the day. He responded with jokes and questions to keep them talking, it distracted them from realizing how long the drive was to the house.

They pulled into the house's garage half an hour later. Anakin was about ready to collapse into a pile of bones in his recliner. Luke and Leia ran like bats out of hell through the door and up the stairs to their bedrooms. He could hear the sounds of them putting their backpacks on their hooks and unzipping them to go through the jungle of papers they stash in them. 

The fridge was fresh out of Dr. Pepper so Anakin grumbled and got a can of bud lite from his locked minifridge on the counter. He managed to make it to the couch before he let himself fall face first onto the cushions. 

The pitter patter of tiny feet bounding down the stairs yanked him from sleep so he sat up and leaned his cheek against the arm of the couch.

"Dad! Dad! Dad! Look!" Luke blurted out, shoving some kind of paper in his dad's smushed face. 

Anakin grimaced but made himself sit upright. He reached out and took the paper from Luke, holding it at a good distance away from his face and at a downwards angle so he could read it properly. 

"What's this, buddy?"

"It's a paper for the party, Dad! The Valentine's day one that's um.... this Friday, i think.” Luke nervously wrung his hands in his striped shirt as he spoke. “I want to get something for my teacher too…” 

Anakin rubbed his shaved chin as he read the paper. Luke was right. It was a newsletter informing parents about the Valentine's Day party each class would be holding on Friday. There would be no working or classes and instead every class would have an all day party for both the children and their parents. Students were allowed to bring any snacks of choice, but they had to bring a box of valentine cards for their class and give one to every student in their class.

"That must be nice, having no school for a day. Well, i'll be there on Friday and tomorrow we can go to the store and get the supplies for you and your sister." 

“And we can get something for my teacher?”

“Of course Luke, that’d be a very nice thing to do for them.”

"Okay! Thanks, dad, love you!" Luke cheered, bouncing on his feet and kissing Anakin on the cheek while giving him a second long side hug before running back upstairs. 

The next day the Skywalker family was back in the truck on the way to the biggest local supermarket in the area. It wasn't too far, just in the next town over. They could've gone to the smaller store back home, but the kids liked having options and liked car rides that were like little road trips. (Why they hated the longer drives when they were to school but liked them in situations like this, Anakin could sympathize. 

Anakin shut the radio off when they pulled into the large parking lot of the supermarket. He put his car in park and turned the engine off. The wind chill smacked him right in the face as soon as he stepped out of his seat. He rubbed his hands up and down his arms to warm himself up and walked over to get Leia and Luke out of the car as quickly as possible without freezing his ass off. They did the standard routine of holding their dad's hands while they crossed the parking lot. Anakin was telling them to look both ways to watch out for any cars that were coming as they walked along the crosswalks. Mercifully they weren't in the cold long before they entered the store.

The bright white LED overhead lights made Anakin want to pass out but he followed closely behind the kids that were already running themselves ragged all over the place. He reminded them what they were here for and his arms were pulled to their breaking point all the way to the card aisle. There were so many options of valentine card packs. There were Bluey ones, Spiderman, ones that looked like the cootie catchers you fold and pull apart, et cetera. 

Luke ended up choosing Spiderman ones that came with pencils. Leia chose a kitten design for her cards. 

Anakin almost fell asleep on the ride home. He let the kids pick out drinks from the little displays in front of the registers so they were miles away in sugar rush land. He made a note to pop a couple ibuprofens before he went to bed. Some days are easier than others but since his wife passed away when his kids were newborns, he’s never known what it was like to be able to depend on someone else to always be there to help. His childhood friend Obi-wan stops by every so often to stay over, his mom and step-dad babysit when he stops being stubborn, but that’s once in a blue moon. The sunset casts light onto the sunspots and hair on his arms. He rolled both of his sleeves up because his body typically runs hot and global warming making the temperature 65 degrees in the middle of February does him no favors. 

The McDonald’s they drove through got the kids happy meals wrong three times, something that was clearly a sign of the apocalypse. 

He had to remind Luke and Leia not to run too fast as they clammored out of the truck with his assistance and bolted to the front door. Anakin sighed his millionth sigh of the day and clamped a hand on Leia’s head to steady her as he searched his rusty old keyring for their house key. His steady hand inserted the key into the lock, ushering his kids inside with his free hand while he pushed the door open. His long legs moved at a sloth like pace, Leia and Luke ignored him and shot up the stairs like two little rockets.

“Guys, slow down. Marshmallow feet, remember?” He reminded them and leaned around the corner so they could hear him, shaking his head in exasperation when all he gets in response is a couple “Okay, dad!”s. 

The white and orange ibuprofen bottle stored in one of the many dark wood cabinets over the fridge beckoned him with a come hither motion. He’s little more than a slave to his baser instincts so he dutifully heeded the call. The cabinet creaked when he cracked it open but he couldn’t give less of a fuck as he dove for the pill bottle and shook out a few orange pills. He exhaled in relief in a way that would suggest he was smoking weed when his adams apple bobbed as the pills hit his stomach. 

With that mindless task out of the way, Anakin slowly journeyed up the stairs to get Leia and Luke ready for bed. He kept a stern eye on them to ensure they brushed their teeth, used their mouthwash properly, and washed their faces. After the kids completed their bedtime routines, he tucked them into bed while humming a lullaby Obi-Wan had taught them when he held them as infants. He gave them their time to say goodnight to their mom, Luke looked at the glow in the dark stars on his ceiling when he said it and Leia clutched her stegosaurus plushie when she whispered her goodnight. 

Anakin didn’t contribute but he warmly kissed his twins on their foreheads and tucked the corners of their comforters around their shoulders. 

His heavy work boots thundered against the hardwood floor of the hallway as he walked out of their room and down the carpeted stairs to the den. He unhooked the buttons holding up his overalls on his shoulders and shimmied his ruined overalls down to his ankles. His hairy thighs expanded as he stepped out of them so he could kick them to the other side of the room. He was left in only his boxers and a white tank top that would never be white again. So he flexed his arms as he took that tank top off too. Grease stains were all over his body but he could at least take a shower now. 

His boxers joined the towels from yesterday’s shower on the floor as his soft cock flopped out. He gave it an absentminded stroke that injected something molten into his bone marrow. He bent over to reach the faucet and turned the water on. The shower didn't start until the water babbling over his thick calloused fingers was hot enough to cook a lobster in. 

He rolled his shoulders back as he stepped into the shower. His mouth dropped open in a silent exclamation and his neck popped as his head lolled back. The onslaught of boiling hot water pin pricked his skin in a pleasure-pain sort of way that made his thoughts temporarily quiet down. 

His cock gave a couple twitches but Anakin elected to wait until he had at least washed his hair before he rubbed a much needed orgasm out. 

3-in-1 shampoo that smelled like some dior cologne was all up in his hair, his hands unhurriedly glided through his short-ish soapy strands. He angled his head back and let the lather he had worked up be drowned out by the shower head. He grabbed his vanilla & shea butter body wash and let the spout rest against his glistening pecs as his fingers curled around the stocky bottle and squeezed. The smooth liquid spurted out over his pecs and dripped down his body. He reached his hands right up under the steady stream and soaped up his pecs, ghosting his thumbs over his puffy nipples before spreading his hands out and spreading the soapsuds all over the rest of his body. 

Squelching sounds echoed off the shower floor as Anakin widened his stance. His right hand was subconsciously traveling closer and closer to his half-hard cock. He had worked so hard, finally being able to relax and luxuriate in the silence made the blood in his body migrate further south. 

A certain teacher flashed through his mind, his head whipped down in shock to discern how greatly his flushed cock swelled up faster just at the single image of his kids’ kindergarten teacher. 

An aurora borealis of fantasies swirled in the air. 

You’re kneeling on a pillow (he would be at serious risk of getting more brow wrinkles if you had to touch the harsh dirty floor with your bare skin.) and bobbing your head up and down the fat cock making a bulge in your cheek. Your sparkling eyes have this glazed over look to them as he anchors his hands on the back of your head. He widens his stance and bullies your throat with his heavy cock. You squeak and sputter but you take it like such a good pet. Your plump lips slide off of his meat a couple inches but before he can do anything, you’re groping his taut ass as you wiggle your head down to the base of his cock. Your eyes flutter shut as your brain shuts off; your nose is buried right in his musky bush. His face scrunches up in the best kind of pain, but he locks his gaze on the way your eyes roll back when he begins to skull fuck you.

Thank god for oral fixations. 

“Gonna let Daddy soak this warm throat pussy?” Don’t worry, he knows you can’t exactly use your vocal chords properly at the moment. So he nods your head for you, deepening his thrusts into slow sharp jabs. 

He’d baptize you in cum if you let him, your skin would look so pretty and glossy covered in it. He’d help you wipe it off after he cements the image of your eyelashes sticking together in his mind. 

Now he’s grabbing your love handles while his cock builds his dream home in your guts. Your ass shakes back against his hips as you try to steady the phone in your hands and face it towards the overhead. He grabs your hair in one fist and gently tugs your head up so you can pay attention properly. He didn’t go through all this just to let you hide away from him. In a perfect world, the kids would be staying with his mom so you’d be more than welcome to lose your voice.

The vision in his mind shifts to you being on your back, hands trembling trying to hold your legs as close to your chest as possible. You’re looking up at him like he was born in the center of the sun. He’s looking back at you like you’re the moon made flesh, eternally encapsulated in his sea of stars. Anakin smiles triumphantly but with a heady passion in his gait that threatens to burn his lungs to ash, coughing them up over your open heart. 

“You’re doing so well puppy, that’s my brave baby.” He coos and pries your hands off your thighs finger by finger. 

Once your hands are free, his larger ones ardently seek out yours like a dog going after a bone. The rough texture of his digits feels like an uncomfortably pleasant caress as they lace together with your own. He doesn’t look at anything else; can’t think of anything else when you make the cutest little watery gasp as his cock humps along the crack of your hole. The red tip of it gets caught against your outer sweet spot as if trying to give your crotch small pecks. His eye wrinkles crinkle when his smile widens and he offers a breathy laugh. 

He squeezes your hands tightly as he wraps a hand around his cock and directs it to its northern star. Your nails digging into his knuckles don’t distract from your hole stretching itself wide to suckle at his encroaching length. 

And if in the shower he spilled into his feverishly fucked fists at the concept of crimson liquid mixing with cum to make a pink swirl where your bodies meet, you’d never know. He thumbed at the glans under his cock tip as he came down from his high, skirting a fingernail up a vein on the side and wishing he was mouthing the space between your shoulder blades; preening your white feathers with his scratchy tongue. 

The next couple days were gone with a couple of blinks. He never deviated from his routine; wake up, wipe off the drool on his face, get kids ready and take them to school, go to work, clean up, go pick kids up from school, help with whatever work 6 year olds would have, put them to bed, jerk off in the shower till his legs ache, fall asleep on his stomach with his the right side of his face smushed into a pillow. 

He did find some time to put together a teacher’s appreciation basket for you. You more than anyone else deserved a few something somethings on a day meant to represent love. The gifts were packed nicely and neatly in a vintage wicker basket wrapped in a red gingham bow and covered in see through red plastic wrap. Your reaction would regrettably have to be viewed from afar, but he’d know how to move forward depending on what adorable expression you had all over your face.

The night before the party, Anakin allowed Luke and Leia to stay up a smidge later than normal so that they could get all of their things ready for the party. Anakin’s special present slept soundly in the seat next to his in front of his truck. An additional gift from Luke was tucked inside along with an item from Leia who had insisted on it when she found out Luke was getting you something.. The basket being hidden away for the time being allowed him to focus completely on helping his children with their gifts at the coffee table. 

Luke’s eyes were droopy as he wrote down the names of his classmates in the hearts made to look like Spiderman’s mask in his cards. He inserted  most of the pencils in the intended slot on the left of the cards by himself before he slumped against Anakin’s arm and weakly pushed the pile of cards towards his dad. Anakin chuckled as he ruffled Luke’s fluffy blonde hair and teasingly whispered that he didn’t know a boy could be so sleepy. His son blinked at him as if to say how unfunny his dad was before yawning and snuggling further into his father. 

Anakin pushed the rest of the pencils into the card slots and sealed all of the cards with red heart stickers. He lifted his head to look across the glass coffee table to check in on how Leia was doing. For how fiery his daughter was already at such a young age, she wasn’t immune to getting tired before 8:30. The signature buns on her head that she loved begging him  to do for her had loose hairs poking out of them because of how Leia had buried her head in her arms. 

Anakin blew a breath out in fond chagrin as he easily reached over the table and delicately removed the pins holding the buns in place. He fluffed out the hair that fell down so her scalp wouldn’t feel weird when she woke up. 

He hoisted Luke up in one arm and Leia in the other (something they were getting a bit too big to continue doing) and slowly but surely deposited them on the couch. He snatched a white plush blanket from the linen closet and settled it over them before turning back to the massive amount of paper cards on the table. He finished the last of Leia’s cards a short while later. He sorted the cards into orderly piles and put them in sandwich bags that he took to the kids room so he could put the bags in their backpacks. 

Anakin came back to the living room as he tried to shoo the sleep away by digging his knuckles into his eye sockets in a lazy rub. He opened the cabinet and took out a package of pink frosted sugar cookies with red heart shaped sprinkles, a pack of capri suns, and a tupperware bowl full of mini brownies. With a long drawn out yawn he set the snacks out on the counter so that he would remember them tomorrow morning. He got a set of paper plates and a sectioned set of cutlery in case you needed any extra. Maybe you’d give him one of those corny gold star stickers as a thank you. 

Friday morning was ushered in by  two children risking their dad’s life by flopping on his stomach with all the strength they had while he was sleeping. 

“OH FU-“ He shouted before he remembered who was in the room and gently rolled them off of his stomach. “What exactly do you two think you’re doing?”

 "It's time to wake up dad, we're gonna be late for school!" Leia said with a dismayed look on her somewhat chubby face. 

Anakin looked away and meekly mouthed a 'sorry' as he looked at the led clock that he had forgotten to set an alarm on. 

Fuck, not again. 

He sat up in bed and hunched over; his head buried in his hands. Luke and Leia crowded around him as they tried their best to comfort their father, giving his back light pats. He let them pull his hair so that he'd look up at them. He smiled in gratitude and crawled out of bed as quickly as he could to get the day started. 

He made a comical sight; hobbling around the floor with his ripped jeans pooled around his feet as he raced to get his kids ready for school in time. His belt was a fairly new black leather piece that he'd been keeping for a special occasion, but the anxiety of the morning made him grapple with getting the buckle in place. Once that was done a shameful amount of time later, he shoved his clothes to the side in his closet as he searched for a nicer, more "classy" dress shirt. Anakin gnawed at his bottom lip and eventually decided on a black silk button up that matched his belt. He crouched, chanting in his head that he hoped he wouldn't tear a muscle, and chose a pair of italian leather slides that his mom had gotten him for Father's Day a couple of years ago. The bathroom mirror held back no punches when it showed Anakin the state of his head. He crossed his fingers and smoothed back his hair with the tiniest glob of gel; the water he splashed on his face would have to do some serious charity work. He could only hope that you liked the naturally unkempt but not too unkempt kind of look, a striking sort of ruggedness. 

"Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad..." Luke droned, understandably fed up with waiting on his dad to deal with another one of his mini mid life crisis episodes. 

"I'll be right there Luke, hold on a second, please."

Anakin gave into his son’s begging and let him brush his teeth with the birthday cake flavored toothpaste today. Even though the dentist moaned about how hard it was to clean out when they introduced it to Luke at his last appointment. His Spiderman toothbrush played a jingle meant to sound like the theme song when Luke did his 2 minutes of brushing. Anakin stood protectively behind him as he spit in the sink, his hand hovered over his head so he wouldn't hit it. He took Luke's toothbrush and ran it under the water before he put it back in the clear organizer next to the faucet. He poured the recommended amount of mouthwash from the bottle and passed the lid that acted as the cup to Luke. Luke grimaced but he tipped the cup up so the blue liquid would pour in his mouth, he swished it around and then spat it out too. He sipped from the glass of water that was handed to him and proudly beamed at his father.

"Good job, Luke. I'm so proud of you." Anakin congratulated him, Luke was still finicky about floss so today would not be the day that he attempted to get him to use it. 

Being a parent means knowing how to pick your battles and what time to schedule them. 

Anakin brushed Luke's hair and fluffed it out a bit like a surfer (how Luke likes it). He grabbed his son by his underarms and lifted him off of the step stool. The mirrors in their house were still a bit too high for his kids to see properly so for now the stools had a purpose. He would be sad when they no longer needed them. 

Anakin quickly dipped into the twins room to grab their backpacks. He had already gotten them dressed after he got out of bed earlier. He helped Luke put his on and then repeated the same process with Leia. Her toothbrush made a loud roar when she finished brushing, and she had a fit of giggles in response. His daughter preferred straightforward mint toothpaste so morning routines really weren't that much of a struggle with her. Once she put the glass of water down on the sink, she eagerly turned her back to her dad and pointed at her loose hair. Anakin saluted as he began shaping her hair into the buns she loves so much. He reminded her not to mess with them too much or they'd fall apart, and she always responded that she knew that already. 

They got in a single file line on their mission out the door. Anakin nabbed the containers of snacks and briefly freaked out wondering if he lost the cards before he remembered that they were in the kids' backpacks. He double checked if his keys and wallet were in his pockets, and to his relief everything was where it was supposed to be.

Well, mostly everything. He'd never forget about you, don't worry. 

He put his phone on do not disturb before tossing in the front seat next to his along with the basket already sitting there. 

Anakin told Luke and Leia to buckle their seatbelts as he inserted his key into the keyhole and started the car. He heard them buckle up and waited for the tell tale clicks before putting his car into drive. They had to leave than some of the other kids in their school would have to since they lived farther away, but because it was so early the twins could only yawn and hold onto the other twins' booster seat. Anakin thanked the cosmos and turned the radio on but kept it a low volume; Frank Sinatra's rich voice was the best company on a drive like this. 

The school entrance was abundantly decorated. A large white banner along the front entry archway announced the festivities. A flurry of red, pink, and white ribbons hung across the ceiling of the lobby. Every door had hearts representing the students in their class covering them, the kids's names scrawled in their own messy handwriting with cheap crayons. 

The door of your classroom was the last one on the left. You kept a bottle of hand sanitizer in front of it because you were very particular about hygiene, a trait that served you extremely well in your job. Luke and Leia pointed out where on the door their hearts were as they waited for you to open the door. The Skywalker family were the first ones there so Anakin wasn't sure if it was okay to just drop in on you unannounced. He wished that you would drop on him unannounced. He cradled his gift basket  in his arms as if it were a fragile baby.  

A few minutes later, your heels were heard clacking against the tile floor. The silver door knob jiggled before it stopped moving and the door took its sweet sweet time opening. Your head poked out and your face brightened when you saw who was at the other end. You sunk down into a squat, putting your hands on your knees as you addressed the children. 

"Why, hello Leia; hello to you too Luke. You're a tad early, but you can go ahead and hang your backpacks on the hooks in your cubbies. I haven't finished setting everything up, so you can sit down on any of those chairs at the front of the class." You greeted them and shook their hands before pointing out where they could sit. 

The twins obviously sat together. You didn't have assigned seating in your class, and you felt that Leia and Luke would be more comfortable sitting together during their first year at school. It wasn't guaranteed that they'd be in the same class next year. You were too sensitive to try to separate them. You cried a lot because of how scary school was when you were in their place, so you couldn't imagine being the cause for any tears your students shed.

Anakin was once again too caught up in studying your outfit. You had on a fitted shirt with a cardigan on top, it had thin strings that could unwind with no effort from him if he reached out and just pulled.

But that could wait. 

The kids scattered off to choose their seats. Your classroom had three circular tables with five small red chairs. Each chair had a small blanket on the back with a valentine's pattern. The table at the front where Luke and Leia were sitting had heart shaped placemats with a lace trim that looked like it should've been a doily, but in a… good way. You had red and pink plates on the smaller table next to your desk, as well as clear forks and spoons that looked like they had confetti inside of them. You figured that the parents would bring all of the refreshments and you didn't know what your students would want; you thought that the safest bet would be to hang back. 

Anakin did the most he could to soften his gaze when you straightened up and automatically locked eyes with the older man. He clocked how you instantly glanced down at the floor for a split second. You adjusted your collar, for some reason, and gave him the world’s smallest smile. Anakin was so certain that if he leaned in close enough, he would be able to hear your heart racing at the same accelerated pace as his.

 Some say that means it’s love. 

You fluttered your eyelashes, “Hi, Mr. Skywalker, thank you for coming. It’s always a pleasure to see Luke and Leia, but i’m glad that you could be here for them”

“Believe me, no one’s more happy about me being here than I am.” He blurted out without thinking, ‘Uh, I brought some snacks and drinks for everybody.”

You took in the capri suns and the desserts as your smile grew. Your hand curled around his bicep subconsciously, “Oh my gosh, that’s so nice of you! I’ll just put those over the-“ 

You couldn’t even finish your sentence before Anakin sauntered past you to put the food down on the table next to your desk. He placed the frosted sugar cookies down first, followed by the capri suns and brownies. 

He turned to face you and his shirt seemed to tighten over his chest as he rested his hands on his hips. His fingers flexed absentmindedly, like they wished they were gripping something else. 

“I can handle it, sweetheart. I’m 42, not 72.”  He chided you, strolling back over and chucking you under the chin; you were cute if you thought you’d be lifting a single finger the entire day. 

The way you nearly fell head over heels trying to fix your assumed faux paus was even cuter, “No, no- I- I didn’t mean anything- I just- Y-you look very capable to me, sir.” 

If your brain would let you, you would rip your face off to hide from your big mouth. Why the hell would you tell the much older father of two of your students that you think he looks “very capable”? WHAT POSSESSED YOU TO CALL HIM “SIR”? 

Anakin scratched his chin and decided that he’d let you off the hook with no more teasing from him. That’s a lie though, he was confident that you could take whatever he gave you. 

“Careful, don’t stroke my ego too much or I'll have to stroke yours. And please, I'd hate to have to remind you again, my name’s Anakin.” He was flirting a little too shamelessly for where you were, but he was still thinking with his upstairs head and guided you to a back corner. 

“I actually got you something myself, but uh,  if it’s all the same to you, I'd wait to open it until you’re nice and snug at home.” 

He gladly took a short walk to your car with you and helped you set the basket down safely in the trunk. He told you to stand back as he slammed the trunk door shut; slapping it for good measure to make sure it was properly closed. 

The two of you returned to your classroom and like the good little helper Anakin wanted you to know he could be, he helped you greet the incoming parents and students. He even took any concessions they brought and put them with the others

By 8:15 everyone you expected was in your classroom. A few kids were without their parents so you asked some of the other students to invite them to enjoy the party; a party’s no fun alone. 

At some point around 9:00 you had the stray daydream of Anakin pinning you against the wall outside of your door as he savagely plundered your mouth with his teeth and tongue. Finger shaped bruises and a promise to ‘see you at home, baby’ would keep your usually freezing cold body warm. You glance at the man out of the corner of your eye to see that he was already staring. He looked like he wanted to teach you a lot of things.

Whatever that meant. 

The morning half of the day consisted of the cafeteria delivering breakfast and watching a couple of movies that the class voted on. The Lego Batman Movie was first (a unanimous decision), and Wreck-it-Ralph was picked after that (some kids wanted to watch the minion movie like always but you were secretly happy that they weren’t the majority.) 

Lunchtime was when you decided to let the students have the snacks, they were welcome to go down to the cafeteria with a guardian if they wanted actual food but they didn’t have to. You weren’t surprised when none of the seats became empty. 

Anakin had to wrench the small plastic chair away from his ass before he winked charmingly and speed walked to the snack table to help you. The air between the both of you had inexplicably become charged with insurmountable tension. The chaos didn’t give you much chatting time so you could only glances and brush your arms together; how accidental those touches were was up for debate. 

Especially when he needed to get through to the plates and forks behind you. 

“Sorry, let me just squeeze past you.” He whispered in your ear, his big hands using your waist to steady you as he pressed his back flush against your chest. 

In the blink of an eye he was gone. The invisible hands chained to your skin remained. You fanned your face with one of the cheap paper plates as you floated back to your body and got a hold of yourself.  

You looked over at the Skywalker trio to see Luke and Leia point at you as they tirelessly tug on their dads sleeves until he caved. You saved him the trouble and went to them, bending down so you could hear the twins properly.

“Do you two need something? I could see you making a fuss over here.” You teased. 

“Dad forgot to give you our presents….” Leia mumbled and Luke nodded sharply. 

Your eyes widened, “Oh! You didn’t have to get me anything, but the day’s not over yet. You can give them to me now.”

“I did not forget, Leia.” Anakin shook his head, fidgeting in the uncomfortable chair. “They’re in the basket Dad brought, and your teacher has it in her car outside, okay?” 

You nodded and confirmed their fathers words, “He’s right. I didn’t know that there were things from you and your brother in it too but it’s safe and sound. I pinky swear.” 

Two much smaller pinkies met you halfway and wrapped around yours. The Skywalker twins giggled as they turned it into an impromptu arm wrestle competition and beat you easily. (You felt they were going to snap your finger off if they kept tightening their hold so you bowed out.) 

Anakin watched with hearts in his eyes and his head propped up in his hand, his eyes crinkled at the inherent domesticity of the act. 

Luke and Leia agreed to call their exhibition match a draw. 

The sun had already set by the time you got home. You were so tired that you nearly dropped your keys down the stairwell; you didn’t want to spend your night fishing them out of the grass.The wicker basket in your arms was at risk of falling too but you got your door opened and you crumpled on the loveseat.

 “Oof, I should probably get this sorted out now or I'll just forget about it.” You said as your body protested you moving a single inch from your sunken spot. 

You grabbed your emerald green pair of scissors and cut the top of the plastic wrap off.The wrapping  squealed as you tore it off the rest of the basket. You peered into it and thankfully it looked like a run of the mill teacher’s appreciation gift; for a valentine’s day it was a little strange but since it was from Anakin… you’d slip on your rose colored glasses. 

There was a medium sized teddy bear, a couple three wick candles; your favorite was the one that smelled like the conversation hearts candy. There was also a custom made box of chocolates from the bakery you frequented, and three burgundy roses that you trimmed properly before dropping them in the vase on your kitchen island. 

The ‘world’s best teacher’ stood out like a sore thumb but it made you smile anyway. 

The teddy bear was incredibly fluffy and bubblegum pink; it’s holding a sparkly red heart with the word ‘princess’ sewed in hot pink thread in the center. You swept the fur away from its black eyes so it could see. The bear was pretty cute, and you had a problem handling your stuffed animal addiction, so you headed to your bedroom and laid it down with the rest of your plushies. 

You yawned and your mouth stretched like a goldfish when it does the same thing. The strings of your red cardigan came undone by your hands and you let it slide off of you and hit the floor. Your pink ribbed top joined it when you gathered enough energy to give a damn and move your arms. 

Your white bra was so plain but like hell if it didn’t make the man palming himself over his jeans rock hard. The kids were sound asleep in bed and the walls were thick so he could be as loud as he wanted. But this particular session wasn’t about achieving some grand climax. No. He just wanted to take things slow tonight. If he happened to gradually tumble over the edge along the way, he wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Anakin loved you, every inch of your body would soon be blissfully aware of that. 

The miniscule camera in the dot above the i in Princess loved you just as much. 

The fire that would wait to invite itself in for a surprise visit until you had left for work loved you more. 

a/n: i had this in the drafts for a bit but i was having a moment so i didn’t post it until now. happy valentine's day 💞

[bonefall]

what are the main prey animals that Shadowclan eat in better bones? because in my rewrite, i can only find like 5 british marshland birds, the frogs like canon, and a common lizard, while the other clans have dozens of prey species. I don't think 7 prey species can feed 50 cats for the generations i need them to, yknow?

This is hard to find out because of the unfortunate reality that wetlands are an "unpopular" natural biome. It's hell out there. No one appreciates their local swamps and marshes </3

But I'M here, NUMBER 1 GOO FAN. Quickie on some of the most common species ShadowClan will be hunting, in an English wetland. 5 for your convenience.

Small intro/recap to BB!ShadowClan's food culture; For a mixture of several reasons, including early collaboration and trade with WindClan, living in an area heavily affected by seasonal changes, and cultural pride in being able to eat anything, ShadowClan has one of the most varied diets of any Clan. Mammals, fish, birds, if they can get their mouth on it, they will eat it.

(Yes. This means predators as well. Other Clans will avoid eating predators for culture and taste reasons. ShadowClan finds it offensive to just let good meat rot.)

The most important reason in that list must be stressed; winter is CRUEL to ShadowClan. The RiverClan river is a moving source of water which rarely completely ices over, most animals in ThunderClan don't hibernate, WindClan's rabbits are active in the snow. For most Clans, they will not feel the "bite" of winter until towards the end, when the prey populations crash. ShadowClan feels it immediately.

That's a problem because Prey Item Number 1 Will Surprise you. The most popular prey in ShadowClan is...

1: Ducks.

And with the most common species, mallards, at about 2 pounds on average (with males being slightly larger) you're looking at 5,442 calories each. Enough to feed 15 warriors for a day.

(Note: This estimate is low; actual value would probably be higher. This measurement is taken from this chart which measured whole carcasses and caloric value rounded from 5.9 to 6, and this particular duck was "dressed"-- so its organs, the most valuable part of the animal, were already removed.)

Ducks are SO valuable as prey it's hard to oversell them. They're huge, they're highly nutritious (thiamin, vitamin a, vitamin b, iron), and they're PACKED with fats. They also lay eggs, TONS of them, which ShadowClan will happily snatch from inattentive hens.

The problem with ducks is, they don't stick around in the winter. Mallards might stay if the weather is mild, but if the water starts freezing, they're a-leaving.

That means that right when ShadowClan needs them the most, they'll vanish. If the marsh freezes, which is VERY likely because it's stillwater, they can't access ANYTHING under the ice. So Prey Animal Number 2 ALSO becomes an issue;

2: Carp

Their size and weight varies immensely, but the european carp is a species that AVERAGES 6 - 15 pounds. Using our rough estimation numbers and only a 6 pound fish, that's 10,884 calories. That's a whole Clan fed, if it's rationed perfectly.

Many carp are larger and heavier than cats. Here is a picture of a human fisher with two 5-pound bass so you can get a feel for just how big fish are

The biggest problem with carp, aside from the fact that icy winter conditions will block access to catching them, is that their gallbladders are poisonous. Carp bile is the only dangerous type of bile Clan cats encounter (that I know about so far). When being eaten, Clan cats must take care to gut them gently and remove the organ without spilling toxic green slime everywhere.

(ShadowClan actually collects and uses this bile for other purposes. Dried and diluted, it can be used as a medicine for treating parasites, and wet and mixed into a poultice it can be used to dress wounds. If gargled, it can also dissolve and loosen stuck bones in the throat, VERY important for unknowing kittens who tried to eat cooked bird bones.)

These two are the most common animals in the highly varied ShadowClan diet. Hunt in the shallow marsh, and you're bound to bump into either a duck or a carp at some point.

But when winter rolls in, they start to rely on mammalian prey.

3: Rats

While some rats can breach 2 pounds (SHOUT OUT TO ALL MY NEW YORKERS) most of them only clock in at about half a pound-- 250 grams. That's 1,250 calories. About 3 cats fed.

(NOTE: These estimations of how MANY cats they feed assumes that these bites are being distributed evenly, such as if the animal was being put into a soup or meticulously portioned. It's more likely that a single rat is eaten alone or only shared between two warriors who then bulk up. The sensation of "fullness" is determined by weight rather than caloric value.)

Rats are highly adaptable omnivores, but most of their diet is actually plants! Humans associate them with garbage and filth, and yes, the rats from carrionplace would certainly taste awful. But most of the rats ShadowClan catches would be living in natural conditions, eating nuts, fruits, and smaller animals. So it doesn't make sense that canon sees ALL rats as dirty-- they should actually be a HUGE part of a warrior's diet!

Especially in ShadowClan, where the invasive brown rat has all but eliminated the native black rat population. Brown rats are huge, thick-tailed, excellent swimmers who stick around in the winter and find themselves right at home in a marsh or swamp.

In fact, ShadowClan thinks hunting them is a two-way blessing. A cat stays fed through the winter, and more resources are freed up for the rarer, but more delicious water vole. ThunderClan isn't the only Clan that understands population management.

And speaking of...

4: Squirrels

Significantly smaller than carp and ducks, gray squirrels are usually about 500 grams. I've heard it said that they triple in mass over the winter, but since I'm not sure if that means they triple in weight, I'll simply rule that a wintertime gray squirrel is 1000 grams. Which means about 5,000 calories, enough to feed 14 cats.

...but also. don't underestimate how big a squirrel is. You are a 200-pound bipedal ape, these are 10 pound cats. They are also eating all the organs you, a human, would usually toss.

The general term, wetland, refers to all land that is... take a guess... wet. The difference between a marsh and a swamp is that a swamp is wooded land, which means squirrels can live there!

ShadowClan often finds itself in conflict with ThunderClan over squirrels. The native, endangered red squirrel is a cultural icon to ThunderClan and they believe it's important to protect it at all costs by killing gray squirrels whenever possible. ShadowClan, meanwhile, agrees red squirrels are beautiful, but isn't willing to be aggressive with gray squirrel populations to protect them.

5: Cheating

In true ShadowClan fashion I do what I want and use number 5 to babble about several animals they turn into grub

And SPEAKING of grubs, they love to forage for larval treats. They regularly make snacks out of chafer grubs, stag beetle larvae, cutworms, and if they can manage it, baby honeybees. Chafer grubs are their absolute favorite, which is another reason why WindClan is so passionate about maintaining their moorland; when it turns into grassland, ShadowClan is energized to fight for grub foraging space.

The "problem" with the meat of predators is that it's said to be tough and taste strong and unpalatable. ShadowClan doesn't entirely mind it, but if they end up with a predator in spring and summer, they like to use the seasonal stream (called a syke) that cuts across ThunderClan to soak the meat in running water for a few days.

Not to mention that they really will just grab at any animal, in addition to those lizards and frogs they're notorious for. Hedgehogs, crayfish, waterbirds, snails. There's all sorts of spices they'll use to try to season a strange meat, between mushrooms, pellitory, juniper, rosemary, so on.

It's harder to find something they WON'T eat.

[tanadrin]

The total land area of all US states is around 9.14 million square km; the US has 3134 counties or county-equivalents, and in most of the country these are a pretty consistent size. there are a few weird states: Alaska has very big boroughs because of its low population, and much of the state is not organized into any borough. Virginia has a lot of independent cities (38 out of 41 in the entire country; most other states just consolidate city and county governments if a city gets very big).

Among all states east of the Mississippi, excluding Virginia, counties are about 1,423 km square (1369 if you include Virginia and count its independent cities as counties). If you include the states just across the Mississippi River, which mostly have counties about the same size as the states just to their east (here I am including Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, the Dakotas, etc.; but nothing further west than the Texas/North Dakota axis), average county size rises only to 1,762 km square. Just within those states of the "nearer west," county size is about 2,220 km square, which is bigger, but not crazy bigger.

Further west, especially in states like Nevada, Utah, and California, counties get very big. Among all states west of the Texas/North Dakota line, counties average around 10,300 square km. But among all states, average county or county-equivalent size is 2,921 km square.

"County" as administrative division descends of course from English counties, which were originally feudal divisions. So how big are U.S. counties compared to their European predecessors? About the same size! England has a land area of ~130,000 km square and 48 ceremonial/historical counties (it has many more local government areas in the modern era). English counties are 2,700 km square on average, about the size of U.S. counties--in fact, maybe a little bigger than most U.S. counties. Ireland has an area of 84,421 km square (not sure what percentage of this is land) and 32 counties, for an average county size of 2,638 km square.

The U.S. state with the fewest counties is Delaware, which has just 3 (1,682 km sq each). The U.S. state with the most is Texas, with 254 counties (2664 km sq each--just a little bit bigger than Ireland!). The state with the biggest counties (again, excluding Alaska, because the unorganized borough messes things up) is Arizona, whose counties are on average 19,614 km square--just seven Arizona-sized counties would cover all of England. The state with the smallest counties is Rhode Island, whose counties average 536 km sq--at 3,144 km square in total, Rhode Island itself is smaller than the average county in fourteen states.

In terms of population, of course, the size of US counties probably varies even more wildly than their land area, but on average they compare reasonably to the local administrative divisions of other countries (some of which are third-level and some of which are second-level, depending on their size). U.S. counties have a population of about 108,000 on average. In the Republic of Ireland (so, not including the six counties of the North), counties have an average population of about 192,000. In Germany, local government areas (Kreise) have an average population of about 207,000 (though the three city-states of Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen complicate this picture somewhat). The actual on-the-ground local government scheme in England is complex, and it is not clear to me what the modern U.S. county or German Kreise equivalent would be.

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

The state I live in (Minnesota) has passed laws that protect trans people. I don’t really have a way to take anyone in myself, but if you need to move my state is protected. You might want to check what the town you move to is political history wise, but in general if it’s a place with a lot of travel and a decent amount of people it’s probably not the worst. I’m only demigender and don’t really look that remarkable, so I can’t say I have much personal experience outside of having friends and knowing people in the area. The south eastern part of the state has several cities and is a relatively safe bet (although nowhere seems to be totally safe in this country unfortunately) followed by deluth and then Moorhead. Avoid Fargo if you move there though. I know the communities are very intwined there but there is very much a difference between the two when it comes to things like lgbtq people. Legally and to an extent socially, just on either side of a river. I never really thought too much about it until Covid hit and people on the Minnesota side would be wearing masks everywhere but you crossed the river into North Dakota and there were barely any people wearing them. It was wild. Anyway, im rambling and im not about to say “this is the single safest place in the country!” But it is probably the safest state in the region.

Anyway, where I was going with this was, wherever you end up in this state (should you come here) be aware that weather here swings between extremes throughout the year. In winter we can get into the negative double digits, and in summer we can get over one hundred degrees (both Fahrenheit). This means that you need to be ready for both. That is a life and death matter. Also, everywhere I’ve been in the state has it’s own extreme winter weather twists. I’m Moorhead when a winter is really wet/snowy you’ll have to take flooding into consideration. I’ve heard the same about the twin cities (the biggest ones) to a lesser extent. Duluth is basically on an inland sea with winter extremes and a lot of up and down roads. Fun for a summer trip but harsher in winter. Both Duluth and Moorhead are big but the farther north you go the more extreme the winters tend to be. Minneapolis/Saint Paul (and it’s hoard of smaller neighbors) do experience Minnesota winters, but they usually get slightly less cold on average. Their tornado season is earlier than Moorhead and Duluth’s (Duluth doesn’t really have much of a tornado season, you get freshwater sea stuff instead) and the twin cities do tend to run a little hotter in summer. I’m sure people will be like “hey! You left out my decently sized population town in your ramblings!” And sure, if you want to add more go ahead. I’m just covering the biggest population spaces. The twin cities (and the surrounding areas) is the most populous. Moorhead is second I believe but there is a very big drop in numbers between the two. I think Duluth has the lowest population but I’m not totally sure about the difference between Moorhead and Duluth population wise. 🤔

Anyway, I’m sure that there are better guides to the state than me, but I at least wanted to share my personal knowledge.

The one thing I want you to take from this if you are moving here is MAKE SURE YOU ARE READY FOR THE WEATHER or at least as ready as you can be.

The second thing would be, if you want to blend in more, go for the twin cities, Moorhead has its own charm though in there being a slightly more closely feeling community. I’m not going to pretend everyone knows everyone, but there is more fuss when some violent drama happens. I haven’t lived there in seven years though. I live nearby (relatively speaking) but no longer in town. The main reason I think you might consider that one is it’s a bit less expensive.

I’m not trying to make a sales pitch, I’m just trying to get my limited knowledge out there. There are also a lot of support programs through various local (state and some counties) governments for disabled people. They are as convoluted as anything else in this country, but they are the reason I can live on my own (with the assistance). Honestly, I have more experience with being a disabled person in my area than being a queer person, just because mine is kinda subtle I guess. USE MORE SOURCES THAN JUST ME! But I hope this at least something to help you get started in case any of my followers need to move to my beautiful hot cold wet state.

This one is a mess, I’ll try to make a cleaner version, although that might not have the population information

I’m making this one unrebloggable because it is messy. My more recent one is better in my opinion

[loominggaia]

What are stereotypes about the great kingdoms?

There are a lot of stereotypes, and they can differ greatly depending on who is doing the stereotyping. But in general, most people around Gaia think...

Folkvar Kingdom: It snows 24/7 and it's so cold that your piss will freeze mid-stream. Folkvarans are bloodthirsty, violence-obsessed barbarians who fight eachother for fun. They live hard, unforgiving lives on their frozen mountains and they are super tough because of it. They eat snow and stinky raw fish. Disabled people are hunted and killed for sport. In Folkvar Kingdom, wife beats you!

Matuzu Kingdom: Disease-riddled jungles with mosquitoes the size of your head. Barren savannahs with hillbilly tribesmen who fuck their cousins and roving fae gangs who ride zebras. Fancy wine. Incredible cuisine. Roshava everywhere, probably trying to scam you. Beautiful beaches and sexy people. Everyone's horny all the time and DTF whenever. Lots of snobby, artsy-fartsy college types in the cities.

Lamai Nation: Everyone lives underground and doesn't know what the sun is. The Lamaish people are cannibalistic gorgons who decide to chow down on grandma whenever they're feeling a bit peckish. These gorgons worship dragons as gods and keep humans as pets. The average Lamaish woman marries several men, then works them like slaves while she sits on her ass and does nothing all day. Everyone is on drugs.

Yerim-Mor Kingdom: Every city is in a constant state of warfare, everyone is poor and starving, the rivers run with blood, and the Divine of Hate is just constantly fucking this kingdom sideways with monster invasions. People are so hungry here that they resort to eating eachother. Everyone's a thief. The military is so desperate that it accepts children into its ranks. Hot weather that will melt you into goo. If you stand out in the open for too long, you'll get snatched by a roc.

Zareen Empire: Zareenites are fat, lazy, alcoholics who drink hand sanitizer to get drunk and inject drain cleaner to get high. They spend all day standing in front of machines that do their jobs for them. It's so overpopulated that people live in cages stacked on top of eachother. The food and water is toxic. Plants can't grow anywhere here, period. Nymphs are shot on sight. The food is shitty but super cheap.

Evangeline Kingdom: All humans own slaves. Everyone is inbred and lives on a farm. There's nothing to do for fun here except churn butter and drink beer. When they're not fucking their sisters, Evangelite men are either fucking their slaves or their livestock. Evangelite women are perfectly obedient little drones without a thought in their heads. Nymphs are above the law and can just do whatever they want here. The environment is pristine.

Mogdir Kingdom: Snotty elves and uppity gaians everywhere. If you so much as step on a flower you will be publicly executed. Backwater swamp-elves keeping commoners as slaves. Everyone lives in trees. Children are being kidnapped constantly. Slutty nymphs. Giant caterpillars for every meal. If you aren't enrolled in magic school, your parents don't love you.

Etios Nation: Everyone lives in grass huts that fall over in the slightest breeze. Etiosi women do nothing but crap out a million babies while the men impregnate more wives and farm grass. There is no school and everyone is dumb. No one bathes, everyone just rolls in dirt and stinks. Satyrs are allowed to run wild and wreak havoc all over the land. Fae are killed on sight. All Etiosi know is kill fae, collect wives, eat grass and lie.

Seelie Court: "If you ain't an elf, go fuck yourself"

Unseelie Court: Everyone practices necromancy and there are zombies just walking around like normal citizens. There are no laws, citizens can just do whatever they want at all times. Every Unseelie woman is a big tiddy goth gf. Every Unseelie man is a creepy weirdo. Everyone eats dogs and drinks blood. The food here sucks but the drugs are great and plentiful. You can't take 5 steps without tripping over a homeless kobold, slipping on a turd, or impaling your foot on a drug needle.

Empire of Damijana: Every citizen is being watched by government agents at all times. No one may leave. No one may enter. The Damijani casually drink gasoline. The food is so spicy you will literally shoot fire out of your ass. The pollution is horrible, it rains acid, and you will definitely get cancer after being here for 0.5 seconds. If you show one inch of skin you will be imprisoned for life. Everyone has depression and takes 10 different medications just to function.

Aquarian Alliance: All Alliance citizens are 100% loyal to the Sovereign and have a raging hate-boner for Terrians. They're all murderous terrorists who will definitely kill you on sight if you are not one of them. When they're not busy killing Terrians, they're killing eachother over petty civil conflicts. They choose to live in nasty, polluted waters and then complain about it and blame Terrians. They're all mutated and mentally challenged from the pollution.

-

Of course very little of this is true, these are just common stereotypes you'll hear around Gaia. These are also very broad, and the stereotypes will differ a lot based on individual cultures within these Great Kingdoms. Most Great Kingdoms are actually quite diverse culturally.

*

Questions/Comments?

Lore Masterpost

[random-thought-depository]

Continuing from my last post about science fictional “hyperspaces” (wow, I think that might be the most viral original post I ever wrote; it’s amazing what being reblogged by @argumate can do for a post!):

As a science fiction writer, these are the features I find attractive about “hyperspace” that incline me to favor it over other explanations for “fast” interstellar communication and travel:

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Hyperspace lets space still feel big. Wormholes/portals and instantaneous “jump drives” tend to make space feel small (though wormholes lend themselves nicely to space outside the wormhole network feeling big and to a feeling of sharp discontinuity between “known” or “civilized” space within the network and “unknown” or “wild” space where the network doesn’t reach). Start-anywhere go-anywhere jump drives without serious limitations have the additional issue that they’re more-or-less equivalent to teleporters, so they create the ultimate MAD setting where defending multiple fixed locations from a peer adversary is very difficult, and they minimize the strategic advantages of sustainable stationary banditry over unsustainable hyper-exploitive mobile banditry, and since the likely implications of that are very depressing I prefer to avoid it (except maybe if I was deliberately setting out to write a dystopia or explore the idea).

I want space to feel big in my writing, to give the reader some feeling of the vastness, grandeur, and inhuman scale of the universe. For my main science fiction setting, I think I’ll give hyperspace travel an effective “speed” of something like 5-10 c in Sol’s local neighborhood. That way interstellar journeys are more manageable than they’d be with journeys through our space, but journeys to other inhabited solar systems usually take at least a year or two (Sol to Alpha Centauri may be less than a year in hyperspace, but add in travel time to and from the Sol and Alpha Centauri hyper-limits, which is probably going to be at least a couple of months for each leg, and it’s probably about a year).

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Hyperspace feels more like the sort of thing that might plausibly be useable to almost hairless apes with near-future-ish technology. With warp drives and wormholes and jump drives and so on I get the niggling feeling that’s the sort of thing you should probably have to be on approximately the level of an Orion’s Arm Archialect to do. Real theoretical warp drive and wormhole proposals tend to involve stuff like exotic forms of matter and energy and very large amounts of energy. Hyperspace would be a natural phenomenon, so it’s easier to explain it in terms of people exploiting natural phenomena we just don’t know about now, no weirder than being able to travel faster than rowing would allow by building a sail to catch the wind.

You can say that there are some rare atoms that naturally have a structure that extends into hyperspace. With human senses and 2020s technology they just look like ordinary atoms of silicon, iron, etc., but with the right kind of machinery you can detect them, sift them out of the surrounding 3D atoms, and concentrate them. Once you’ve got enough of them, you can make them the core of a pair of transmitters that you can use to send and receive radio messages through hyperspace. With more energy, you can “push” on these structures and “push” those atoms into hyperspace, and then if those atoms are part of a larger solid object the rest of the object and anything touching it gets dragged along with them (with a certain size limit, perhaps related to mass being “pushed” and energy used, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally sending the whole Earth into hyperspace the first time you try this - that’d be one heck of an oops; maybe a later disproven small theoretical possibility of that happening would go down into the history books along with “before they exploded Trinity they were worried it might ignite the atmosphere”); thus you can send a whole ship into hyperspace instead of just information. When you want to leave hyperspace you can reverse the operation and “push” the ship back into our space.

That gives you a nice highly valuable “handwavium” that can be a hook for various plot and worldbuilding points, e.g. there’s not much obvious economic reason to colonize Mars IRL except maybe tourism (anything you could mine there you get more easily from near-Earth asteroids, and it’s too inhospitable to make much sense as a settler colony), but maybe there’s a huge mother lode of these hyperspace-touching atoms somewhere on Mars. These hyperspace-touching atoms would be especially valuable if the process of using them for communication or in hyperdrives “strained” these structures and at some predictable rate caused some of them to “snap,” causing the atoms to become ordinary 3D atoms of silicon or iron or uranium or whatever. Then there’d be a continuous need for (relatively) large amounts of new ones even in a steady-state economy; you couldn’t just keep recycling them and recycling them and just do a little mining to make up for recycling inefficiencies. This would also be an interesting limit on use of hyperspace; using hyperspace radio or doing a hyperjump involves destroying a small amount of a precious resource, so people wouldn’t want to do it frivolously. This might augment that sphere analogy limitation on hyperspace communication I talked about in my other post; even if a hyperspace radio message from Saturn to Earth got there a little ahead of a radio message through our space, you’d probably send a radio message through our space for anything that isn’t time-critical, because the message arriving ten minutes sooner usually just isn’t worth the predictable cost in “snapped” hyperspace-touching atoms.

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Hyperspace would be an environment, so you can do interesting things with it.

Since hyperspace offers a short-cut because it’s more compact than our space, I like to pull on the idea that it’s like our space but in a more compact state, so it’s similar to what our space looked like when the universe was younger and smaller. Going to hyperspace might be a little like time travelling back to a few tens or hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, before the first stars formed. The environment of hyperspace might be a little like the inside of a giant molecular cloud, but “warmer” and extremely impoverished in heavy elements. The gas density might be a few thousand to a few billion atoms per cubic centimeter (by comparison, sea level air is about 10^19 molecules per cubic centimeter while the interstellar medium averages around 1 atom per cubic centimeter). The gasses and plasmas in hyperspace would be almost pure hydrogen and helium. The cosmic microwave background temperature in hyperspace might be around 50 K; that’s warm in comparison to what it is in our space (around 3 K), and warm enough to probably be a big part of the reason hyperspace has no stars (present day star-forming giant molecular cloud regions have gas temperatures around 10-20 K), but by human standards it’s deeply cold; it’s upper atmosphere of Uranus temperature. With no stars, I’d guess hyperspace would be a place of more-or-less total darkness outside the range of any lights humans passing through might bring with them.

Alternately, if I want hyperspace to have a murky and mysterious quality and be a place where visibility isn’t good and sensors don’t work well (so a vibe a bit like B5 hyperspace), I could say the Big Bang nucleosynthesis era lasted longer in hyperspace and there produced a substantial amount of heavy elements, some of which then condensed into dust (probably more like smoke if it’s similar to interstellar dust in our space - nanometer to micrometer particles). This dust would probably be pretty insubstantial on human scale distances (again, if it’s like the interstellar medium matter in hyperspace would be about 99% mostly hydrogen and helium gas and plasma and 1% dust, and even a relatively “dense” hyperspace with billions of atoms per cm^3 would have less than a billionth the gas density of sea level air), but over AUs it would scatter light and that effect might add up. This would make hyperspace similar to a dark nebula.

If I want to take the “hyperspace is a scary place” further, I could add sources of energy that might further confuse sensors and add dangerous radiation and other dangers to the mix. Maybe hyperspace has a few large black holes or something, with energetic accretion disks and polar jets fed by all that relatively dense gas and adding turbulence to it. Or maybe spacetime in hyperspace is “lumpier” than spacetime in our space and hyperspace has weird “rivers” formed by something related to whatever force drives cosmic expansion and some of the gas/plasma gets caught in that and accelerated to large fractions of the speed of light and then slams into the low-velocity material in the “still” parts in places, creating lots of turbulence and various other interesting and scary things (powerful magnetic fields, radiation, locally intense heat, maybe some of these collision zones are even giant naturally occurring inertial confinement fusion reactors; maybe that’s where the heavy elements in the dust come from). Maybe hyperspace has a lot of cosmic strings; it makes a certain intuitive sense that, hyperspace being more compact than our space, its cosmic eggshell might be densely veined with cracks.

This gets into another interesting aspect; hyperspace might have something equivalent to terrain; hyperspace travel may be easier in some directions than others. And there’s lots of worldbuilding and plot hooks you could hang from that idea.

For example, let’s look at that idea of hyperspace having “rivers” formed of exotic spacetime structures and filled with gas/plasma streams moving at high fractions of the speed of light. If the edge of these “rivers” has a gradual enough velocity gradient and the plasma in the “rivers” is ionized, with enough skill a spacecraft pilot might be able to catch that “current” with a magsail and ride it, then when they’d gotten about as far as they needed to go they could leave the “river” and do magsail braking against low-velocity plasma in the “still” areas. Just gotta be careful to stay well away from the dangerous collision zones! This might be a huge part of the short-cut offered by hyperspace travel! It could be that distances across hyperspace are only modestly shorter than distances across our space (say, Alpha Centauri is 1 light year away in hyperspace), but the really big savings is you can catch one of these hyperspace “currents” and use it to get up to large fractions of c without expending any fuel. A set-up like that does raise some awkward questions about conservation of energy, but I could say something like “the hyperspace ‘rivers’ are areas where dark energy is being converted into kinetic energy, slightly slowing down the expansion of the universe in the process.” It’s not like we know much about how dark energy works, or even what it is, so for all we know that’s a thing that might happen under certain conditions.

Those collision zones would generate substantial radiation, including light, so unlike a calm hyperspace a turbulent hyperspace with energetic “currents” would probably have light. Don’t know how bright it would be; all that dust (made of heavy elements built up over the eons by inertial confinement fusion in collision zones, I like that idea!) would absorb a lot of light over cosmic distances, and stars are pretty bright but most of our space is pretty dark.

That set-up would make hyperspace travel kind of like sailing; there would be “currents” or “winds” you want to catch, and travel might be a lot faster along directions where the currents are favorable. Travel times in hyperspace might only loosely correlate with distance; Alpha Centauri might take longer to reach than Zeta Reticuli. There would also be hazards you’d need to avoid, e.g. the collision zones.

Maybe part of the explanation for the Fermi Paradox might be that Earth is in the middle of a big “still” part of hyperspace; few ships went here because we’re in the middle of a cosmic doldrums that takes years to crawl across.

With a set-up like this, hyperspace may have “weather” that influences interstellar commerce, and “climate change” on historical timescales that influences the trajectories of interstellar societies. Ages when hyperspace is particularly turbulent might cause Dark Ages as hyperspace travel becomes very dangerous. Ages when hyperspace becomes unusually calm might also cause Dark Ages as there are no fast hyperspace “currents” to ride and hyperspace travel becomes relatively slow. In one age hyperspace “currents” may be arranged such that a world is isolated; a few thousand years later the hyperspace “currents” might have shifted and that previously isolated world might be much more accessible and back in the mainstream of interstellar civilization.

One wrinkle: a turbulent, energetic, opaque hyperspace such as this probably wouldn’t be good for sending radio signals across. Maybe the universe actually has multiple “basement” levels, hyperspace is just the one that’s “closest” to our “living room” level and the only one that’s “close” enough that ships can travel to and from it, but there’s a clearer layer that’s “farther away” but still “close” enough that you can send radio signals through it, and that “deeper” clear layer is the one used for interstellar communication. Bonus idea I like: the deep clear layer is even more compact than hyperspace (by orders of magnitude) so it’s overall a much better short-cut in every way except being “too far away” to send ships through it, so finding a way to send ships through it is a huge potential breakthrough that tantalizes generations of scientists and engineers who so far have not managed to figure out a way to do it.

Really, on that note, I like the idea that the universe is analogous to an onion with many “layers,” and hyperspace and the deep clear layer are just the layers that are most easily accessible from our space. There are a lot of “basements” below the deep clear layer, and generally as you get farther “down” the “basements” get smaller, denser, and hotter; going “down” is a little like time travelling to eras closer and closer to the Big Bang (though this isn’t a completely reliable rule - the deep clear layer is smaller than hyperspace and perhaps warmer, but seems to be a lot emptier; maybe most of its matter has been sucked into black holes?). Maybe the whole thing is a bit timey wimey wibbly wobbly and if you go “down” far enough you eventually hit what 2020s science knows as the moment of the Big Bang. As well as “basements” there are also “attics,” but they’re less accessible because going “up” is harder than going “down.” If going “down” into the basements is a little like time travelling to the early universe, going “up” into the attics is a little like time travelling to the deep future, to places that look kind of like what our space may look like in the deep future black hole era (assuming the Big Rip doesn’t destroy our universe before that deep future proton decay story has time to play out). The “attics” are vast, empty, and deeply cold; cosmic microwave background temperatures a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero and precious little else to generate energy, maybe one atom in every cubic kilometer of space. They probably expanded too quickly for stars to ever form there. The total number of layers might be large; maybe hundreds or thousands, maybe billions, maybe a number so big it would need to be expressed in scientific notation. I like this idea because it makes hyperspace feel less implausibly convenient for humans; we’re just taking advantage of a particularly convenient part of a big macrostructure that’s mostly inaccessible to us.

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Hyperspace is a natural phenomenon, so it probably isn’t going to be neatly quarantined to just being a thing humans can use for communication and travel. Hyperspace-related phenomena are going to show up in nature, and this offers a neat explanation for any exotic soft SF-ish natural phenomena you may be interested in incorporating into your setting.

Hyperspace (and other “basements” of our universe) also gives you a built-in parsimonious explanation for any other bits of soft SF technology your setting might feature. Want your setting to have e.g. Star Trek style forcefields? You can say they work through interaction with one of the “basement” layers of the universe.

On that note, I have an idea for a more hard SF version of the Babylon 5 “going beyond the Rim” thing or Stargate ascension, based on the “onion universe” concept I described above, which might serve as a partial explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Maybe some “layers” of the “onion” are “superhabitable” to advanced machine intelligences (though not to primitive flesh and blood beings like us). You know the aestivation hypothesis? If advanced machine intelligences could move to an “attic” they wouldn’t have to wait billions of years for our space to cool down; the cosmic microwave background temperatures in many of the “attics” would already be some tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Maybe they could move to a nice big cold “attic” and live there and “mine” a nice compact “basement” that is rich in matter and energy, getting the best of both worlds. Most of these “attics” and “basements” would be completely inaccessible to humans, but beings with better technology and more resources might be able to access many more of them (or maybe even get beyond the “onion” and search the entire multiverse for universes with conditions more to their liking). So the universe’s most powerful and most enduring civilizations might usually leave our space and move to another “layer” or universe that has conditions more ideal for them, and thus be mostly undetectable to us.

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See: the concept of hyperspace is loaded with potential plot and worldbuilding hooks if you use a little imagination, and I like that!

[goliath-de-senfina-sango]

Stars

Dannymay, 12,021 Human Era

Danny floated lazily on his back, a bag full of white and grey rocks orbiting him while he admired the lunar surface. It was going to be hard for anything short of crafting the rocks into something to top Wulf’s teachings letting him portal up to the moon whenever he wanted, barely tethered by its weak gravity and able to traverse it without disturbing the dust unless he picked up a rock. From his vantage point, the stars above and about were uncountable, and if he didn’t know better he’d say there was no end to them. His appearance had changed, even, from the silk-lined, spike studded, leather jacket that Sam and Tuck all but shoved onto him when it became clear that he’d be fighting ghosts regularly to a suit resembling the uniforms of NASA astronauts, black, white, green, and covered in silver stars.

Grinning to himself, Danny took off toward the Oceanus Procellarum, a camera he and Tuck had built recording the longest video he’d ever taken when a chill that dwarfed the cold of space ran down his spine and rose from his lungs and throat to his lips, blue vapor drifting in front of his face. There was a ghost, on the moon, and the idea of a hostile ghost following him up to space was so beyond aggravating that Danny’s hair ignited, his fangs sharp, the knuckles of his gloves sharpening into hardpoints, and his aura flaring up like a beacon of green and blue. Opening a portal to deposit his bag of moon rocks in his closet, Danny launched himself where he felt the other ghost’s presence, the logic that a ghost whose aura he couldn’t see but still feel on the moon’s surface, in one of her craters even, abandoned at the moment. That thought process is, of course, slammed into him the moment Danny sees exactly what it is that he’s sensed.

Their body was a slowly slithering mass of the purest darkness that could not be called something so bright as black, with violets and blues and colors that could not be seen, only experienced, dancing within them like ink within water, blue and red and green stars twinkling between the stretches of void, moving fast enough for Danny to know there even was movement of them, but slow enough to be mesmerized by the sight of it. Their face was a theatrical mask, bone white with red behind the eyes and a curve of a smile to mark the mouth, and from the void behind the mask curled horns of dark and beautiful amethyst and sapphire and onyx, somehow occupying the same space and curving in every which way. It was, frankly, impossible to make out all the details or to measure quite how massive the form of Nocturne was as he relaxed upon the surface of the moon’s ocean of storms. In all his conflicts, no ghost had ever made him feel quite so small simply by laying back, impossibly huge.

“My, my, ” he said, voice coming from the back of Danny’s head rather than the lack of air around him, even if their lips still moved to shape the words. “ Is that Danny Phantom in the flesh, not simply dreaming so big that you’ve learned to astral project without my guidance? Have you decided to make your fantasy reality and join me here?” They lifted part of their body and when Danny focused he saw the silhouette of a hand.

Danny had many questions, but the first one that came out of his gawking mouth as he rose to meet the giant’s face was, ”How did you get so big? Been munching on the muses of artists? Oh stars, are artistic muses actual spirits? Can you eat them?” While Danny usually appreciated a good laugh, that was when he said something as a joke, not asked a very good question. Nocturne’s laughter swept over him like a tidal wave of endearment and amusement.

“Ah, that’s right, you met me through a smaller emanation, didn’t you? I assure you, child, I’ve been this size for ages. Also, I do not consume muses, though whether that is because they do not exist in such a form that I could or because that would be an unsustainable form of sustenance, I shall leave you to consider. While the dreams of artists like you are rather vivid, the occasional idealist and average joe is good for diversity in palette. After all, each mind has such capacity for imaginative dreams.”

“Emanation?”

“A thin slice of myself sent down to help you sleep at my brother’s request. ” Danny scratched his head at that and Nocturne laughed again. “ The little game of hero and villain was delightful fun, though… you didn’t think that the ghost Master of Dreams needed helmets and machinery to harvest the energy of good dreams, did you?” Danny folded his arms with a pout that Nocturne couldn’t possibly have been able to make out when he was so small comparatively, and yet they chuckled anyway, shifting into what Danny was going to call a sitting position.

“So you aren’t going to leave everyone asleep forever?”

They frowned. “Of course not, you can’t dream forever. It isn’t healthy and leads to stagnation and, eugh, nightmares. Those the Fright Knight can have, whensoever he gets himself free from his imprisonment. ” Danny sighed, relaxing all over, and did his best not to flinch when Nocturne scooped him up in a claw talon tendril wing fin hand. “ Come to listen?”

Danny looked around and spread his arms slowly. “In the silent vacuum of space? To what?”

“My dear boy, can you not hear the star song? ” Nocturne tilted his head and their eyes locked for a long, headache inducing minute. “ No one has taught you how to percieve the spaces that layer upon themselves to form the world you know, have they?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about but I do have a headcahe now, so that’s great. What, the world is like origami and everything is singing underneath the top layer?”

“An apt comparison, yes, ” Nocturne said. “ Your liminal state of being considered, perhaps it would be simpler to show you, than to make you work your way through new senses. After all, what’s a dream without a bit of fantastical ease?”

Danny flew back a few paces, though he was still in Nocturne’s palm. “Is it safe for you to do that? I don’t wanna go forgetting how to be a living human being just to hear a song.” Nocturne huffed, puffing up like a bird in mild offense.

“Child, the mind is my domain, I know perfectly well what I am doing. You are not the first liminal whose mind I have touched, nor I imagine shall you be the last. But, if you do not care to hear the song that the earth, the moon and the stars sing…”

“I never said I don’t! I just, wanted to be sure.” Danny rubbed the back of his head before floating a bit higher. “Alright, alright what do I do?”

“Relax, little one. Imagine a door, it can be any door you like, between your mind and those minds around you. ” Danny closed his eyes, taking a superfluous breath that came up empty, his body relaxing slowly with each breath. He pictured a door, a hexagonal door to a space station. “ Very good, ” Nocturne said, and Danny felt his chest puff up with something like pride before he felt and heard a knock knock on the door in his mind. “ Now all you have to do is let me in.”

There was a moment where in Danny considered simply not letting Nocturne into his mind. After all, Danny would probably figure this out himself if he tried. It was a tempting idea, probably even the smartest idea when dealing with a being who had attacked him, even if they claimed it was a game. Still, the opportunity to experience space in a way that no one else could was a far bigger temptation, and so Danny turned the knob on the door to his mind and opened it up slowly.

There is the brush of Nocturne against the door and Danny both has himself drawn out and the universe slipped in and when he opens his eyes and his ears he cannot help but to let his mouth fall open as well. He can hear the voices of the endless universe singing under his feet. The hearts of stars singing deep beneath the lunar soil. Lost to the blooming nebulas staining the dark sky with color, miles upon miles of light and rivers of fire and the promise of something new. Danny can almost hear the words and language they speak; something so close, so distant, something he has never known -- but they ring with such magnificent, terrible truth that he thinks, maybe he has always known them. Maybe they have always lived inside him, alongside the bones. These melodies, these words, that burn with such ferocious clarity that if he just spoke them aloud then the far would become near and he could reach out and pluck the stars from the sky and cradle them in his hands or be cradled in their stellar flares.

The heavy elements known to those dull terrestrial creatures he began life as could only enter the universe with the death of a star, a fact that Danny knew very well, but it was one thing to know something on an academic level, and another to see and hear the voices of the ghosts left behind by those ancient stars, their magnificent fire shining from within every atom of the earth and the moon and the planets around him, harmonizing and rising into something yet more in the song of the Earth and her seas and forests and sky. Danny listens to the moon, and he knows that if he were to sing that song he could reach out to any body of water on Earth and pull it to him and him to it, and his call would be answered. That if he simply moved his lips and sang the words of the stars, he could call upon their fire, their gravity, could reach out to them and leave the chains of gravity rooting him to the Earth. It would be so easy to explore the universe, to leave and join the chorus of the stars and see all that one with an eternity at their hands could see.

Yet there was another song, this one smaller, softer, but no less wonderful song that wove around and within him, and listening to it brought to his mind yet more little songs, faint as the step of an ant against the dirt but still beautiful in all their own ways. He couldn’t go, not yet. Not without them. And so, Danny turned back to Nocturne and beamed up at him. “Thank you.”

“Of course, child. We may stop whenever you wish.” Danny nodded and rose up to circle around Nocturne, drinking in the sight of the universe, so that he could attempt - and fail and attempt again and again - to show his friends what he now experienced with paint and brush and pen. He had to return to Earth, but for now, he had the stars.

[primrose-fr]

Wildlife of the Windswept Plateau

Hey I've decided to make this a series. Next on my list of "researcher documents the Flights native wildlife" we have the Wind Flight! I hope this is at least a good jumping off point for you writers/RPers/Worldbuilders!

Includes little personal notes here and there about possible uses, ecology and real-life equivalents, and interesting notes from the items bio too. Calling this series “Ecology of Sornieth” where I detail: Wildlife.  Aquatic life. Insects. Plant life. ???.

Long post ahead. Cut for convenience.

Wild Life:

Balsas Anole (Able to change color based on mood. probably a popular catch for hatchlings) Plague Bat (Bats native to the Scarred Wasteland. Most likely purged for spreading diseases.) Sun Flecked Fieldmouse (Fur sparkles in the sunlight. can leap great distances and has a tendency to brood.) Zephyr Sparrow (Flies very high but is prone to oxygen deprivation. Tend to be short lived due to this reason. Possibly kept by dragons for it's plumage) Broad-footed Moles (Stubborn. strangely tend to dig in opposite directions from their mates. Possibly dug up as food by hatchlings) Cottontail Rabbit (A decent meal for dragons, probably farmed for meat and fur. hilariously large dragons might use them similarly to cottonballs.) Hooded Hen (Can be ornery maybe? A decent meal for a dragon. Probably farmed for meat and feathers.) Steppes Box Turtle (Known for the pattern on it's shell) Hooded Skunk (despite being a skunk its rather docile. Probably hunted for as wild game for meat and fur) False-Peacock Quail (Pretty plumage. A decent meal for a dragon. Probably hunted as wild game for meat and feathers) Mallard (A decent meal for a dragon. Probably hunted as wild game for meat and feathers. Note: Irl only male Mallards have the signature green hood.) Golden-Laced Rooster (Can reached running speeds of up to 15km an hour. Probably hunted as wild game.) Arroyo Toad (Most dragons have developed an immunity to it's skin toxin. Mirrors however are allergic.) Firebearer (A type of squirrel monkey. Has been observed spreading forest fires by carrying burning branches to new areas. Possibly done to flush out game from underbrush or usher in new growth in remote areas. Possibly a Keystone species?) Fancy Rat (Possibly kept as pets. Might even be given as gifts(for pets or to eat) during special occasions) Wallaby (Probably hunted as wild game. A decent meal for a dragon.) Pangolin (Noted for keeping lairs insect free! Might be kept around as a form of pest control. although maybe not by insectivorous dominated clans.) White-Eared Hummingbird (Yes birds do have ears!) Olive Sea Snake (VENOMOUS. Aposematic. Bright blue and orange coloration warns of it's toxicity. Named not for it's color by for it's curious love of olives. Note: Irl all species of sea snake are venomous. they are close cousins to cobras and kraits.) Grey Squirrel (Probably a common meat in stews and campfire roasts) Tree Gecko (Has great camouflage but oddly is color blind.) Magpie (Hunted for both their meat and hoards of shinies) Ferret (Probably kept as popular pets/small game hunting companions.) Sugarglider (A prime pest of Sugarmelon crops. Probably kept and bred as pets for their cuteness. Funfact: It's a possum!) Bar-headed Goose (Probably hunted as wild game or farmed for meat and feathers.) Crested Newt (Notable has a crest for mating displays) Emerald Striker (VENOMOUS. Contains it's venom in the "emeralds" on it's body. Probably not safe to eat due to the "venom pockets" throughout it's body) Silver Racoon (Named for it's love of silver ore and trinkets. Might be hunted as wild game.) Lesser Land Iguana (apparently very self confident. I take that to mean they are aware of how dangerous they are and probably have few predators. Probably hunted if there are no other options though. Most likely avoided due to average iguana temperament (That is to say violent as hell)) Bog Canary (Has an awful call. but it's plumage is pretty and might be kept as pets (Note: Picture depicts a budgerigar not a canary)) Golden Reefprince (A type of axolotl, has a golden sheen. typically given by dragons to someone they're trying to impress. Might be farmed similarly to Valentines roses and sold for holidays and anniversaries.) Black Swan (Probably kept as ornamental birds by the upperclass. Compete in elegant displays with each other. Probably over mating rights.) Juvenile Prairie Skink (The adults of this species perform excellent parental care for lizards when the hatchlings are young. (Note: Maternal care in irl skinks is highly unlikely. Note 2: Art possibly depicts a jeweled lacerta instead?)) Muskrat (A native to the Gladevines of the Viridian labryinth this rodent is commonly found in aqueducts hunting small aquatic life. Probably hunted as wild game or farmed for meat and water resistant fur.) Reedhopper (Amphibian. well camouflaged though makes a loud incessant croaking. Probably a common sound at night near fresh waterways like ponds and rivers.) Collard Lemmings (Has local folk stories that tell of them staring into your soul and knowing all your secrets.) Glowing Pocket mouse (Common prey to smaller predators. It's brightness indicates it's mood. Kept as familiars) Skycats (Common winged felines that guide dragons throughout the Windswept Plateau. Multiple sets of large ears implies excellent hearing. Normally catch the updraft of larger dragon wings for easier flight. Kept as familiars.) Bamboo Phytocat (Has developed bamboo growths on it's body for camouflage in the reeds. Ambush Predator. Large and dangerous. Possibly hunted for trophies or as rites of passage. Kept as familiars) Banded Owlcat (Silent ambush predators from both the land and the sky. Kept as familiars) Grassland Trunker (Small squat herbivores. Very docile. Often kept as pets or farmed for meat. Kept as familiars.) Lilyfowl (Birds who spend most of their time submerged in ponds and such. Can breath through it's plant-like growths! Kept as familiars.) Myosotis Fox (Fur is vibrant in color and displays many beautiful flowers. In the wild they most likely use this for camouflage. However they are kept and bred as companions. Possibly bred for color and flower variation. May even be used in shows. Popular among upper class? Kept as familiars.) Traveling Garden (Large tortoises with a variety of plant life growing amongst their shell. Maybe a Keystone species? Kept as familiars.) Heckling Hydrena (Possibly native to the Shifting Expanse. Unknown if invasive or just widespread. Most likely inhabits marshlands and other waterways. Apparently pose danger to stray hatchlings. Kept as familiars) Toxic Igueel (TOXIC. Coloration is aposematic to warn would be predators. Probably inhabits rocky coastlines and other marine environments. Leather is very useful in leatherworking as interfacing and support. Kept as familiars) Tradewinds Gull (Common seabirds. Popular for use in message transport. Most likely used by maritime trades. Kept as familiars) Blueridge Greatshell (Large aquatic turtles that inhabit freshwater only. Cannot survive saltwater. Probably hunted for meat. Kept as familiars) Scaleside Noggle (Most likely a riverway/lake predator for small to mid sized creatures. Kept as familiars) Fiendcat (Fiery predators that cook their prey. large and dangerous. Probably a threat to smaller clans. Hunting one could be considered and accomplishment. Kept as familiars) Bluetail Skira (Large herbivores who spend much of their time lounging in ponds and lakes. Blue algea growing on their tail gives it that blue color. Kept as familiars ) Ringlet Amphithere (Tiny winged snakes that can fit in a Fae's claws. Might be kept as pets. Kept as familiars.) Hippojay (Might be farmed for meat or hunted as big/trophy game. Probably a common sight in wind clan backyards. Or kept as familiars) Crowned Roc (DEADLY. Massive dangerous birds that can be found hunting the skies of the Windswept Plateau. Poses a threat to all but the largest of dragons(Imperials?). Might even hunt/eat mid to small sized dragons. Apex predator of the region and a possible keystone species. Might commonly be the subject of stories, legends, myths, art, ect. Hunting one is probably a great event. Kept as familiars) Cloud Chaser (Airborne cetaceans that fly through the air, possibly in massive beautiful pods. produces clicks and whistles. Groups of them might sound like an orchestra of woodwind instruments. Most likely the favored prey of Crowned Rocs. Also probably subjects of popular culture. Kept as familiars. )

Aquatic Life:

Fissure Crawdad (Found only in dark crevices. Tasty. worth the effort) Leech (Common pest after swimming in waterways) Common Minnow (can be eaten in mass quantities for nourishment. Possibly kept in dragon aquaria) Sun Baked Oysters Jumbo Shrimp (Meat has a sweet and tender flavor.) Pumpkinseed Sunfish (Tasty and addictive when roasted and salted. decent meal) Sea Sparrow (flying fish known for it's abrasive chirping) Sea Hare Sea Fae (Known for it's resemblance to the dragon species. Plentiful snacks) Dumpling Squid (dipped in tangy sauce when eaten) Golden Rainbow Trout (Commonly fished from riverways as a decent meal. Golden shine is noticeable from the bank. Might be farmed in aquaponics for meat) Green Corydoras catfish (Tiny bottom dwelling armored catfish. Might be kept in dragon aquaria) Golden Cushionfish (Puffer fish) Seabed Pincher (When threatened they swarm and attack the threat. Plentiful food if a little difficult) Longfin Urchinbane (Species of cardinalfish that preys on urchins. considered a pest fish by dragons.) Sea Heart (Some kinda urchin. might be preyed on by Longfin Urchinbane) Steppes Pincher (Well camouflaged and possibly territorial) Topaz Guppy (Very friendly, possibly live in a area free of natural predators. Beautiful copper finage. possibly kept in dragon aquaria) Silverside Tetras (Small tetras, shimmery scales confuse predators when in schools. Possibly kept in dragon aquaria) Red Octopus (Color changing cephalopods. Might display typical cephalopod intelligence. Tentacles might be eaten as seafood.) Lesser Shallowshark (Small cat sharks. Scavengers. Large schools are common and very efficient at striping large carcasses) Royal Oyster (The more pearls this species has produced the more valuable they are to dragon collectors.) Chromodori Swimmer (Variety of dragon sea slugs) Golden Snakehead (Labrynthian fish capable of breathing through primitive lungs. Allows them to live in low oxygenated water. Medium vicious predators. Decent meal for dragons.) Electric Stingers (Jellyfish whose sting is particularly painful) Marbled Hatchetfish (Top dwelling schooling fish. Probably kept in dragon aquaria) Kuhli Loach (Bright colors ward off potential predators. Probably kept in dragon aquaria. (Note: Water spaghetti! One of my favorite fish in aquaria)) Molten Goby (Thrives in incredibly hot waters. meat is possibly very spicy.) Glass Isopod (Have very fragile shells that crack easily.) Pale Smallmouth (CANNOT handle water touched by the plaguebringer, It's presence is an indication of a healthy ecosystem and safe water. Indicator species. Decent meal for dragons too) Discus (Popular, beautiful, and challenging to care for in irl aquaria. Possibly kept as decorative fish for the upper class in dragon aquaria) Four-Eyed Butterflyfish Morning Star (Seastars active only in the early hours of the morning.) Angelspine (Golden spines of this urchin are valued. Meat however is bland.) Gaseous Megashrimp (Big, kept as familiars. this is speculation but depending on the size it may also be used as a seafood alternative to whole roasts like pig) Skittering Megashrimp (See above) Lurefish (Predates on other fish using it's lure. Probably a species of jawfish. Kept as familiars) Plantation Pincher (Considered a rampant pest on farmland.)

Insect Life:

Gliding Ant (Known for it's ability to glide across the ice. Most likely Native to Ice) Honeybee (Tastes sweet. Most likely kept for food as well as honey.) Crop Cutter (Pests that can devour entire fields. Plant eater hate them while others feast on them.) Nymph (appears to be just a grub) Bean Beetle (considered a pest to gardener. popular to eat for insectivorous dragons though. Get your Fae friends!) Swamp Mosquito (Clouds of this insects are a joy for insect eaters and a plague for everyone else.) Blow Fly (Very common in summers. tend to swarm lairs to keep cool. Doesn't need to be stated that that's upsetting.) Cricket (Commonly caught in bulk, dried, and sold as snack. Faes are experts at catching them) Greenworm (Blends in well and challenging to find) Garden Snail Spotted Grasshopper (Particularly vibrant specimens are caught as trophies and pinned to walls by Fae.) Stick Insect (Tundras often mistake them for actual sticks and often get a buggy surprise) Striped Earwig (Common pests that get into everything) Lunar Lacewing (Swarms can be found flitting between trees on full moon nights.) Redknee Tarantula Southern Grass Cicada (Nymphs can't fly and are commonly dug up as snacks) Millipede White Cabbage Butterfly (Very common. Overconsumption can lead to gas issues.) Stinglash (DEADLY. Aposematic. Skull pattern on it’s head is a threat display. When stinger is removed however it’s considered a delicacy) Pillbug (curls into a ball when threatened) Four-Spot Mealworm (Commonly found feasting on festering rot) Rhododendron Leafhopper (Swarms of these insects inhabit the interiors of bamboo stalks. Hatchlings love playing "Shake the Stick.") Venomous Fly (DANGER. Bite has paralyzing venom.) Green June Beetle Blackshield Cockroach (Fae use rocks to crack it’s shell for eating.) Diving Aranea (Aquatic spiders similar to the diving bell spider) Petal Moth (Makes its home in flower beds of a similar color to its wings, helping it hide from darting birds and lesser mammals.) Yellowtail Caterpillar (Commonly eaten in piles with pepper sauce, cucumber, rice, and wrapped in seaweed) Bark Biter (Devours tree bark. Can devastate entire forests overnight if population wasn't kept in check by dragons. Quite tasty!) Water Bug Micromoth (Common reagent in magical remedies. Most likely cultivated for medicinal purposes) False Mantis Prickler (Herbivorous. Example of batesian mimicry. Mimics the threat display of mantids to fool predators) Autumn Pennant (Dragonfly. Scarce, only appears towards the end of autumn) Brave Blue Bee (carapace is a shiny blue color. Possibly a species of solitary bee.) Reedcleft Sparkler (Hides amongst reeds. capable of bioluminescence) Leafy Moth (This large moth feeds by spreading its chlorophyll-rich wings in a patch of sunlight and flapping gently. Large. Possibly farmed as cow equivalents to insectivorous dragons. Kept as familiars) Triple-Sight Firebug (Dragons closely bonded to this bug can use it’s sight for short periods of time. Possibly used for rough reconnaissance. Kept as familiars) Goliath Mountain Beetle (Long lifespans and natural armor allow this insect to reach enormous sizes. The largest has up to a 7m wingspan! I could see these being herded and tended to by Fae. Kept as familiars.) Garden Larail (Pests. A gardeners nemesis. However they are cannibalistic and keep their own population in check.) Highgrass Priest (A type of mantid)

Plant Life:

Clover (Common plant life. A legend tells of a rare clover that can unlock anything and uncover buried treasure.) Cliff Lion (A species similar to dandelions that grow on cliffsides. Like it's cousin it can be fermented into wines and beer) Sweet Grass (Some dragons choose to chew on sweetgrass for hours. probably similar to chewing gum.) Cindershroom (Spores resemble cinders but are completely harmless. Unknown if edible. Possible.) Red Emperor Tulip (Cultivated by herbivorous dragons as both beautiful displays and tasty treats!) Greenstripe Amaranth (Healthy food for herbivorous creatures. Cultivated for food. Naughty hatchlings pass their amaranth to their familiars.) Wild Mustard (Grows in thick patches with bright yellow flowers. Goes great with wild Catsup) Thistle (Provides food for herbivores. Seeds provide food to songbirds.) Sour Spinach (Has little to no nutritional value and is nearly inedible. Used to discipline naughty hatchlings.) Sunkernel (Smallest of the acorns. Harvested and eaten in mass quantity.) Green Shoots (Hollow. Makes for a chewy meal or a durable paper.) Chickweed (Used in herbal remedies to sooth itchy scales. Probably cultivated for medicinal purposes) Greater Plantain. (possibly like its relative the Herbal plantain whos leaves can be used as an effective anti-toxin. Probably cultivated for medicinal purposes) Peace Lily (Pretty and edible, it’s petals are a favorite snack of peace doves. Probably cultivated for decoration and consumption.) Corona Sempervivum (Edible succulent. Cultivated for food and décor) Treasure Plant (Considered to bring good luck if kept in the lair. Possibly cultivated for decoration or as gifts.) Boxwood (Has a subtle flavor?) Seaberry (Bright blue berries most likely found near marshes and waterways.) Bonebark Mold (Plentiful. grows on dead trees.) Tundra Cactus (Grows well in winter and colder climates. Probably native to Ice.) Sour Green Apple (A green apple. Sour. Probably cultivated in orchards for consumption) Wild Onion ( Edible? Possibly Deadly??) Prickly Pear (The fruit of cacti. Edible but not that great.) Peppermint (can be consumed to help aid a number of maladies such as indigestion, nausea, colds, and headaches. Probably cultivated for medicinal purposes) Sunbeam Fig (Edible fruit. Trees only produce fruit when exposed to direct sun for long periods of time.) Fairy Ears (Tree fungus. Theres a myth explaining it's existence but it's apparently unpleasant. Unknown if edible.) Green Plantain (Has a tart flavor and can be stored in cool places for long periods of time. Probably cultivated and exported to other flights.) Lume Daffodil  (Blooms under moonlight, with a cool, refreshing taste. Often consumed as after-dinner mints. Probably cultivated for these reasons.) Quinoa (Recently, Tundras have started claiming quinoa is full of vitamins, cures disease, and attracts mates. Mirrors are skeptical.) Pinwheel Paddies (The blooms of this plant can spin for hours.) Minty Jadevine ( leaves are favored as snacks due to their sweet, cooling taste. Probably cultivated for these reasons.) Strawberry (Its a strawberry.) Withered Rose (perfume made from this rose remains nauseatingly strong. Dragons may use such blooms to cover up all manner of undesirable scents. Possibly cultivated for this industry) Pompom Mums (Vibrant, cheerful petals. Very attention getting to pollinators. might be used to attract pollinators to fields. Also useful for decorative purposes) Sand Creeper (Type of ivy that spreads prolifically over sand. Might be a good crop for those in barren wastelands.) Charged Duneberry (Berries glow brightest and taste the best after storms. Possibly native to the Shifting Expanse.)

???:

Gale Wolf (Dangerous and possibly extradimensional? Only appear wherever a warm front meets a cold front. leaves behind mass destruction. Hunting them is probably considered a great accomplishment. Kept as familiars) Glassbound Gustvul (Glasslike vulpines that can be found often napping in patches of sunlight. Might be popular in folk-lore, stories, art subject ect.. Kept as familiars.) River Muck (Goopy. probably common in or near waterways. Probably a pest/hazard) Garden Watcher  (Walking tulips???) Orange Blotch Pansy (??? Uproots and moves itself to more optimal locations when required.) Cactus Marzal (Behaves like a normal plant until it matures in which it will become more animalistic. Weird. Kept as familiars)

[bosspigeon]

"no cis nonsense in this house" please 🤲🤲 i must know

oh this one's fun! so for the last couple years, i've been outlining a plan for a potential future NANOWRIMO project when i'm in a better headspace to sit down and properly focus on it? (also, maybe when i'm actually appropriately medicated lmao)

i’ve only got a vague idea for the plot, but it mostly revolves around Urraka, a 7+ foot dragon-man, and essentially a remnant of a culture/race thought to be entirely either extinct or just a myth, and his adopted kid, Talon. Urraka is a traveling mercenary, and has been for a loooong time, and Talon was sort of raised on the road from infancy, so he’s a bit of a wild child lmao. this whole bit makes me giggle, so it’s kinda long, but i can’t decide which tidbit to cut off, so you just get all of it!

Talon's left a trail of discarded clothing in his wake, and Urraka sighs gustily. He does not change his pace, but periodically he bends down to pick up Talon's battered leather breastplate, his vambraces and kilt, and a sideways glance every now and then to make sure Puck is still keeping pace notes the progress of a mottled flush working its way from the fidgety scholar's ears to his neck and further still beneath his starched clothes.

“It has been a while since we've had a proper wash,” Urraka explains as he catches the flash of his ward's bare backside streaking its way towards the river. Urraka can only hope no wild animals make off with the lad's breeches before he can retrieve them.

“I suppose regular hygiene is difficult to maintain with such a lifestyle,” Puck mumbles, burying his nose in his book pointedly. Talon's too far ahead of them at this point for his weak [human] eyes to make out any details beyond “probably nude” but Urraka keeps this to himself and simply nudges the squirrelly creature away from any obstructions in the path.

When they reach the river, Urraka has gathered most of Talon's gear, and he dumps it on a dry patch of sun-warmed gravel and starts the arduous process of hauling off his own kit.

It's the height of summer, so the river is more of a stream than anything, just barely waist-deep where Talon's splashing around more than he's truly attempting to get himself clean.

Urraka spots a few darker spots that may be deep enough for him to sink himself at least to the hips, maybe to his waist if he sits. But anything is better than nothing, especially when it comes to clearing out dirt between his scales. He rolls his shoulders, and swears he can hear the grit grinding in his scutes.

“Hey, Da, can you toss me the soap?” Talon shouts. Urraka hardly has one foot in the water (warm at the edge, but he's hoping there's at least a few cool spots) but he still rumbles his irritation loud enough for the boy to hear as he lumbers back towards his haversack where it sits slumped on the bank.

Puck stands alongside it, fidgeting like he always seems to do, squinting up towards the sky in an effort to avoid looking at either of his naked traveling companions.

“Doesn't make much sense to blind yourself on our account,” Urraka hums, bending to retrieve the hard tallow soap from his bag. “Modesty has no place on the road, but I'd recommend turning around if it bothers you so much. Better than staring at the sun, at any rate.”

His ruddy cheeks go even ruddier, and Urraka can nearly feel the heat radiating off his ears. His eyes flicker downwards for a split second, and, unfortunately for him, where they'd rest at about chest-height on an average-sized person, they land just at Urraka's groin. He makes a strangled sound and spins around, and the Dragoi bites the inside of his cheek so he doesn't laugh out loud.

“If it makes you feel better, my kind don't keep our bits on the outside.” Puck's back goes ramrod straight, and Urraka's not sure if he's going to start scribbling that in his journal or run for the hills.

“Hey!” Talon hollers from the river. “Where's that soap, old man?”

Without looking, Urraka tosses a bar over his shoulder, and smirks when he hears a satisfying thunk, then an indignant squawk and a splash.

He glances back to see Talon sputtering as he drags himself upright. “Fuck you, ya big bastard lizard!” he roars, sweeping his arms together in a furious thunderclap that sends an arc of water towards him.

Urraka doesn't flinch, seeing as, to him, it's hardly enough water to be anything other than slightly refreshing. But it is more than enough to entirely drench Puck's back. The lad fair squeals and darts away, but it's too late to save his clothes, and he turns a miserable gaze towards the river, where Talon's laughing so hard he's liable to drown himself.

Urraka strides forward into the water, scoops up his insufferable brat before he can gather himself, and hurls him towards deeper water, where he hits with a shout and a resounding crash that echoes down the valley.

“May as well join us,” he calls out to Puck, who appears to be frantically checking his satchel to make sure none of his tools, supplies, or books have been damaged. He looks up, face still fair glowing red, and before he can protest, Urraka adds, “Your clothes will dry faster without you in them, and you've been on the road with us for two days without a bath yourself.”

Urraka doesn't wait to see if the scribe will take his advice, since Talon's erupted from the water like a wrathful sea-beast and is striking out furiously towards him. He's almost twenty feet away, but a quick enough swimmer, so Urraka at least tries to wash his face and crest before he's got the little monster clambering all over him and trying, in vain, to drag him under the water.

A delicate splash at the water's edge and he turns towards Puck, who huddles in the shallows where the water is still warm, and squawks indignantly when he catches Urraka looking.

He simply arches the heavy ridge of his brows and looks away politely, lathering up his own soap and scrubbing the sage-scented suds over his chest.

Talon seems to have tuckered himself out, between the run to the river and the following shenanigans, and when he reaches Urraka he just punches him solidly in the hip and finally focuses on washing up himself. He grumbles something about being lucky the river is clear enough for him to have found his soap.

Once Urraka's sloughed off the worst of the grit and grime of two week's rough travel, he breaks off a bit of his own soap and offers it to Puck, making sure not to look directly at him. The lad mutters a quiet thanks and begins his own ablutions.

Talon rises from the deeper water and sloshes off to the bank to find a nice warm spot to lie down and dry off, and behind Urraka, Puck makes that scandalized, choked sound again. Urraka turns to him, brows quirked, to see those wide eyes staring at Talon as if he can't help it. A prickle of protective instinct itches under his scutes.

“You're really a g-urgh!”

Urraka's claws wrapping around his head and pushing him under the water cut his words off with a gurgle, and he comes up sputtering, his dandelion puff hair wetted down in sandy tangles around his face. “No,” Urraka rumbles at him, dangerously low, and up to this point, he's been careful with showing his teeth, because every time he's so much as smiled, the porcine stink of the scribe's fear-sweat was nigh unbearable. But now, he bares them with clear intent, and Puck goes from blotchy red to starkly sallow, eyes bulging wide with terror. “He is not.”

Talon hasn't taken notice of the exchange, too busy sprawling out in the sun-warmed grass just beyond the riverbank, and Urraka stares hard at the scribe, daring him to say anything more on the subject.

The lad is bumbling, awkward, and wastes all the energy that should go towards walking on chattering endlessly, but he's at least clever enough to figure out, in this moment at least, it's wiser to be quiet.

[gogiberries]

Toshinori loves Texas

-You’ve probably heard the saying “everything is bigger in Texas” and its true.

-Like seriously, Texas and Texans are just as extra as the blond hero.

-People like to drive big ass trucks in Texas and Toshinori loves how he can fit into one and not have his head hit the cieling and enjoys how he doesn’t have to have his legs bent awkwardly to fit in.

-Toshi likes driving, though he doesn’t really drive in Japan (due to the fact he can just bike/walk or jump around in his hero form to where ever he needs to get to)

-In his years abroad when him and Dave would visit different states, Toshinori loved that in Texas you can cruise on the highways (cause everything takes at least an hour to get to) and would take the back roads on purpose for the scenery.

-The stores are also fucking huge. Have You ever heard of the gas station chain call Buc-ee’s? Imagine if Walmart had a child with a gas staion with a little more to it (to give you a size reference, the biggest one is in New Braunfels,TX and it can fit 2 whole foods or 22 average sized 7-Elevens in it)

- The first time Toshinori went to one he was overwhelmed and was just in awe that it had 100+ gas pumps with an insane amount of options of sodas, coffees, Icees, etc.

- Texan women got some big ass hair

(obviously not all the women sport this style, but I bet you if you come you’ll see a good number of women with this hair) With their hair being high enough for God to touch, Toshi’s tall ass bangs fit right in to this chaos.

-Football, do I need to say more? With Toshinori’s build im sure he’s been begged to play on people’s teams before (I feel like he enjoys the sport, but he’s not that crazy about) but he sure is impressed with the stadiums (Texas A&Ms Kyle Field for example)

- Don’t even get me started with the Texas state fair in Dallas. The 277 acre fair grounds that has a tall as fuck statue named Big Tex that continuously greets fair visitors.

- Toshinori absolutely loved Big Tex and wanted countless photos of him posing next to it

-Besides things being big as fuck in Texas, Texans are also very proud of their state and love Texas shaped stuff.

- We know you can get Texas shaped waffles, but you can also get your steak Texas shaped

- Before his injuries, I’m sure Toshinori could eat 2-3 of these things easily

- If you think that wasn’t extra enough, there’s a Texas rooftop lazy river too

- Along with feeling like his huge ass can exist comfortably in the state, Toshinori also likes the western wear.

- I bet you this dude would like to sport a nice cowboy hat with some jeans, boots and a big belt buckle everyday.

- The style can be so flashy and can turn ridiculous very quickly though

- I can just imagine him trying to wear yellow everything and somebody has to pull him aside and tell him nicely “no sweetheart lets tone this down a bit”

-Totally see him wearing this shirt

Okay this post is so long but

[sweatybrandon]

Victims Tumblr Survey (Part 3- The Killers Live)

Part  1 Part 2

Welcome back everyone as we dive into the stats on something we are all missing right now: live music, and more specifically The Killers live

How many times have you seen The Killers live?

The average amount of times was 2.7. There’s not much to say about this data but if you’ve not seen them live yet I hope your time will come. Predictions for next year: this won’t have changed much apart from new people giving their answers.

How has this changed since 2019?

This is really showing we have new people here (which is a good thing!) because otherwise we’d expect the 0 column to stay the same or decrease. However, above 1 times there are increases in how many people have seen them 2-5 times. 

Favourite Tour?

As the era increases so do the amount of people saying it’;s their favourite. IS it recency bias? Bias of when people found the band? Or is it that they’re getting better as time goes on? Honestly, likely a combination of all of them but no one can deny they are getting better as a live band as time goes on, and clearly people are preferring this now. 

How has this changed since 2019?

A decrease in WW and a increase in all the overs. This is suggesting to me that the recency bias is not too strong here with the decrease in WW. I hope my thoughts are making sense to you all, my science head is currently on but it is also 11pm. Last years stats still show as the years go on more people prefer their tour, can’t wait to see ITM out on top in 2 years time!

Best tour performance wise?

Same % of people saying WW here. The only big difference between favourite tour and best tour is the reduction in HF. It’s clear to see that Brandon is a far more confident performer today and its making the performances far better, only a fool would argue otherwise. Again, I look forward to ITM being here in 2 years time!

How does this compare to 2019?

Same pattern as best tour. Same discussion points apply as before.

Favourite singular show?

There was 37 singular shows this year, with it appearing less people are just saying their own show which, honestly, makes for far more interesting stats. So I present to you what is basically a list of shows to watch on YouTube.

Turns out having it as a live dvd really helps it be your favourite, who’d have thought. But HELLO GLAST-ON-BERRY (seriously man, you’ve played it 5 times learn to pronounce it). It was a great show though wasn’t it. Probably a career highlight and it is showing here!

How does this compare to 2019?

30 shows were given last year and here they are

Funnily enough no Glastonbury 2019, but RAH still maintains the top spot but has a higher percentage in 2020. I have just realised I forgot to change the decimals to only 2 places. I’m sorry. Enjoy looking at those horrible numbers. 

Most Soul destroying performance? 

Nearly half of you said some version of dustland, with the lolla Brazil one coming out on top. Just analysing all the dustland data made me :sadbrandon:. So, if you want to sit and watch The Killers and cry, here is your list! 

How does this compare to 2019?

46% of you last year also said some form of Dustland, the lolla brazil one only has a change of -1%. It truly is a hard one to watch. Shoutout to Starlight being mentioned both years for being bad.

Song you most want to hear live?

Here is the top 10. 2020 said River rights! Also those people who said Caution, I get you, one day. AN interesting mix of staples and more rarities here. Brb sending this to Brandon. There was 48 songs mentioned, the full list can be found here

How does this compare to 2019?

Obviously no Caution. If you had said Caution last year I would have been very creeped out. And it would appear some of you have heard ATTTID and Dustland live, congrats! You better have cried, it’s a life changing moment. Everyone still wants to see Sweet Talk live aka how Brandon loses his voice. You better all take your turn with the Sweet Talk to protect Brandons voice.

Are you going to the UK/Europe tour?

This is the overall graph and I am giving it you for completness sake, but then it occured to me this is pretty useless data. A high percentage of you are in the US so of course its unlikely you are going to the UK/Europe shows (Unless you’re Andy, Hi Andy!)

So here’s the Europe only data:

which is far more interesting let’s be honest. And then it occured to me that the tour is mainly in the UK so I thought I’d do it for the UK only (small sample size though so take this with a tablespoon of salt):

UK’Europe ticket retention: 

This was where people’s reading comprehension failed them and I’m very glad I checked every single answer thoroughly. There does seem to be some people that are now buying tickets now tour is rescheduled but what I am interested in here is ticket retention.

See you all there (there means London or Norwich)!

N/S. America, Australia tour?

And I did the same thing and split it into continents to give more meaningful data:

Enjoy your nice ticket sales at some point boys!

Tour retention

Few more unsure people which makes sense. Tickets aren’t on sale yet, we’re in a pandemic, no one will know when it will happen blah blah blah. Still most of you plan on seeing them!

And that concludes the live stats! Drag each other as usual in the tags/replies (don’t reblog it with a comment though for the love of god)

Come back tomorrow for part 3: members solo work where we discover together that most have only listened to Brandon's! 

[baileysneddon]

The Monster of Loch Ness

A collection of facts, myths and legends.

The earliest written report of a monster in Loch Ness appears in the Life of St. Columba by Adomnán, written in the sixth century AD, about a century after the event.

According to Adomnán, Irish monk Saint Columba was staying in Scotland with his friends when they encountered the locals burying a man by the River Ness. The locals explained that the man was swimming in the river when he was attacked by a ‘’Water Beast’’ that mauled and dragged him underwater. They had attempted to rescue him by boat, but unfortunately he was killed. Columba sent Luigne Moccu Min, a follower- to swim across the river. The monster approached him, but Columba made the sign of the cross and said:

‘’Go no further. Do not touch the man. Go back at once.’’  The monster stopped as if it had been ‘’pulled back with ropes’’ and fled, and Columba and co., along with the locals gave thanks for what they perceived to be a miracle.

Believer’s point to this story as evidence to the monsters existence as early as the sixth century, Skeptics however, question the reliability of the story, considering that water-beast stories were extremely common in medieval hagiographies and that the tale probably recycles a common motif attached to a local landmark. According to skeptics, the story may be independent of the modern legend of the monster, and has became attached to it by believers seeking to validate their claims. Some conclude that the story of St. Columba may have been impacted by earlier Irish folklore about the Caoránach and an Oilliphéist.

The earliest modern sighting of a strange creature in the loch may have been in the 1870s, when D. Mackenzie claimed to have seen something ‘’Wriggling and churning up the water’’, however this account was not published until 1934.  Although, research shows that several newspapers did publish articles about a creature in the loch well before 1934.

An article titled ‘’Strange Spectacle in Loch Ness’’ was published on 2 May 1933 and attracted a great deal of attention about a creature in the loch, The Courier in 2017 published excerpts from the article.

‘’The creature disported itself, rolling and plunging for fully a minute, its body resembling that of a whale and the water cascading and churning like a simmering cauldron. Soon, however, it disappeared in a boiling mass of foam. Both onlookers confessed that there was something uncanny about the whole thing, for they had realised that here was no ordinary denizen of the depths, because, apart from its enormous size, the beast, in taking that final plunge, sent out waves that were big enough to have been caused by a passing steamer.’’

On 4 August 1933 The Courier published yet another alleged sighting, and after this letters began appearing in The Courier, often anonymously, of people claiming to have seen the monster. The accounts described a ‘’monster fish’’, ‘’sea serpent’’ or ‘’dragon’’ and the media eventually settled on the ‘’Loch Ness Monster’’.

The most famous piece of evidence of the monster is the ‘’Surgeon’s Photograph’’ , reportedly the first ever photograph of the monster, Supposedly taken by Robert Kenneth Wilson (a London gynecologist) that was published in the Daily Mail on 21 April 1934. According to Robert, he was looking at the loch when he saw the beast, he grabbed his camera and snapped four photos. Only two of the photos came out clearly; The first reportedly shows a small head and back, and the second  shows a similar head in a diving position. The second photo attracted little publicity due to it being blurry, the first one however, became well known- and still is to this day.

For 60 years the photo was considered evidence of the existence of the monster, although skeptics dismissed it as driftwood, an elephant (Yes, as outrageous as this sounds- it could be possible for it to have been an elephant, in 2006, paleontologist and artist Neil Clark suggested travelling circuses might have allowed elephants to bathe in the loch; the trunk could be the perceived head and neck, with the head and back being the perceived humps.), an otter or a bird. The photo’s scale was controversial; it is often shown cropped- making the creature seem large and the ripples like waves, while the uncropped photo shows the other end of the loch and the monster in the centre, the ripples were found to fit the size and pattern of small ripples, rather than large waves photographed up close. Many now believe this picture to be a hoax, and claim that the second, blurry picture was an earlier, crude attempt at a hoax.

A number of explanations have been suggested to account for sightings of the monster. According to Ronald Binns, a former member of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau, there is probably no single explanation of the monster. The mostly likely explanation for the sightings is the ability of the eye to see what it wants, and expects to see, leading to misidentification of known animals, inanimate objects, exotic species of large animals, reinterpretation of Scottish folklore and hoaxes. Binns does not call the sightings a hoax, but ‘’a myth in the true sense of the term’’ and states that the ‘’monster is a sociological phenomenon.’’

Back in the 1950s sonar readings were taken by the fishing boat Rival III. Its crew noticed a large object keeping pace with the vessel at a depth of 146 meters (479 ft). It was detected for 800m (2600 ft) before contact was lost and regained. Previous sonar attempts were inconclusive or negative.

On 19 April 2014, it was reported that a satellite image on Apple Maps showed what appeared to be a large creature, just below the surface of Loch Ness. At the loch’s far north, the image appeared about 30 meters (98 ft) long. Possible explanations include, the wake of a boat (with the boat itself lost in image stitching or low contrast), seal- caused ripples, or floating wood.

In 1933 it was suggested that the monster ‘’bears a striking resemblance to the supposedly extinct Plesiosaur’’, a long-necked aquatic reptile that became extinct during the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Though a popular theory/explanation, there are many arguments disproving this idea;

- Plesiosaurs were most likely cold-blooded reptiles needing warm tropical waters; the average temperature of Loch Ness is only about 5.5 °C (42 °F). If the Plesiosaurs were warm-blooded, they would require a food supply beyond that supplied by Loch Ness.

-The osteology of the neck makes it absolutely certain that the Plesiosaur could not lift its head up swan-like out of the water.

-The Loch is only 10,000 years old, dating to the end of the last ice age. Before then, it was frozen for about 20,000 years.

- If creatures similar to the Plesiosaurs lived in Loch Ness they would frequently be seen, as they would have to surface several times a day to breathe.

Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster? Tell me your theories, your thoughts?

Is it just folklore? Is it just a legend? Or is there really a monster lurking in the depths of the loch?

[christoefur-uncaged]

Adventure as a Value

Adventure as a value

Our lives are shaped by our values, whether we know what they are or not. We may not know at all what a value is in the first place, which was the position I was in until recently. But every decision we make, logically or following your gut, is made while drawing on our values and so, next to your physical body and all its functions, they are probably the most important parts of you that create your life and all its elements. At 27 years old, I am now finally aware fully of what value means, and am becoming aware of what ones I hold.

Luckily, we actively choose our values, but many of them we choose accidently as kids when we were under control of parents, family members, friends, teachers, and TV. We weren’t taught what a value is, let alone that we may choose them for ourselves. So, they just develop with little awareness on our ends, and because we are young and impressionable, the values we form are not always helpful and are poorly put together.

One of my strong core values is to adventure and has been developed and lodged in my blueprints before I had any knowledge or any say in the matter. This means I developed this value to adventure as I binge watched Steve Irwin wrestling crocodiles, the Krat brothers swimming with Sea lions and sharks, while Miss Frizzel and the gang were getting baked into a pie. Needless to say, my idea of what an adventure was may have been a little dramatic and while I have of course matured in thought processes, the importance of the adventure to me has not subsided.

Because this value remains so strong in me, when I am “adventuring” I am enthusiastic and my natural state throughout the adventure is excited and accepting with little expectation because I am feeling balanced. Unfortunately, “real life” doesn’t allow for my dramatic definition of an adventure every day and so each day I don’t head out to swim with marine life, I am neglecting this value and neglecting one of these, is a great way to become depressed. I have basically set myself up to fail to fulfill this value and so it’s power to boost me up cannot be harnessed and it’s use as a shield against the sharp edges of negative thoughts is diminished.

When you set these standards, and don’t quite meet them, you become less capable of dealing with unexpected events that may fall into your lap on some dull Tuesday afternoon. As each day passes you become more and more unbalanced due to lack of fulfillment. With no end in sight to the monotony, you become unmotivated. This lack of motivation leaves you nearly incapable of making any future plans and so the vicious cycle continues as you become so unbalanced you slip and fall, defenceless into a dark pit full of sharp negative thoughts and emotions.

A full gown adult now, with new knowledge of values, I am actively pursuing change. As a naïve youth, I set myself up for degradation, but my internal lust for new self-growth as an adult has allowed me to evolve.  My value that was once “to be adventuring” I choose now to be “to adventure at every opportunity that arises”. The idea that I need to be always adventuring has let me feel like a failure for far too long and since the rule is that we may choose our values, I choose to alter this one. Adventuring will always be important to my spirit, but I know now how to better harness the power of my own values.

As I go about my most average days, not adventuring, I may wish to be out travelling the world but instead of resenting every day that I am not, I will be looking forward to future opportunities where I can. This is not going to be easy of course, but when all else fails I will remember that I have freedom of choice.

I choose to feel free from the burden of my own high standards.

Each day as an adventure

So now I have established in my life that adventuring is absolutely necessary for me to feel balanced. As I have been putting some thought into adventure and what exactly the word means to me or what it can possibly mean, I have come to some realizations.  

When someone says “I’m going on an adventure!” with a gleam in their eyes and an optimistic look on their face, they are using this word to describe an action, they are about to take which may or may not have a step by step plan but they do have a purpose. That purpose is to simply head in the direction of what they want with their expectations set low. The only expectation they have in mind is that many unexpected things may occur along the way.

A person may set out to canoe down an unnamed river, or hitchhike across the country, or one may even decide that their new plan to end an addiction may too be labelled an adventure. What is for sure, is that the events that may take place between their start point and their finish point are unknown and that’s the way we humans like our adventures. It is not however, how we like our daily lives.

On a regular day, perhaps at our regular jobs and usual daily activities, an unexpected event that alters our expectations for the day, may absolutely send us off the deep end. It may be something as simple as our normal commute route being disrupted by construction and we must follow a detour. We get to work a little late, our boss frowns, then suddenly the world owes us everything and everybody must feel our wrath all day.

On an adventure, a simple detour will not phase us, but rather it may be exactly what we wanted, an unexpected change in our bare bones plan. We head down the detour excited like a kid on Christmas because it’s what you do on an adventure even if your headed straight for a flat tire, a rainstorm or a sinkhole that swallows you whole. It may take an extra 2 days to get to our location, miss our flight 2 days in a row, run out of food and water, wear through our only pair of shoes, get blisters the size of light bulbs break our tibia and still manage to shove our fulfilment in all our friends faces when we finally get home, claiming how amazing our adventure was. How?

As far as I can see, the only difference in these unfortunate events is that some happen when expectations are low, and others are happening on regular days when expectations are not exactly high but precise and calculated.

Many yoga teachers will say at the beginning of their practice, “go ahead, set an intention for your practice”. We do this every day and in our normal routines our intention is to stay very normal. Our intention is to follow our step by step plan from your morning alarm to bedtime. It may be first to get ourselves to work on time, then to have a stable but productive day of work so that we may deserve the bottle of wine we’re going to consume when we finally get home. The problem with these intentions is that they are so vulnerable to change by outside forces. If your first intention is to get to work on time and your late because of construction, you have already failed your intentions once and it is barely breakfast time. How many more times will you let yourself down by lunch break?

Enlightened people always tell us to live in the moment, but this is not a good enough direction by itself. It’s not like we can just hit a switch and change our setting to “in the moment”. We just aren’t wired that way, no matter how many videos you watch barking at you insisting you live in the moment, you cannot simply switch the way your brain has been thinking your whole life. We are however, capable of rolling with the punches, we must employ the same mindset we take when heading out on an adventure. Each day must to be an adventure.

We may need some practice of course and it will not just come easily. Your first day attempting to live an adventure you may wake up in the morning, decide to slurp down some licorice for breakfast and run barefoot to your workplace wearing soccer cleats and a belly top. This is overkill, and yes that sounds adventurous but that’s not what we require and your boss is going to suggest you carry on straight to the hospital to be checked out.

It will be hard at first, but to slowly train ourselves to approach each day with less expectations will be so much easier than trying to force yourself to “live in the moment” while our foreheads wrinkle deeper as they day progresses and our ability to maintain gentle conversation with others dies.

My adventurous spirit longs to climb mountains, find the headwaters of rivers, camp under big spruce trees, experience other cultures, and experience the world. It is a value of mine, be that a newly constructed one, to go on these types of adventures when I have the time or to set aside time to allow them. I understand the value now more deeply after some examination of my behaviour and a deeper look inside to what makes me tick, but why stop there? I choose to live my “every day’s” as adventures, start my mornings with an intention to approach the day openly with little to no expectations so I may be accepting of unexpected events that will occur. If I choose to feel and live each day like it was an adventure imagine then what it may feel like to climb one of those mountains, or camp under a tree when real adventure time comes.

Remember, things take practice, and not every day is going to feel like an adventure, some days are still going to suck, but if we set our intentions and put our hearts behind it, maybe our new predictable will be the unpredictable. Our new routine will be to accept changes, take things as they come, learn from them, and be living in the moment without even trying.

I choose adventure.

[thismightbeaterribleidea]

Accidental Snowbirding

So I went to Florida and accidentally became a snowbird. I drove south in September with no real timeframe for anything in mind, and I ended up staying on the Gulf coast north of Tampa (Pasco County) for almost three months, minus a couple of weeks I was in Georgia.

Some friends have asked me how the new, nomadic life is going, and I tell them that it hasn’t really felt that nomadic. I’ve enjoyed being close to my friend Ron — I had a regular rotation of several campgrounds, none of them more than half an hour from his place. It reminded me of the decade-plus ago when we both lived in Denver, in old, cheap apartments within walking distance of each other. A friend calls and says “do you want to come over?” and you just go over. It’s lovely. We both got into paddleboarding (more on that later) and explored some rivers. We even took an airbnb trip to the Smokies and northern Alabama before the pandemic escalated. So it’s been interesting and good, if different from the types of images that motivated me to buy this big-ass van (wilderness, solitude, aspen groves, desert mesas).

Here’s what I remember from the last few months:

A cotton-candy-pink bird forages on a shoreline and it is so quiet that you can hear its three-clawed feet pattering in the mud. Ninety minutes later we are scarfing down fried chicken in the car in a crowded parking lot.

In the trailer park, people drive golf carts around in loops: maybe this passes for exercise, or maybe they are hoping to run into someone to talk to.

Until November, I sweat and sweat and sweat, and then it cools off enough for me to run in the morning and it’s glorious. 

During the day, there is constant traffic and the lights are always red. There are a lot of billboards, all promising different things, but the one that makes us angry is the one that says “Jesus promises stability.”

I spend the night at a trailer park and the ladies in the office are sweet and efficient and wearing masks. But the spot I’m assigned is across from a mobile home with one of those flags that is half the U.S. flag and half the Confederate flag, and although my privilege probably keeps me safe here, I keep running through the equations with slightly different variables: who would be safe in this spot, in this trailer park/this county/this state/this country, and under what circumstances? What could make all of us safer? And the people who chose to pay for and display that absurdity of a flag, why is that flag the story they tell themselves? And what is the topography of the shared responsibility for all of this bullshit?

We paddle the Hillsborough River and see no other boaters but two alligators. One is basking on a log, and when I turn my head for a second it drops into the water with a massive splash: one moment there was a six-foot alligator; the next moment there was nothing but ripples. It was that fast. My friend decides he will not paddle here alone.

I see live oaks that have Spanish moss hanging from their branches, sure — but they’re also covered in lichens, and on the horizontal branches there are carpets of multiple kinds of moss and clusters of foot-tall ferns. It’s a whole ecosystem in one tree.

I’m driving “home” (most frequent campground) late one night and I am alone on a very dark road. In my headlights, I see a human figure in the middle of my lane, facing directly at me. I think: goblin! But it is a human person. I swerve into the other lane in case he moves. But he doesn’t move a muscle. He is in a half-crouch with his hands on his knees. I catch a glimpse of him in profile as I pass: his face is set in a rictus, jaw clenched. He is still staring straight ahead, unblinking, as if he hasn’t even seen me.

I call Ron just to reassure myself that I haven’t slipped out of the real human world and into someplace else.

“Oh my God,” he says. “But no, you’re still in the real world. There’s a lot of meth around here. He’s not a demon or anything. It’s just Florida.” He is wearing a dark sweatshirt and standing in the dark on a dark road; what if he gets hit? I call the police and I hate that to this day I still wonder if that was the right decision.

We get into paddleboarding. Ron already has an inflatable paddleboard, and I buy one with money I should be saving for things like van insulation or the loose crown on my lower left molar that is already living on borrowed time. But the paddleboard is amazing. Previously, I hadn’t gotten it: why stand when you could sit? I’m lazy and I have crappy feet; I hate standing. But this isn’t regular standing. It’s walking-on-water standing. In our favorite river, the Weeki Wachee, you can see all kinds of things from a paddleboard that it’s harder to see in a kayak, just because of the angle. On a paddleboard, you look straight down and there’s a fish striped like a zebra, an old pine log submerged ten feet down in the clear water, a scurrying blue crab, a bed of rippled sand.

We start at the public park and paddle up against a stiff current. Twice, we get to the three-mile mark and there is the same black-and-white cormorant in the same tree both times. We are familiar with the fact that if you time it right, so that you get back to the park as late as possible without actually paddling in the dark, and the crowds taper off so you have the river to yourself, the deepest pools are turquoise on our way upriver and viridian on our way down.

There are sometimes manatees on the river. In this part of the world, manatees are THE charismatic megafauna. And they are charismatic as hell. Once we are out late, a couple miles up the river with no one else around, and we see a mother and baby grazing on eelgrass in shallow water. We watch for minutes, mesmerized. The baby is tiny for a manatee: about the size of a Corgi. It must be very, very new. There is another manatee that I’m pretty sure I see several times on different days: it is very plump, with three pink slash marks across its back. We get to the point where, if there is a throng of other boaters stopped near where manatees are feeding, we don’t try to stop and see the manatees. We’ve seen them before, and we’ll see them again, when we don’t have to worry about the people and their kayaks and canoes in the current.

The last time I went to the Weeki Wachee, I went alone. The leaves were turning, because the calendar’s close-to-Christmas is Florida’s fall. I hadn’t ever planned on seeing a blazing orange maple next to tropical blue water, but it happened. Close-knit formations of big, soft gray, doe-eyed fish darted under my feet, and at the appointed time the water started turning dark green. In one of the final bends just upriver from the park, there is a deep spot called Hospital Hole. As I paddled down towards it, I saw one manatee, then another break the surface to breathe. I drifted over the hole, away from the manatees near the surface, and I saw the outline of another one eight or ten feet down against the very dark blue of very deep water.

The Weeki Wachee is a very narrow river, usually not more than thirty feet across and often only twenty. It’s also shallow, four or five feet on average, twelve where the current has carved a deep groove or pocket. Hospital Hole is at one of the river’s widest points, I’d guess maybe 150 feet from bank to bank. The hole itself — technically a sinkhole, but with a couple of small springs feeding into it — is only about 30 or 40 feet wide, but 140 feet deep. It goes down so far that there are different layers of water: freshwater, saltwater, a layer that is anoxic, another layer that is so full of hydrogen sulfide that divers can smell the rotten-egg odor even though they’re breathing compressed air. I read online that the manatees often go to Hospital Hole to sleep at night. The sinkhole-spring, like a big deep pocket, gives them space to stay together and still spread out. They can sink down below where they have to worry about boat engines or curious paddle boarders or whatever else manatees worry about. Every so often, they come up to breathe, then sink down again. Respire, rest, repeat.

It’s 7:17 p.m. as I am writing this, so they’re probably there right now.

***

So that’s Florida! Other, more nuts-and-bolts things that have happened include...

I installed lights and outlets. This was a big project and a big deal, since it means that I can have things like a fan (to keep me from sweating to death in the summer), an electric cooler (a.k.a. mini-mini-fridge) for things like vegetables and hummus and cheese and cold boozy beverages, and, well, lights at night that aren’t a harsh blue-white solar lantern, which is what I was using before October, when I made these improvements. Anything electrical is always a little scary; I’m nervous every time I have to go into the breaker box and always surprised when I’m able to touch it without shocking myself. I also had an extremely minimal understanding of how to splice wires together and how to connect all these lights to each other, to the dimmer switch, and to the breaker box. This involved a lot of googling, and even though the DIY van blogs seemed to say that installing lights would take half a day, it took me the better part of two days. But it’s done, and I’m very happy with it. Fiat lux, motherf***er!

My new favorite public agency is the Southwest Florida Water Management District. Occasionally, if I’d had a few drinks at Ron’s house, I spent the night parked in his driveway. Sometimes I stayed in private RV parks. (This was mostly driven by the need to empty the van’s port-a-pot once a week or so — public dump stations are not easy to find in this area of Florida; the closest was about an hour away.) But mostly, I stayed at campground operated by the SWFWMD. These campgrounds are in big tracts of forested, marshy, watery land, and they are great primitive campgrounds that cost $0. There’s no water, no showers, no other fancy campground amenities, but there is usually one outhouse, and each campsite has a picnic table and a fire pit. They’re basic and beautiful.

My favorite campground is called the Serenova Tract. It’s about 15 minutes from Ron’s house, and the campground is in a bunch of pines and live oaks. Horses are allowed, and on one of the last weekends I spent there, several people with horses stayed overnight and hung up Christmas lights. The next morning, they were joined by a dozen other horses and riders who all went for a morning trail ride through the woods. I was insanely jealous.

The other SWFWMD campground I stayed at was called Cypress Creek. It’s a little farther from Ron’s place than Serenova, so it was my second choice when Serenova was full but my van’s shitter wasn’t. It’s a beautiful spot, with tons of big pines. But right now I’m a little wary of it because the last time I stayed there I woke up from a dead sleep at 4:51 a.m. when I heard someone singing and talking to themselves. (The campground had been totally empty when I got there and still was as far as I could see.) It was probably just someone who had come in on foot and was drinking because it was cold (40 degrees) outside, but it was still a bit unnerving. 

I also have a favorite RV park. I was thinking that my relationship with these places would be strictly utilitarian, and it still mostly is. But out of the three RV parks that I’ve stayed at, there’s one small one called Suncoast that I actually kind of enjoyed: even though I only went there occasionally, the three staff people remembered me when I called or came in, and they often gave me a discount on their regular rates because I don’t use any electricity. They (both staff and most guests) also seem to be taking pretty good pandemic precautions. (I actually saw someone get kicked out of the office when they tried to come in without a mask, something that I’ve never seen in any other business since March!) The place has nice big pine trees, and by the office there’s a table where people put free food that they aren’t using, or occasionally two-day-old bread that someone got from Publix for free. The last time I was there, some people had decorated their campers and RVs with lights and it was kind of charming. I still heavily prefer to be out in the woods by myself and not spending any money, but I’m glad I found someplace pleasant for my once-a-week-or-so sewer/water needs.

I figured out how to stay warm while sleeping. This is a bigger deal than it sounds because a) I haven’t insulated the van yet, so at night, it’s only a few degrees warmer than whatever the temperature is outside, and b) I’m a very cold sleeper. Florida is SUPER WARM compared to any other place I’ve ever lived, but in December, it started getting a little chilly at night: down into the fifties, then the forties, then, a few nights ago, 30 degrees. I’ve camped in near-freezing or slightly-below-freezing temperatures before, but sometimes it wasn’t very comfortable — even with good long underwear and socks and a hat and a zero-degree-rated sleeping bag. But I’ve figured out a system for my bed that uses four blankets, layered like a licorice allsort: a quilt, a heavy wool blanket, another quilt, and a faux-wool blanket. If it gets below 40, I can add my zero-degree down sleeping bag and be not just comfortable but actively toasty, like a baking croissant.

Unrelatedly, I’ve been having a hard time getting out of bed in the morning.

I’ve found that my life in a van is basically like my life has been anywhere else. I work. I sleep. I stay up late reading things on the internet when I should be sleeping. Sometimes I go running or do yoga (while trying not to bump into the cabinet or kick the front console or hit the ceiling). Sometimes I do fun things, like paddleboarding or talking to friends. I make goals and plans and don’t follow through on them, except when very very occasionally I do. But when I’m looking up van stuff online, I often run across photos of people who are #selfemployed #vanlife and the photos of them working are:

A woman is seated propped up on pillows in the bed in the back of her van. The doors are open, framing a view of the cerulean sea, so that you can practically smell the gentle breeze blowing over the dunes. She has a laptop on her lap and is looking thoughtfully out to sea while a cup of tea steeps on a tray that is on the white coverlet of her bed.

Or

A man is seated at the dinette in the back of his van. He has a laptop, a French press, a mug of coffee, and a plate with two scones on it on the table. The table, and in fact the whole dinette with its two upholstered benches, would be at home on a small luxury yacht, and it’s the kind of dinette that you make into a bed at night. The astute, intent expression on the man’s face give the viewer to understand that he is competent and disciplined and never stays up two hours past his bedtime because he’s too lazy to lower the dinette table and rearrange the cushions and put on all his sheets and blankets. We are also given to understand that the electrical system in his van would have no problems handling the power drain of a bean grinder, even though he is clearly parked in the high Rockies — again, with the back doors open, the better to take in the late spring air and see the fresh green of the aspen trees — and it’s often cloudy. Lastly, we are given to understand that he baked those scones himself, because when he’s not working, hiking, lumberjacking, or otherwise living his best life, he enjoys unwinding by baking bread and pastries. (Not in the van; don’t be silly! He bakes outside, over a wood fire.)

(A tangent: Why do so many people have their van doors open in photos I see online? Do they only stay in places with no bugs? If I tried that in Florida, or even Maryland or Colorado half the year, I’d be awake half the night swatting at mosquitoes and/or flies.)

In contrast, a photo of me being self-employed in a van would look like:

A woman is sprawled in an ungainly fashion on her narrow bunk. Her laptop is braced by her lower ribs and propped up with a pillow placed over her gut. The pillow has a cat on it. The windows of the van are covered in silver bubble-wrap, so very little light gets in. Absolutely no doors are open, because the van is parked behind a Dunkin Donuts so the woman can get free wifi and not burn through all the data on her phone plan. She takes a break to heat up a can of Campbell’s soup on an alcohol stove, adding a handful of dehydrated mixed vegetables, to be healthy. As she stirs the soup, she gazes contemplatively out the windshield towards the adjacent parking lot, where there is an IHOP. #vanlife

Or

A woman is sitting in the passenger seat of her van with her feet on the dashboard and her laptop on her lap. Beside her in the cupholder is a steaming Hydroflask full of the cheapest tea she could buy at Publix. The van is parked in a grove of live oaks. Spanish moss sways gently in the morning breeze. Behind the woman, in the dark recesses of the van, sets of clothes are hanging: leggings and a shirt, still sweaty, by the side doors, a bathing suit over the sink, a t-shirt and shorts for sleeping in by the rear cabinet. Several kitchen towels are draped on the driver’s seat and on the dashboard because the cab leaks above the sun visors when it rains, and even though she’s tried caulking it three times, she still can’t get it to stop. #vanlife

The good thing, though, is that I’m still getting work and making a living. I can do it someplace that’s safe, without having to risk my life to do it. And I’m getting paid a fair hourly wage. But then the very terrible thing is that everyone should be able to say what I just said, but so many people can’t: they’re not making a real living through their work, they have to risk their lives to do it, and they’re not getting paid a fair wage.

(Brief interlude as I stare at the ceiling angrily.)

***

Here’s what I’m doing next: I left Pasco County on the 16th. I’ll be in what I think of as “traveling quarantine” until the 30th, staying in a national forest near Jacksonville. (With a couple of stops at state parks to refill water, empty the port-a-pot, and maybe take a real shower.) I’ll be in Maryland on New Year’s Eve and will stay at my parents’ while I insulate the van, build interior walls, and do a bunch of other stuff so that I can call it (mostly) finished. Then I’m thinking of going to New Mexico and spending late winter/early spring there… parked on top of a mesa… sipping a cup of French-press coffee on my white coverlet while I thoughtfully gaze out the open doors of my van… (I really would like to park on top of a mesa though.)

[peppymint1986]

Who needs a laugh, or some advice

Source: http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

I highly recommend going to the site and checking out the ones that did not make the top 100 list.  

Peter’s Evil Overlord List

My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.

My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.

Shooting is not too good for my enemies.

The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.

I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them.

When I've captured my adversary and he says, "Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?" I'll say, "No." and shoot him. No, on second thought I'll shoot him then say "No."

After I kidnap the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, not a lavish spectacle in three weeks' time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.

I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled "Danger: Do Not Push". The big red button marked "Do Not Push" will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not clearly be labelled as such.

I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum -- a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well.

I will be secure in my superiority. Therefore, I will feel no need to prove it by leaving clues in the form of riddles or leaving my weaker enemies alive to show they pose no threat.

One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

All slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.

The hero is not entitled to a last kiss, a last cigarette, or any other form of last request.

I will never employ any device with a digital countdown. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable, I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation.

I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know."

When I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice.

I will not have a son. Although his laughably under-planned attempt to usurp power would easily fail, it would provide a fatal distraction at a crucial point in time.

I will not have a daughter. She would be as beautiful as she was evil, but one look at the hero's rugged countenance and she'd betray her own father.

Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will not indulge in maniacal laughter. When so occupied, it's too easy to miss unexpected developments that a more attentive individual could adjust to accordingly.

I will hire a talented fashion designer to create original uniforms for my Legions of Terror, as opposed to some cheap knock-offs that make them look like Nazi stormtroopers, Roman footsoldiers, or savage Mongol hordes. All were eventually defeated and I want my troops to have a more positive mind-set.

No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.

I will keep a special cache of low-tech weapons and train my troops in their use. That way -- even if the heroes manage to neutralize my power generator and/or render the standard-issue energy weapons useless -- my troops will not be overrun by a handful of savages armed with spears and rocks.

I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line "No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!" (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)

No matter how well it would perform, I will never construct any sort of machinery which is completely indestructible except for one small and virtually inaccessible vulnerable spot.

No matter how attractive certain members of the rebellion are, there is probably someone just as attractive who is not desperate to kill me. Therefore, I will think twice before ordering a prisoner sent to my bedchamber.

I will never build only one of anything important. All important systems will have redundant control panels and power supplies. For the same reason I will always carry at least two fully loaded weapons at all times.

My pet monster will be kept in a secure cage from which it cannot escape and into which I could not accidentally stumble.

I will dress in bright and cheery colors, and so throw my enemies into confusion.

All bumbling conjurers, clumsy squires, no-talent bards, and cowardly thieves in the land will be preemptively put to death. My foes will surely give up and abandon their quest if they have no source of comic relief.

All naive, busty tavern wenches in my realm will be replaced with surly, world-weary waitresses who will provide no unexpected reinforcement and/or romantic subplot for the hero or his sidekick.

I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really am. Good messengers are hard to come by.

I won't require high-ranking female members of my organization to wear a stainless-steel bustier. Morale is better with a more casual dress-code. Similarly, outfits made entirely from black leather will be reserved for formal occasions.

I will not turn into a snake. It never helps.

I will not grow a goatee. In the old days they made you look diabolic. Now they just make you look like a disaffected member of Generation X.

I will not imprison members of the same party in the same cell block, let alone the same cell. If they are important prisoners, I will keep the only key to the cell door on my person instead of handing out copies to every bottom-rung guard in the prison.

If my trusted lieutenant tells me my Legions of Terror are losing a battle, I will believe him. After all, he's my trusted lieutenant.

If an enemy I have just killed has a younger sibling or offspring anywhere, I will find them and have them killed immediately, instead of waiting for them to grow up harboring feelings of vengeance towards me in my old age.

If I absolutely must ride into battle, I will certainly not ride at the forefront of my Legions of Terror, nor will I seek out my opposite number among his army.

I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve.

Once my power is secure, I will destroy all those pesky time-travel devices.

When I capture the hero, I will make sure I also get his dog, monkey, ferret, or whatever sickeningly cute little animal capable of untying ropes and filching keys happens to follow him around.

I will maintain a healthy amount of skepticism when I capture the beautiful rebel and she claims she is attracted to my power and good looks and will gladly betray her companions if I just let her in on my plans.

I will only employ bounty hunters who work for money. Those who work for the pleasure of the hunt tend to do dumb things like even the odds to give the other guy a sporting chance.

I will make sure I have a clear understanding of who is responsible for what in my organization. For example, if my general screws up I will not draw my weapon, point it at him, say "And here is the price for failure," then suddenly turn and kill some random underling.

If an advisor says to me "My liege, he is but one man. What can one man possibly do?", I will reply "This." and kill the advisor.

If I learn that a callow youth has begun a quest to destroy me, I will slay him while he is still a callow youth instead of waiting for him to mature.

I will treat any beast which I control through magic or technology with respect and kindness. Thus if the control is ever broken, it will not immediately come after me for revenge.

If I learn the whereabouts of the one artifact which can destroy me, I will not send all my troops out to seize it. Instead I will send them out to seize something else and quietly put a Want-Ad in the local paper.

My main computers will have their own special operating system that will be completely incompatible with standard IBM and Macintosh powerbooks.

If one of my dungeon guards begins expressing concern over the conditions in the beautiful princess' cell, I will immediately transfer him to a less people-oriented position.

I will hire a team of board-certified architects and surveyors to examine my castle and inform me of any secret passages and abandoned tunnels that I might not know about.

If the beautiful princess that I capture says "I'll never marry you! Never, do you hear me, NEVER!!!", I will say "Oh well" and kill her.

I will not strike a bargain with a demonic being then attempt to double-cross it simply because I feel like being contrary.

The deformed mutants and odd-ball psychotics will have their place in my Legions of Terror. However before I send them out on important covert missions that require tact and subtlety, I will first see if there is anyone else equally qualified who would attract less attention.

My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.

Before employing any captured artifacts or machinery, I will carefully read the owner's manual.

If it becomes necessary to escape, I will never stop to pose dramatically and toss off a one-liner.

I will never build a sentient computer smarter than I am.

My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be used. Note: this also applies to passwords.

If my advisors ask "Why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?", I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies them.

I will design fortress hallways with no alcoves or protruding structural supports which intruders could use for cover in a firefight.

Bulk trash will be disposed of in incinerators, not compactors. And they will be kept hot, with none of that nonsense about flames going through accessible tunnels at predictable intervals.

I will see a competent psychiatrist and get cured of all extremely unusual phobias and bizarre compulsive habits which could prove to be a disadvantage.

If I must have computer systems with publically available terminals, the maps they display of my complex will have a room clearly marked as the Main Control Room. That room will be the Execution Chamber. The actual main control room will be marked as Sewage Overflow Containment.

My security keypad will actually be a fingerprint scanner. Anyone who watches someone press a sequence of buttons or dusts the pad for fingerprints then subsequently tries to enter by repeating that sequence will trigger the alarm system.

No matter how many shorts we have in the system, my guards will be instructed to treat every surveillance camera malfunction as a full-scale emergency.

I will spare someone who saved my life sometime in the past. This is only reasonable as it encourages others to do so. However, the offer is good one time only. If they want me to spare them again, they'd better save my life again.

All midwives will be banned from the realm. All babies will be delivered at state-approved hospitals. Orphans will be placed in foster-homes, not abandoned in the woods to be raised by creatures of the wild.

When my guards split up to search for intruders, they will always travel in groups of at least two. They will be trained so that if one of them disappears mysteriously while on patrol, the other will immediately initiate an alert and call for backup, instead of quizzically peering around a corner.

If I decide to test a lieutenant's loyalty and see if he/she should be made a trusted lieutenant, I will have a crack squad of marksmen standing by in case the answer is no.

If all the heroes are standing together around a strange device and begin to taunt me, I will pull out a conventional weapon instead of using my unstoppable superweapon on them.

I will not agree to let the heroes go free if they win a rigged contest, even though my advisors assure me it is impossible for them to win.

When I create a multimedia presentation of my plan designed so that my five-year-old advisor can easily understand the details, I will not label the disk "Project Overlord" and leave it lying on top of my desk.

I will instruct my Legions of Terror to attack the hero en masse, instead of standing around waiting while members break off and attack one or two at a time.

If the hero runs up to my roof, I will not run up after him and struggle with him in an attempt to push him over the edge. I will also not engage him at the edge of a cliff. (In the middle of a rope-bridge over a river of molten lava is not even worth considering.)

If I have a fit of temporary insanity and decide to give the hero the chance to reject a job as my trusted lieutentant, I will retain enough sanity to wait until my current trusted lieutenant is out of earshot before making the offer.

I will not tell my Legions of Terror "And he must be taken alive!" The command will be "And try to take him alive if it is reasonably practical."

If my doomsday device happens to come with a reverse switch, as soon as it has been employed it will be melted down and made into limited-edition commemorative coins.

If my weakest troops fail to eliminate a hero, I will send out my best troops instead of wasting time with progressively stronger ones as he gets closer and closer to my fortress.

If I am fighting with the hero atop a moving platform, have disarmed him, and am about to finish him off and he glances behind me and drops flat, I too will drop flat instead of quizzically turning around to find out what he saw.

I will not shoot at any of my enemies if they are standing in front of the crucial support beam to a heavy, dangerous, unbalanced structure.

If I'm eating dinner with the hero, put poison in his goblet, then have to leave the table for any reason, I will order new drinks for both of us instead of trying to decide whether or not to switch with him.

I will not have captives of one sex guarded by members of the opposite sex.

I will not use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. "Align the 12 Stones of Power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse." Instead it will be more along the lines of "Push the button."

I will make sure that my doomsday device is up to code and properly grounded.

My vats of hazardous chemicals will be covered when not in use. Also, I will not construct walkways above them.

If a group of henchmen fail miserably at a task, I will not berate them for incompetence then send the same group out to try the task again.

After I captures the hero's superweapon, I will not immediately disband my legions and relax my guard because I believe whoever holds the weapon is unstoppable. After all, the hero held the weapon and I took it from him.

I will not design my Main Control Room so that every workstation is facing away from the door.

I will not ignore the messenger that stumbles in exhausted and obviously agitated until my personal grooming or current entertainment is finished. It might actually be important.

If I ever talk to the hero on the phone, I will not taunt him. Instead I will say this his dogged perseverance has given me new insight on the futility of my evil ways and that if he leaves me alone for a few months of quiet contemplation I will likely return to the path of righteousness. (Heroes are incredibly gullible in this regard.)

If I decide to hold a double execution of the hero and an underling who failed or betrayed me, I will see to it that the hero is scheduled to go first.

When arresting prisoners, my guards will not allow them to stop and grab a useless trinket of purely sentimental value.

My dungeon will have its own qualified medical staff complete with bodyguards. That way if a prisoner becomes sick and his cellmate tells the guard it's an emergency, the guard will fetch a trauma team instead of opening up the cell for a look.

My door mechanisms will be designed so that blasting the control panel on the outside seals the door and blasting the control panel on the inside opens the door, not vice versa.

My dungeon cells will not be furnished with objects that contain reflective surfaces or anything that can be unravelled.

If an attractive young couple enters my realm, I will carefully monitor their activities. If I find they are happy and affectionate, I will ignore them. However if circumstance have forced them together against their will and they spend all their time bickering and criticizing each other except during the intermittent occasions when they are saving each others' lives at which point there are hints of sexual tension, I will immediately order their execution.

Any data file of crucial importance will be padded to 1.45Mb in size.

Finally, to keep my subjects permanently locked in a mindless trance, I will provide each of them with free unlimited Internet access.