#crossthicc!magnus

[twitchesandstitches]

Apparantly it's now canon that Magnus the Red has a little tail. Does Raven have one too, being his daughter and all?

HE DOES!?

...Given that his gene-seed is apparently prone to absolutely absurd levels of mutation, it’s fair to say that he probably got off really easy with JUST red skin, a mutable eye, and apparently a tail!

hmmm... i rather like that idea. if so, her tail is probably fairly long and spiky, or it might manifest instead as the tentacles Raven is associated with in her more demony forms; as her default form IS monstery, it’s totally possible for her to have that

hmmm; followers! who here thinks monster girl Raven should have a tail or not?

[twitchesandstitches]

The Great Library was a vast enough eldritch realm that there were enough room for smaller pockets for magic to carve out enclaves of spirit sanctuaries within them, and establish little pocket realms loosely tethered to the rest of the Library; close enough, so to speak, that you could walk through a door in the Library and into someone’s personal realm with ease and comfort, but distinct enough that the all seeing eyes of the spirit that commanded the Library had no actual influence or power there.

He probably didn’t care what anyone did, as long as it was not misusing his knowledge or stealing it, but it paid to be cautious around spirits… divorced from understanding of humans, or so Raven understood. Magnus had taught her this with some urgency when she was young; she knew that spirits were more direct than mortals. They were a purpose and domain given its own form, and did not understand the complexities and changes that a human did. Some dealt with this magnanimously, such as spirits of righteous concepts like Valor or Honor. Some, like the great knowledge spirit of this Library, regarded mortals as hopelessly treacherous and insane, as lost as the tides upon the ocean. And he had told her scary bedtime stories about entities like Koh the Face Stealer, and those like him altogether too interested in mortal weakness, taking the faces and perspectives of mortals to experience it for themselves.

Ever since she was small, long before she had ever towered over him and everyone else, Raven had always listened closely to him. One day, a red giant with one eye had taken in a half-demon girl, on perhaps a whim or a stirring of compassion within his heart, and a longing for a father who had long since left into the ether.

To Raven, the demon Trigon was a monster. A nightmare that even the great demonic Who’s Who tomes refused to talk about in detail. Talking grimoires clammed up, stifling their screaming voices, and would say nothing of him. He was many things in her mind; a looming inevitability, something she would have to take care of, a reminder that she had been born wrong. But he was not Father to her.

When Raven thought ‘Father’, she saw a giant of a man, with a great mane of feathered red hair, a single shifting eye. Always a word for the curious, sarcastic snarking for the unwise, and moments of childish pique… but always kind with her, patient and encouraging her talents no matter how they might frighten her, or she frighten others.

The sanctuary of Magnus the Red, his students, and those he had named sons and daughters, they lived within a realm partially modeled after many worlds he had taken a liking to, an ever shifting magical wonderland of infinite possibilities, and the multiverse’s most complicated antique shop. Buildings lay within this realm at odd angles to one another, streets sticking out around invisible trajectories to create mountains of buildings all twisting around one another, and talking raven-spirits flapping about to make sarcastic comments at people.

Presently she and Magnus were within his own sanctum, a place of power to preserve his incorporeal form and make him properly solid for a while and stabilize his powers a bit. It pleased him to follow her whim to make it look like a giant T-letter. Within it, they were having a meeting.

“Sit, my child,” he said, squatting down upon a heavy mat in the fashion of his homeworld from lost antiquity, Prospero. Raven sat in precisely the same way, her gargantuan backside serving the role of a chair. Awkwardly, she pulled her heavy cloak over herself, trying to wear it like he did and she had some trouble. Her chest was getting in the way. Granted, he was quite broad in the chest but not quite in the same way she was.

She was, in every way, a loving daughter who wanted nothing more than to be like her father. Not Trigon. Magnus.

He looked fondly at her, but also sadly.

“There is…” he started, and stopped. He fumbled for the words. “Ah. ...You are well, today? My child?”

Raven nodded demurely. “Yes, father. I am well. The nightmares of…” she shifted anxiously. “Well, you know. I am not dreaming of that anymore. I suppose the medicine worked?”

“That’s good to hear. Yes, good. Er…” he looked awkward again. “I think I know what was causing those nightmares.”

“You do? I thought the general idea was that… he… was growing in power and was attempting to contact me through my dreams.”

“I had thought so too, and that is indeed the case. However… I may have unintentionally given him a route, of sorts.”

Raven’s face, as red as his own, paled into a grayish horror. “You, you what?”

“Not on purpose!” He waved a great hand anxiously. “I was studying a summoning spell for him!”

“Oh dear lord…”

“Not to summon him, not at all! I was simply trying to find out his name!” He sighed. “I don’t want to have to wait for him to make the first move. When we face him, and we will, I swear to you, I want it on our terms. But I needed more information; his name, something to use to track his realms of power or fiendish armies, a way to figure out his cults in the material realm. So I was decoding his summoning spell, working out the programming in it, so to speak.”

Raven calmed down, a bit. A summoning spell ,of the classic ‘call up something into a circle’, was effectively the magical version of messaging someone with the bonus of making them materialize under certain controls. What he was talking about was theoretically possible, and she had no doubt he could do it.

“Then, you have his name?”

Magnus bowed his head. “Yes. I have a name, of great importance to him. The seed of his existence.”

“You do!? What is it?”

He hesitated. “Raven… this is… ah. Look, I called you here to tell you this because we both know the day will soon come when you will have to face him. Sooner or later, he will press that matter, and I intend to see you slay him and take his power for your own. But… now, there is something else. I have to fight him. Not just because I want to, for your sake.”

Raven frowned. “I’m not sure I understand. Do you not have his name?”

“I do. And that is what worries me.” He sighed. “Daughter, you understand that many ages ago, I was… very, very badly hurt.”

She recalled her history lessons. “The Thousand Sons teach that in ages past, your essence was shattered into many shards. Each one containing a portion of yourself.”

“Yes. And in order to retain me, my shards sought each other ought and enough recombined to allow me to keep my mind. And I was badly weakened, as most of my power was scattered. And over time, I found more of them, becoming more whole and powerful… but I never did find them all.”

“The best of you remained as the core aspect, and over time, you found more pieces of yourself,” she said.

“Yes! Very good. Now tell me, how many shards do you think a soul would break into? Bearing in mind that the soul is, by its nature, indivisible and infinite.”

She considered this riddle. “I would think that there is no limit. You could have any number of shards, and since the soul encompasses all you are and COULD be, you might have many, each comprising a minute facet of your being. Is that not so?”

“Indeed. And as I embody the magical potential of humanity as a whole, and therefore multitudes, I could be stretched farther than mortals would be.” Magnus tapped his chest, a nail clicking against one of the spike/horns growing from his chest. “So how many do you think I was reduced to?”

Raven took a guess. “Hrm. A few hundred?”

He winced. “Selling me a bit short there.”

“...A thousand?”

“I wish. More manageable and I enjoy the theming. But no.”

“Father, I don’t know. How many did you break into.”

He looked up, his face weary with an ancient ache. “Trillions. More.”

“Trillions!?”

“I broke apart into so many pieces, each one aware, if barely. Some larger and more powerful. Others less so, but each one an aspect of me. When some of these shards found one another, they fused into what I am now; myself, if not quite whole at least stable. And there were still vast gaps in my being, for eons I searched but never found them all.”

Raven leaned forward, eyes wide and fearful. “Father… do you mean that… oh, are you alright? Are you hurting, even now?!”

“Don’t worry, dear child. I have become whole, over time. The soul is a growing thing, and experience, understanding, growth? I have found all that. I have changed, and so my soul has healed itself. My power is weaker, yes, I would have to fuse with my shards to truly regain my full power, but my being, the essence of what makes me who I am? I have grown into a new Magnus, and made myself whole. I fixed myself, you see.”

Raven sighed, looking relieved. “I was worried there, Father. And, why do you tell me this?”

His single eye narrowed gravely. “You must know that, therefore, many of these shards are still out there. Most are just pockets of raw potentiality, unlikely to do more than exercise random magic. No mind there, just a sense of will. But some, with more essential aspects in the beginning, took on their own life.”

“And, if you grew back into someone…” Raven pondered this. “Then perhaps they have grown into something else as well?”

“You have it! And for the most part, this is not so bad. Some of them are harmless. Others, mutated into dangerous monsters that I must find and slay. But others embodied… terrible aspects of who I was. Spiteful tendencies, vindictiveness, thoughts of wanting to be extremely important, and overwhelming arrogance.”

Raven loved her adoptive father, but she was also realistic. “Thank goodness you left all that behind,” she said sarcastically.

“Yes, it’s rather a good job, isn’t it?” Magnus replied proudly, quite blind to it. “But those parts of myself are still out there. They are still in existence, and over time… I believe they found one another. All the worst in me, coming together without a single aspect of the parts of me that knew compassion… trust, love, the need for other people and a desire to help. Everything, in short, that makes me human.”

Raven frowned. “And those shards might have grown, as you have.”

Magnus’ expression was terribly blank. “This is no hypothetical situation. I can prove it.” He pulled out a roll of parchment, and upon it were many things, but at the bottom:

A summon spell, decoded in messy script, and below it, was the name of Magnus.

“Father?” Raven took it and studied it. “This spell… your name is the central part of it? What is it?”

“A summoning spell for the demon who sired you,” Magnus said grimly. “This is what I’ve been studying, and he used that to try to pinpoint your location. I’ve created wards so he cannot do that now, but I’ve learned his origin.”

Raven tried to work this out. “Okay, but what do you have to do with-”

The shards of myself can grow…

Pieces of myself, the very worst in me, without any shred of humanity or compassion…

Father’s name, on the parchment. On a summoning spell for Trigon.

Evil pieced together, without any room for goodness in there, evolving… growing… and demons, fiends, were just what happened when evil took on a face and a will.

And Trigon looked so very much like Magnus the Red.

Raven paled again. “Oh dear, sweet Primus.”

Magnus shuffled away from her. “Please… Raven. Understand, I am not Trigon! And he is not me! I-”

“But he was made from a piece of you,” she said, understanding dawning. She forced herself to calm down.

This is Father. It has always been Father.

He is not the monster you fear.

She remembered a great red hand, always at her shoulder. Giving her treats. A warm voice, making snide comments at the more fussy Thousand Sons. Always standing up for her, and so kind to her mother…

Father.

Raven tried not to think about the terrible feelings welling up, the confusion and random surges of fear, and silenced them. Deal with them later, she told herself. She wiped away tears. “I’m sorry, Father,” she said meekly. “I.. I don’t… this, this isn’t your fault…!”

What have I done to Father? He must think so terribly of himself…!

Magnus’ face curled in horror. “My fault!? I, no! This isn’t about me, this is about you! The demon that plagues you, he is my fault! Now, more than ever, it is my responsibility to help you end him.”

“Does that mean… you can become more whole by making him fuse with you? Will that help you?”

Magnus shook his head. “No. We’ve been apart for so long that I haven’t the faintest idea what he has become. A fiend, yes, but apart from that? He’s certainly far less human that I ever was, and I suspect he’s evolved into something else entirely. I’m more interested in how you can help yourself by… hrm, how do i put this delicately… ‘absorbing him’, I suppose?”

“You, you really think that’s a good idea?”

“I trust you, daughter. And whatever power he has, I’d rather have you claim it, and make yourself the best you can be.”

“But, it’s your power!”

He didn’t look at her. Just saying ‘I don’t trust myself to stay me after absorbing him’ was out of the question.

Magnus trusted Raven. He did not trust himself.

“We can end him,” he promised. “Whatever happens after that. We are the key to undoing that monster’s evil. I, the remnant of what he once was a part of. You, the person he made as a vessel. We are in a perfect position to ruin his plans, and for you to become something even greater than you already are!”

Raven bowed her head. “I am willing to try, at least.”

Sometime later…

“And that is the situation,” Magnus said to the assembled Thousand Sons, the Blood Ravens, his other orders, and the human wizards and witches that were allied to him. “Are there any questions?”

A Blood Raven raised his hand.

“Yes? Gabriel Angelos!”

“The plan is still to kill this wretched fiend,” Angelos said. “So apart from a technicality, that the fiend was born from pieces of you, has much actually changed?”

“A lot has changed! It’s a lot more personal than it already was, and it was really damn personal to begin with!”

“Doesn’t sound like much has changed.”

“Oh, shut up and let someone else ask something. You! Tall wizard, the one with red hair.”

A human wizard, red-haired and peeking out of the copious masses of Hermione Granger’s hair, had his hand raised. He was called Ron Weasley, and he had a point to make. “So does this make Lady Raven your actual daughter, or what?”

“She already was,” Magnus said flatly. “Next question.”

“No, no! I mean, adopted, yes, but… biologically! Is she your actual daughter!?”

“We have different meanings of ‘actual’. She is my daughter, end of story. Next question?”

“But if she’s Trigon’s daughter, and Trigon is a part of you, is there some kinda, what’s the word, transitive property that make her your kid too?”

“For pity’s sake! No one actually cares!”

Raven raised a hand. “I care, Father.” She smiled at that.

“Oh come on! Don’t tell me you believe that biological parentage is more ‘legitimate’ than adoption!”

“Well, no… but it’s still a nice notion, all the same.”

Magnus sighed. A Thousand Son - Ahriman, perhaps - piped up. “This, I think, makes the Lady Raven Lord Magnus’ first heir!”

“SHE ALREADY WAS!” Magnus bellowed. “It’s even in my completely pointless will!”

“I recommend a grand celebration!” Ahriman continued, ignoring him. “Let us celebrate the downfall of our eldest enemy, and the discovery of a true scion to lead us all!”

“How is he an eldest enemy?” asked a witch; Luna Lovegood, Raven thought. “You’ve only known of his nature for a short while.”

“He is retroactively a greatest enemy,” sad a Blood Raven, with a straight face somehow. “And he was at one point part of Lord Magnus. Everyone knows that Lord Magnus’ greatest enemy is himself.”

“Hey now!” Magnus complained.

“I’m sorry, Father, but they’ve a point,” Raven said.

“Oh gods not you too.”

[twitchesandstitches]

Magnus the Red crumpled a piece of paper and threw it so violently at the wall it burst into flames, ignited with just a shred of his own horror, and as it burned it screamed the words he would not: “No no no no!”

Ashes fell to the floor. He watched them fall with his one eye, numb. Sickened.

Eventually, revulsion at wasting good parchment overruling even his revulsion at everything else right now, he waved a hand and a spell weaved together, and the ashes came as one. They flowed into each other, and as though time turned backwards, they became parchment again, the ink still wet.

Upon it was all manner of things: some complicated calculations, translations of demonic names, the decoding of a summoning rune for Trigon that had been kept in the ‘DO NOT TOUCH EVER’ sealed archives that he had no intent of using for anything else but simply reverse engineering to find the name that called to Trigon, a few doodles of werewolves being punched by comically muscular birdmen...

And a name

Magnus could not think of much else right now. Good Gods. How did I miss it!? It was right there in front of my face, the whole time! How else did I find my way to her? We were CALLING to one another! Like wants like, birds of a feather come to the same nests… damn it, but it’s too much of a coincidence. Did HE arrange this? Am I still just a pawn of fate, in the end?

His self-pity, normally the cornerstone of his ramblings, was silenced by thoughts of the girl he thought of as ‘daughter’. The one who had taken the name of his sons for her own. His little Blood Raven.

What can I do? What have I inflicted upon her fate!?

Sighing, Magnus dropped the paper. The equations on the name rang true, and what was there… was not Trigon’s true name. No demon’s true name could fit upon a single roll of parchment. A demon’s name was more like a general description, personality profile and list of deeds, not a single word. And yet, you could find a seed of a demon, a key phrase that undercut who and what they were. An origin, perhaps.

And now, Magnus thought about the many shards of his souls, mostly reclaimed after he had been shattered in an ancient battle. He was not what he had been; he had been a crueler man once, colder and more ruthless, and then he had been shattered, and pieced himself back together. In the place of missing parts of his soul, he’d grown, he had changed. He had become more than what he was; less powerful, not a slayer of demon-gods, but more… whole. At peace.

And yet, he had once been but a collection of Magnus-shards, shoved together and repairing a broken mind. He had wondered, at times, what had become of the other shards he had never been able to bring back into his being.

What, he now thought grimly, of shards that had taken on a life of their own, growing into something far fouler and more evil than he would ever had done on his own, all humanity stripped away, becoming a true fiend, and growing power that outstripped his own?

Perhaps he had his answer.

On the parchment was but a name, the one that Trigon would answer to, for it had once been his own.

Magnus the Red.

He sighed, and covered his face.

He thought of Raven. My child… I am so sorry.

[twitchesandstitches]

Magnus: *Using his far sight abilities* why is Vulkan watching Guillimen and Yvraine from a bus? Raven: Uncle is just overprotective of Uncle G, unlike Vulkan he doesn't get out nearly as much, and also because Vulkan still don't trust her after what happened. Magnus: It was her first prank in centuries, he gotta let it go at some point! Raven: It's Vulkan, he's stubbon about stuff. At least uncle G has good taste, Yvraine got a nice booty. Magnus: Mine's better. Raven: You're just jealous dad.

Vulkan lowered a pair of binoculars, scowling adorably. It was actually quite difficult for someone with red glowing eyes and what appeared to be volcanic veins (which were also glowing, same as his eyes) to be adorable, but his fundamental nature overcame the restraints of his physical form. And so, fearsome though he appeared, cuddly he remained.

His binoculars were on fire, with little vents igniting gases from within. Somehow this produced greater magnification. It was best not to think about it too much.

The bus itself was a golden, elaborate affair, its roof affixed with a large wreath. From the window, and in a hot tub, Roboute Gulliman sighed, glancing out the window. "My brother is still there, is he not?"

Yvraine, managing to be large enough that even a primarch looked dwarfed in her lap, peered out the window. She cast a spell, her massive breasts engulfing Guilliman's body as she moved, and it was amazing that he gave no indication of noticing. "Away with you, rapscallion!"

And a force field appeared over them, blocking them from sight. Vulkan shook a fist, impotently. "Bumbleclots, the lot of you! I'll not have you sinking your claws into my impressionable brother, fiend!" Ominously, he said, "I will do the most terrible and fearsome thing I can think of..."

Jaghatai Khan, playing a game of 4th-dimensional chess with himself and idly following Vulkan around for the hell of it, glanced at him. "What's that, oh brother dear? Shall you find a quarter and NOT tell anyone you found it?"

Vulkan shuddered at such evil. "Never, but almost as bad... I shall write a very strongly worded letter!"

Jaghatai raised a thin eyebrow. "...Oh my."

Meanwhile...

"And THAT, daughter mine, is why our butts are the finest in all the land!" Magnus finished.

The God-Empress of Mankind, peeking through the door, swiftly retreated. "I was going to ask what on the hell they were going on about," she said, with a look of disgust. "But now I am certain I don't WANT to know."

"Probably smart," said the Condesce, who was on a date with the Empress. A hate date, but still a date.

"Besides, it should be obvious they inherited MY fabulous, gold-plated ass. That's just common sense."

"Ya don't say? Let's test that." The Condesce raised a clawed, many-ringed hand up high, on a smacking trajectory-

"IF YOU SLAP MY BEDAZZLED ASS I SWEAR I WILL PUNT YOU INTO A SUN."

Her hand swung down.

TWWACK.

"Worth it!" the Condesce cried maniacally as she was sent rocketing upwards, the Empress' butt still bouncing and stinging from the force of the planet-shattering smack it had been dealt.

[twitchesandstitches]

Scratch my previous ask, Magnus the Red, and maybe some of their followers, pinned by Raven's huge belly. Since theres no way that in Crossthicc a demon as powerful as Raven isnt becoming a broodmother for infinite demon races to serve her will

Raven cooed, hundreds of feet tall and with curves that could be descibed as ‘city block sized’ if you wanted to undersell them; her mammoth breasts, overflowing with ocean-scale milk, blotted out the sky. Her backside, a tremendous shelf wobbling with the air caressing it. Her waist? ...Too tiny, inbetween, to be seen. But her belly was the biggest of all, a gigantic orb three times her size and very visibly filled to the brim with untold trillions of young!

Demons of every shape, size and purpose were gestating in there, wriggling aingst  her skin so that her stomach bulged and warped with their bodies. Periodically a few thousand at a time would reach maturity and immediately materialize outside in bursts of magic, eager to fulfill their progenitor’s will. The skies were covered with them, enough demonic creations to populate an entire planet! And more kept coming, Raven’s immense power and creativity impregnating her.

And beneath her belly was Magnus the Red, mysteriously discinclined to move her. Some would speculate that he COULDN’T, she had grown so powerful that she overcome his own strength. But perhaps he was simply too proud to upstage her.

He wiped away a flaming tear. “I’m a grandfather! So many times over! I am so PROUD of you, daughter!”

“RELEASE US, LADY RAVEN!” wailed Gabriel Angelos, who was more concerned about being pinned by a gigantic belly that seemed to be growing by the second.

The rest of the entire Blood Raven chapter, and quite a few witches, echoed the sentiment.

[twitchesandstitches]

I remember you saying that WH40K had some influence on the crossthicc AU, and that some of the characters and such was in it, such as Sanquinius who's together with Dolorosa and created the vampires, and Raven being Magnus' daughter, ect. I was curious, are the elder in this AU too, and what about Slaneesh? If both are in it, what's the relationship between the eldar, Isha and Slaneesh like? (Maybe Nurgle too since i mentioned Isha.)

I’ve been leaning, lately, towards more influences from Warhammer Fantasy Battle (not so much age of sigmar, since i don’t run across it that much, though I do like Seraphon as a name the Lizardmen use for themselves to distinguish them from other lizardfolk species), so that’s one detail to bear in mind in a sec.

Secondly, I have to say I like the Eldar! A lot! I actually prefer them to the Imperium of Man as a whole (and let’s be honest; the Imperium is less ‘Warhammer’s Empire, in SPACE’ and more, when you get down to it, the Skaven in human suits), and I honestly consider that the Eldar should have the protagonist spot. Granted, their own end goal of restablishing their old empire, come way may to anyone in their way, is not a good thing, but it’s still less openly malicious than the Imperium’s goals, and certainly less horrible to their own people.

Of course my own take on the Imperium has none of the SUPER EVIL of canon, but that’s besides the point!

In any case, I lean towards the Warhammer take; Slaneesh here predates the Eldar, and has no direct connection to the Eldar or elves in general, though due to them tending towards great passions more intense than normal humans, Slaneesh does have an easier time influencing them.

Isha would be a particular goddess of healing, fertility and life, worshiped widely by elves but likely by others as well; possibly she is a guise of the goddess Dibella as well. (If you have gods and goddesses here that are very similar in terms of personality, influences and general archetypes, they are probably the same deities as seen by different cultures.) She retains a genuinely romantic relationship with Nurgle, though she is not under his influence.

Slaneesh remains a rival goddess to Isha, revered by the most depraved and sense-obsessed of elven society. (The Dread Wolf, a notorious elven god and trickster who has taken to the mortal plane of late as an avatar, probably hates Slaneesh. A LOT.) In truth, though, I am not entirely certain how to handle the Chaos Gods as a whole; the corrupting and eldritch influences they were in canon, given power through mortal passions and mostly caring exclusively about spreading those influences, with absolutely no concept outside that? (Chaos Undivided is probably more genuinely morally neutral or even good, in places, since it has a perspective its smaller aspects lack.)

I’d also like to add that I personally consider, in my canon, that the Great Horned Rat worshiped by the Skaven is Slaneesh (very similar portfolios, general attitudes and interests, the distinciton is that Slaneesh is the elven perspective, and the GHR is the Skaven version, which says a lot about them in question).

[twitchesandstitches]

things crossthicc Hermione has absolutely done:

told off Magnus the Red to his face he’s being an immature and hypocritical jerk and actually getting away with it. somehow she’s become something like the person who is less powerful than him AND less experienced but she has way more emotional intelligence and knows he’s fooling himself, so she’s like the hyper competent subordinate.

shrugged off the fact that as Magnus is the god of human magical potential, he is technically her god. “Perhaps, but he should ACT like it.” he threw a fit but conceded the point.

managed to arrange a peace agreement with the notoriously wary Yangchen without ceding the Great Library’s territory to her. usually yangchen operates on ‘comply or die’, doing diplomacy with her is a great feat

wiped out an entire army division of wicked Commonwealth forces using only her ravenous belly, a teleportation spell, enough magical power to teleport all four thousand of them and all their mechs and psi-pods into her stomach, and all on complete accident. She was AIMING for the bagel, not a belly the size of an aircraft carrier.

has simultaneously had all popular ships for her carry on at once, while adopting a total dommy MILF vibe with them all, apparently without realizing it either.

inspired no less than sixteen solar systems worth of robots doomed to subjugation to throw off their chains, rise up and battle against their creators.

invented an entire new field of magical academics centered around the study of math so complicated it literally distorts the universe.

developed a butt so big it broke a castle. ordinary not that much of an accomplishment, but as the castle in question was a theoretically infinite plane of existence, it raised a LOT of questions.

[twitchesandstitches]

Raven in Crossthicc might generally be considered a tiefling, in a rough way? she certainly has the look.

i figure that CT!Tieflings are not exactly humanoids descended from demons, however, since that wouldn’t create a sufficient amount to make a whole species on one world, let alone enough to make a significant demographic across the whole multiverse. Instead, I imagine that they are the descendants of true fiends who ascended from their origins, one way or another.

Angels, fiends and their like can change from their natures as elemental beings of good and evil. This isn’t a good thing all the time; if a demon can rise, an angel can fall, and woe be to those that suffer at their hands. However, fiends CAN become good, and at some point in the past, prior to various ceasefire agreements between the divine factions that prevent them from acting without mortal assistance, fiends established an empire across the multiverse. This was short lived; internal fighting, conflict and other things are a basic element of being a fiend, but many of them also began to change, influenced by mortal capacity to change their own natures. Not all of them became good, but enough of them did, and the empire soon was destroyed.

However they had many descendants, offspring of fiends adapted to the mortal realms, with the ability to be truly good; tieflings are the mortal races descended from them!

thus, Raven is similar enough to them that she can be considered one, even if her origins are much more direct. Her many children would be considered tieflings, but more eldritch than the usual ones and prone to more monstery appearances and shapes. Since Beast Boy is her main partner, they would also be animalistic in appearance, or chimeric. (Something similar would apply with anyone else; Starfire would likely yield solar-themed feline monsters, for example.)

Raven will, in the course of time, become a mother of monsters, and progenitor to a new and very widespread line of fiend-blooded mortals; these tieflings will probably be known as Magneans or something similar, in reference to their descendent from Magnus the Red.

[twitchesandstitches]

Is Globgor (from SvtFoE) by any chance also connected to Magnus in CrossThicc, or is his physical resemblance to Trigon just a weird coincidence?

Hrm!

well

he does bear quite a lot of SIMILARITY

to the red demon bois

reading through the wiki, it seems ambigious to whether or not he is a mortal being or not; if he definitely WAS, i could say that he could be a descendant of Trigon, a demon in the sense of creatures that have the AESTHETIC but not the moral compulsion to be... well, made of concentrated Evil

however i get the sense from his write up that if he’s not outright immortal, he’s definitely long lived and he has the vibe of a demon king in the line of Trigon

so in that vein, I suggest that like Trigon, Globgor is an offshoot of Trigon, who has refined himself over the eons to become increasingly more powerful and distinct from Magnus. some of these shards have become lesser demons and fiends, and Globgor is one reasonably old shard of him!

specifically he’s a piece of Trigon that was jettisoned for being too potentially good, as Trigon has gone to some lengths to make himself pure evil. Globgor has changed over the ages and become his own thing

this does mean that he IS a shard of Magnus, and thus a potential way for Raven to power up, but he is currently serving a vital role as counterbalancing various conflicting parties in the magical realms he inhabits (as that is where the SvtFOE magical worlds would be located); he may be a monster prone to eating people but he’s not a fiend, in the sense of being incapable of nothing BUT pure evil. he does experience love, and he stonewalls attempts to wipe out entire species

he’s far from innocent but Raven can’t just consume him for her personal gain, there would be consequences and he’s far nicer than you’d expect of a monster from Trigon. MORAL DILEMMAS, HO

[twitchesandstitches]

A few details i wasn’t able to get into the library fic that introduced the Avatar characters to Crossthicc! This was worldbuilding stuff I thought was interesting, but didn’t have room to put into the fic properly.

AVATAR STUFF

Suki is one of the daughters of Kyoshi, who rules a system of islands, and has inherited something of her size, power, and commanding attitude. The Kyoshi Islands are intended to be an analogue to Japan in some respects, and in particular Kyoshi’s daughters lead their own respective dynasties in service to Kyoshi, who is ultimately a Raava-blessed empress uniting them all as a daughter of Heaven.

The girls are considerably older than in canon, and the boys are more or less their canon ages but in a way to give them a different dynamic with the girls. Katara is the eldest child in her generation, with Sokka as her younger brother. Her dynamic with Aang is even more ‘skilled student winds up marrying his gifted mentor’, with a bit more emphasis on Katara being a heroine. The biggest shift is for Zuko; as Azula’s younger brother, he was never in the running for being Fire Lord and was a surplus child. Mai was more or less his bodyguard and they wound up falling for another as a bright spot in each other’s lives.

Way more AU as the cultures of Avatar go. Sun Warriors are still extant, groups such as the Foggy Swamp Tribe are all over the place. The Fire Nation is presently in a huge civil war between Azula and forces that follow Zuko, and Azula is actually more active as a leader than Ozai is; as it stands, the Fire Nation is basically like Warring States-era Japan, but with people who can breathe fire and ride dragons.

On that note, the Fire Lords are more or less just the Fire Sages as they originally were in canon; the Fire Lord is the leader of the Fire Sages, who ride dragons here and commune with them, and have enormous power over the Fire Nation’s people with this influence. Azula has taken over as hereditary right and the most powerful of the family, but Zuko has also earned the right and this has caused the civil war in question, with an unprecedented amount of nobles, warlords and influencers split between the two rather than the usual free for all.

The Air Nomads are mainly based off the people of ancient Mongolia, with Genghis Khan’s example being a pretty obvious one. The Air Nomads who live in this area are explicitly intended to be modeled after them. Yangchen herself is an analogue to the Khan, down to building an empire and unifying her people, and having a strict ‘insult my people and die horribly’ vibe. As a whole the Air Nomads are a lot more diverse than what we see in canon; Air Nomads like the monks we see in canon are still around, but they’re a specific set of clans who live in the mountains near the Southern Water Tribe and have established a monastary there. They support their life style by working out deals to control the wind for the benefit of their Water Tribe neighbors.

Bending here is marked by two things: becoming a giant hyper-curvy lady (as is the main rule in this AU when you become powerful), and physical mutations. Not like the mods used by other, but non-functional attributes such as crystalline skin for Earthbenders, icy body temperature for Waterbenders, blazing skin for Firebenders, and so on. It varies for each individual, gets more intense as they power up and the specific kind of mutation changes when they are bending different things, but all benders are obvious and easily spotted.

Size is linked to bending. The more powerful you are, the bigger. The inverse is true; if you’re bigger, you have bending powers. Characters who canonically have no bending ability but are big here (Mai, Suki, Asami and so on) are benders here, but have very low grade powers or extremely specialized skills. Suki is probably an Earthbender who can do minor tricks with soul to be immovable, Mai and Asami are firebenders (Mai does internal tricks with heat, Asami can bend lightning but ONLY lightning), and so on.

I usually avoid specific sizes, but I did measurements for a tricky line, and worked some things out. Katara is roughly about twenty feet tall here, an average man only going up to her knees. Toph may be about 30 or so while the other girls are smaller than Katara on average, ranging from 12 to 15 feet. Korra is the biggest at at least forty feet. She is very big!

Raava does not serially incarnate here, but instead bonds to multiple human hosts as they are born; the Avatar is thus not a singular entity but a soul fusion of many different people to previous ones and the other living ones, linked and boosted by Raava. Thus, Korra and Aang can be around at the same time, and she can be significantly older than him too. The other Avatars relevant to Aang (Kuruk, Kyoshi, Roku and Yangchen) are, of course, all alive and doing things, being important heroes and leaders.

The owl entity that is mentioned briefly near the end of the story is intended to be Wan Shi Tong, and the Great Library is a combination of his library and the idea of the Akashic Records from Mage: The Awakening. He’s not as anti-mortal as he is in canon, or at least, not allowed to act upon it due to the other powers in the Library. He is a spirit of the idea of knowledge and lore, and acts as a neutral figure within the library’s command.

Bending stuff. Here, bending is not hereditary (though it is dependant on cultural identity); rather, people commune with specific spirits after manifesting an elemental power at a young age. Everyon can use an element appropriate to their culture, though perhaps very limited, and some can commune directly with the spirits, earning their favor and gaining their powers, being physically transformed in some respect and gaining enormous amounts of power. These are like Benders from canon, but they explicitly sought it out. Animals like badger-moles and sky bison are linked to these spirits, too. (There are different ways of earning favor; some women might become hyper pregnant with powerful spirits, for example, and at the end of the pregnancy, transform into their new state and gain their powers. The REAL elemental blessing was inside them all along…!)

The Air Nomads are alive and well!

Aang is ethnically related to the northern Air Nomads who are based on the followers of Genghis Khan; Yangchen’s clans, here. However he was raised among the monastary monks near the Southern Water Tribe, where he met Katara when young and studied under her to learn Waterbending. His heritage carries no stigma, and while he has no concern about his actual family (it being an Air Nomad thing to raise children communally), he wants to know more about his birth-people and ancestral culture.

You may have noticed a reference to ‘red tornado spirits’ in regards to Aang’s tattoos. Double meaning here; Aang’s tattoos were originally based, from what I hear, on the DC robot hero Red Tornado’s markings, and thus the spirits who originally taught the first Air Nomads were related to the spirits that give Red Tornado life force. (It was either that or make Red Tornado this settings version of Tenzin. Still might do that, actually.)

Speaking of Tenzin, Aang and Katara’s children are around for sure, but doing their own thing during the events of this story.

NON AVATAR STUFF

Hermione here is based on my take on her in the fics I’ve written here and there. The other group mentioned in relation to her is intended to be her canonical friendship group, including Harry, Ron, Ginny, Luna and Neville, and possibly others. The Great Library may be Hogwarts, but the castle may exist elsewhere with the wizards and witches here being a specific group that wound up at the Library through a mishap.

Witches like Hermione grow bigger as they get more magically powerful, as generally goes in this AU.

Hermione is intended to be read as black/Afro-British (or a space future analogue) but I’m not sure I’m that great at conveying that in writing.

Hermione’s somewhere between Toph and Katara’s sizes. Smaller than 30 feet, bigger than 20 feet. She’s thicc, hyper busty, and big all over!

Hermione not speaking the language of the Avatar characters is based on a few plot points I’ve had in mind; linguistics in this AU is a serious matter with no ‘translator microbes’ or quick solutions to language barriers. Languages must be learned the hard way. She’s never had any reason to expect to communicate with the people, expecting a life as a solitary scholary with her library chums, so she’s woefully unprepared for this. She will correct this in the future.

Magnus the Red is shamelessly based on the interpretation of him from the youtube web series, If The Emperor HAd A Text To Speech Device. I also included aspects such as the Primarch’s being sensory overload to regula humans, and more mystical overtones than they normally get in 40k. I wrote this with the idea that the Imperium was a pre-cataclysm society in line with the Emperor’s original goals (and had none of the anti-alien issues, due to difference circumstances), and the Emperor has become a god of the idea of humanity as its own thing, with the Primarchs as different reflections of that: Magnus embodies humanity’s magical potential as well as the drive to learn and know.

Magnus doesn’t have an exact size. He is huge, yes, but his bizarre magical nature means that he is much larger than he would seem to be. He’s also a shapeshifter, so make of that what you will.

The figures with him are basically Space Marines: Thousand Sons and Blood Ravens, if it wasn’t obvious enough. Gabriel Angelos, one of the canon Blood Raven leaders from the Dawn of War games, is mentioned briefly.

Obliquely referred to a few times is Optimus Prime; in the main events of the AU his absence has been notable, so this is where he’s been all this time; searching for an answer to what has become of Primus, and unable to return to the Autobots. Grimlock is gonna be PISSED.

The Unseen University’s faculty from Discworld are present here as more comedic elements of the faculty running the library, and may be seen on some other time. They’re not human here, since I’m trying to avoi the idea that humans are super-important in-universe. Ridcully, for example, is most likely a krogan. The magic they employ is a cross between Potterverse spells and classic D&D magic. (I used to headcanon that potterverse magic was particular to humans, but i may be moving away from that.)

I originally intended there to be several characters drawn from religious/monk origins for use as library characters to later join the Endowed Fleet and converse with the characters in this one, but there were too many characters as is. Two of the most important would have been Zenyatta from Overwatch (here a full on magic user and Guru Pathik-analogue) and Scar from Fullmetal Alchemist (donated his brother’s teachings to the library, stayed there to study as a religious duty)

There was originally an in-universe lesson about how their world fits into the cosmology, but i couldn’t find a natural place to slot it in. In brief, they’re technically one of the mortal universes, but exist in a demi-realm deep within the realms of magic and swimming in spirits, so they’re not really connected to the mortal universes and unless you know what you’re doing, there’s no real way to get there. This universe is mainly empty but rich with magic, so it’s possible for people who find their way there to establish new worlds there.

[twitchesandstitches]

The Great Library, In The World of Elements

Crossthicc fic introducing two major players: the Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra ladies as older MILFs, their husbands and relatives as being younger than them as oppose to canon, and the Great Library that holds all knowledge, or is at least trying to. Featuring appearances by Warhammer 40k’s Magnus the Red, Hermione Granger from Potterverse if you squint and tilt your head, and worldbuilding all over the place!

On a world apart from all mortal universes and inaccessible by most normal means, there was a world of elements, and spirits, and upon it, a ruin had been found, carrying priceless treasures.

Perhaps one of the most important of those had been an unassuming book. It was among the things found by Katara of the Southern Water Tribe and her group of friends, and it was not long after that they had received a most unusual invitation, which they were en route to accept.

In the mortal universes, there were legends of a Great Library; said to be founded by the spirit of knowledge itself and guarded by a thousand sorcerers, overseen by the greatest prophet of Primus, guided by the god of human magical might, and many other grand tales. It was said this library held all works, gathering them all to it, even the ones that were logically impossible for it to have; all mortal thought and knowledge, the stories went, wound up here. But most people thought it was just a legend. It wasn’t thought to be a real place, except by fleet-based weirdos. There wasn’t really a library bigger than a universe and filled with every book to have been destroyed, of relics kept intact past the doom of their civilizations, and every lost big of knowledge and technique preserved forever, immortalized and guarded. And lost technologies, from shipcraft to terraforming, the schematics and Standard Template Constructs intact.

If the people who told those stories knew where that airship was going, they would have thrown a jealous fit.

But, in any case, the world upon which this transpired was somewhat isolated from the test of existence, making it a pretty safe place for such a library to… exist, if that was the right word for such an eldritch location.

The separation between the shallowest parts of the Astral Sea and the mortal realms were not quite as rigid as mortal scholar supposed. Go deep enough, and it was true that you would enter a different state of existence than mortals were normally accustomed to. The Fade; the Warp, the realms of magic; call them by any of the names given over the eons, but they were not separate from the physical universes. Degrees of separation could make the distinctions extremely thin indeed, so you might slip through them with ease.

Katara, Chieftess of the Southern Water Tribes (and mother to a large portion of it), instructor to two avatars of the world-spirit Raava, and perhaps one of the greatest sorcery-shapers in all the world she knew, had something of a scholarly bent and so she knew approximately some of this.

She knew, for example, that many thousands of years ago (perhaps ten thousand, perhaps more; the records varying in the telling, but such was the way of stories), a great cataclysm had struck all existence. Had it been an invasion of the utterly alien raksha, the fair ones who dwelled beyond the world and came forth, taking the very stars and all living things into their nightmare places as toys and slaves for their tortures? Perhaps the dark goddess of extinction and undeath, Unicron (she who devours All), had risen forth, and set about ending all existence to remake it in her image. And perhaps the fiends who dwelled in the most wretched realms of belief had burst forth, descending upon all worlds to enslave them or slaughter them, as befit their mood.

Perhaps all of those things, are none. Katara didn’t know, and not knowing rankled her. Not even the Library held that knowledge, when it was said to contain all lore lost to memory  in the greater multiverse.

Perhaps, she considered as the airship her family rode upon neared its destination, it was a good time to brush up her favorite students on their lore.

Across a particularly challenging part of the world, over steppes and mountains where a branch of the Air Nomads more warlike than others had established their domain and fiercely protected against Water Tribe hunters and Fire Nation soldiers alike, the storms were fierce, the wind almost a living thing. It probably was. Katara heard a distant voice upon the wind, booming and rumbling in the echoes between crashes of thunder. A challenging voice, commanding them to not break the laws of the land.

This was Air Nomad land. The mountains all across the world belonged to the Air Nomads, and each mountain, each steppes, they all had their own character that shaped the world. The spirits spoke to all who worked with the elements, and it made their culture what it was. The Air Nomads who took to the desert did not fly but piloted sand-boats across the sand; the nomads who lived near the pastures of the Fire Nation’s marshes were in constant conflict with them, and the Air Nomads who took to the mountains were distant and lived almost in the air itself, relying on their sky bison herds to survive.

These mountains produced people whom it was extremely unwise to offend. It was said that Yangchen, great khan of all the Air Nomad clans and lands and fiefdoms, was a soft-spoken soul who nonetheless treated any breaking of her people’s territory a grievous slight, and could call down the hurricane upon them. She was as large as a hurricane, a giantess of a woman who strode between valleys with a single step, her curves taking up all the space inbetween.

All women, when they swelled with the power of the spirits and the elements, got larger as they got stronger.

Katara did not see her, even in the distance, but nonetheless her presence was still there in a way; she knew there were Air Nomad scouts watching there, or perhaps at pasture and silently observing them, and should anything… untoward or objectionable happen… Yangchen would know about it at once. You did not violate Air Nomad law. Katara was most familiar with the mountain monasteries near her homeland, and monks there subsisted by growing their own food and trading their power over the air to give bountiful harvests to their neighbors. They were pacifists, but they dealt with offenses by simply withdrawing the blessings of the wind and protection from the storm. You kept an agreement with them, or they let the wind take you. Around here, there was probably a more direct route that involved ostrich-horses and quartering.

Their airship was a Fire Nation design, but Air Nomads who took the steppes near the caldera heartland and enjoyed a healthy rivalry with the dragon riders had made it their own; taking inspiration from Fire clans who spent their entire lives on the ocean in communal home-ships, they considerably expanded the design, lightened it, modified it to glide with the help of sky bison teams and airbending prowess, and produced a lightweight and streamlined airship barely distinct from its envelope. It really couldn’t take much hit, but as Katara had no intention of risking the wrath of Yangchen or the caretakers of the great library, that wasn’t an issue.

She looked out the desk, heavily sheltered against pelting rain and strong winds and the worst of the cold. She and her family had traveled the world in this fashion; herself and her young husband Aang, her brother Sokka and his wife/combat instructor Suki, Fire Lord Zuko (leader of the religious Fire Sage order and taking some time out, since the perpetual civil war between he and his elder sister Azula had cooled for the moment) and his wife Mai, perhaps the greatest assassin in the known world, and Toph Bei Fong, twenty-times battle champion of the ring and leader of the most notorious crime family in the world even if she was doing her best to reform them. With them, too, was her student Korra, and the resident mechanic and innovator of this ariship’s improvements, Asami Sato.

Katara turned aside, so suddenly that her massive breasts swung with a faintly audible sloshing sound. Women who walked with the spirits grew larger, and the larger they became as they got stronger, and Katara was very strong. For the sake of convenience she had let her power be concealed just to fit into the airship, but she still stood so tall that a large man would be no taller than her knee; not even the mightiest krogran of the Earth Kingdom’s expansions, nor the tallest necrofriggian specter could stand any bigger than the lowest part of her broad thighs.

The blessings of the spirits shone bright upon her, her skin marked with the bright blue tattoos of the Water Tribe upon her dark brown skin and shining with a faint silvery light; the markings upon her face were the angled lines given to adult women to celebrate them mastering all the skills to contribute fully (angular lines on the forehead, spanning cheek and nose, and several lines running up the chin), and the Waterbending markings all over her body were largely the same, flowing and curling over her body and seeming to move, sometimes still and jagged, other times rippling and flowing in tides.

Then there were the… obvious physical gifts. Many years of refining her powers, and many children born from the fertility bestowed upon her by the spirits, had also given her a fairly plump belly that stuck out a bit on her broad, motherly figure. Her thick, black hair flowed down behind her all the way to the ground, riding along her elaborate mantle of office, the small wind chimes given to her by the Air Nomad elders as a marriage gift dangling from it. Not even her heavy furs and warm clothing could conceal just how huge her figure was, nor how much her enormous backside distorted her clothing.

“We’ll be there soon!” She said brightly, smiling down at the much smaller (for the most part) figures around her.

She would, she realized with a numb thrill, be one of the first living people in a long, long time, enter the Great Library itself.

And be the only one of those select few to be invited there.

Aboard this private room, fashioned after a communal living room in her people’s style with a great fire in the middle of the room, her husband and student Aang sat, dressed warmly in a white coat made by the sheared fur of his sky bison, who was helping keep the ship on track. A young man of slight build, broadening somewhat by the physical effort of simply being her lover when she was several times his size, sixteen times as heavy as she looked and even stronger than she looked, he gazed at her with solemn eyes, his head shaved in the style of the monastic Air Nomads she knew and elaborately tattooed much as she was, through the Air Nomads favored intricate designs that weaved into large arrows upon the forehead, across the back and hands, and down the legs, as proscribed by the red tornado spirits who had taught the first Air Nomad sages.

Mixed in with those, two, were the markings of the other elemental nations. It was hard to know this, as he was warmly dressed and most of his elegant form was covered up, obscuring the tattoos, but Katara knew them all quite intimately, as much as the curve of his limbs or the taste of his lips. In deference to his people’s traditions, though, they were the same light blue as his Airbending master tattoos, and as he wasn’t powered up, they weren’t too bright at the moment.

The others were around the room. Sitting on a big poof was her younger brother Sokka, dozing away, his head in the lap of a rather larger woman, Suki, and around her neck was the betrothal necklace he had made for her, looking quite small around her imposing frame and threatening to vanish into her broad cleavage. Asami Sato, the long-time adventure partner and giftfriend to Katara’s other student Korra, busied herself with an elemental core on the fritz, her tall frame mostly dominated by her absolutely enormous hair and the magical cybernetics she had installed, electrical static and vapor rising from her as she produced a number of brass tools from her arm.

Lounging by herself was the amazonian frame of Toph Bei Fong, larger than anyone else in the room save Korra by a huge margin, her massive body extremely wide and rippling with bulky muscle and the signs of her element: small crystals grew from her skin, metal interlaced with stone, and her blind eyes (all but hidden beneath her shockingly long, heavy hair) looked like they were made of granite. She slugged back a drink of something probably alcoholic, her breasts so massive they were cradled by her biceps and defined belly.

There were a few others (such as Mako and Bolin, two gladiators who had come to serve Toph as a kind of bodyguard), but the last of the family unit was Fire Lord Zuko, leader of the religious order of dragon riders and fire sages that had taken his side in the civil war between him and his sister Azula that left their homeland in a cluster of warring states. AT the moment times were calm, allowing him to go on this pilgrimage with the others. He sat docilely in the lap of his wife Mai; like the other girls, older than him, and much larger than him. Her thighs alone were wider than his whole body, and he looked like a little doll sitting in her lap, her huge breasts sandwiching the top of his head as she ran her fingers through his hair. He looked like he might be asleep, wrapped up in her robes like a blanket.

Mai herself, stern and silent, let a rare moment of open tenderness as she ran fingers like actual blades through his hair. She let herself rest fully upon him, perhaps warming herself with his strong body.

Katara hated to ruin the various tender moments going on around her, and she opted to focus instead on Aang. She smiled at him. He smiled back, and at his side there was a book. A very large book, perhaps a tome, and upon its cover there was the symbol of a cogwheel.

KAtara was tempted to ask him to hand it over and allow her to peruse it, just one last time, and put herself to the task of doing the impossible. To wring meaning out of letters that absolutely no one had seen before, to understand the meaning of what kind of Bending art this was teaching. It was an authority on teaching some kind of Bending and martial arts, that was certain, but it was impossible to say what it conveyed, within context.

It looked like the kind of thing preserved by masters and passed on, conveying philosophy and techniques, and the soul of the bending style it taught. And most of it was written, in a language no one had ever seen before, with no relation to any living language. Establishing even the slightest rudimentary understanding would take decades of work for the finest minds in the world.

The visual aids clearly showed moves. Poses, katas to position through and perform, but not what they were manipulating or communing with; no spiritual insignias except variations on cogwheels. And the moves it did show bore some resemblance to, say, Earthbending, for example, similar to some of the metal manipulation schools, but far more rigid and unyielding in a way that allowed for no deviance. Earth always held an element of sudden potential shift. This was something else altogether.

A massive bending manual, written in a completely alien language, its mysteries distant. Katara thought it best to just leave it be.

“We’ll be coming up to our destination soon,” she said softly to Aang. “And then.. Well, we’ll see what’s next.”

He replied, “Whatever you think is best, Chieftess?”

Katara smiled faintly. He had more or less matured underneath her rule and seemed to feel she ought to always be in charge. “You don’t have to be so formal when it’s us.”

Aang smiled back with a hint of impishness. “I can if I want to~!”

The much larger woman sitting besides Aang, who even sitting down was even taller than Katara and Toph, gave him a happy punch to the shoulder. “That’s the spirit!” Korra shouted cheerfully, boisterousness resonating off her every word. A Water Tribe woman like Katara, also of the Southern branch but from a more isolated branch that spent a lot of time wrestling spirits for fun, she was absolutely huge; her breasts were nearly twice the size of her entire upper body and were deeply tattooed with some of the most elaborate tattoos any of them had ever seen. Water Tribe womanhood markings upon her face and water honors upon her forearms and hips, yes, but the green geometric patterns of the Earth Kingdom showed her attunement to soil and stone and mineral things, she bore the same tattoos Aang did, and the Fire Nation’s sage letters were scripted on her body, and the flame iconography of the Sun Warriors as well. Red, greens and blues met all over her body, on her breasts and sleek muscles, so that her body was a tapestry of unity.

It was more obvious than Aang’s similar pan-tradition markings. Korra, after all, made a point of showing much more of her gigantic curves and beefy build. And upon their backs was the great white mark of Raava, indicating that she had chosen both of them as vessels for her power; a broadly triangular white shape, adorned with blue sigils, and tendrils embracing their lower back and sides.

Katara turned back, the night beginning to come. The sun was fading (Zuko stirring briefly, and then stopping), and soon the moon would rise, and Katara felt herself swelling as the power came to her. For the moment, it was only a momentary tightness where her breasts fetched up against her robes.

The airship drifted onwards past a circular outcropping of hills, dark obsidian and still frozen in the violent upheaval that had made them eons ago. The ground beneath them looked like it ought to have been a crater but arched up in completely different materials than what would be expected, and they were very regular for hills. No, too large for hills. They were mountains, arching high into the sky,

But agan, no. There had never been a truly natural shape that regular. These were not mountains. They were massive buildings.

The airship soon had to drift upwards as the mountain-sized mass of buildings grew closter. They arched bigger and bigger, dominating the horizon, drowning it out, blocking it, and casting a massive shadow upon the nearby sea trickling through the shattered ground. The buildings glistened, pyramids and spires shaping them into a fortress against time and invaders, and age emanated from it as a physical force.

The skyline was more of this, a massive complex larger than entire countries, and it continued going on, and on, and on… in many ways, it felt too big, so large that their minds genuinely could not process it, the building’s true extend beginning in some other set of dimensions, and looking at it too long or too hard would do troublesome things to the mind.

It did, if you looked at it from the right angle, arch up into a central edifice that sort of resembled a massive tree, and with the secondary structure sprouting off it, the massive complex looked… well.

Sokka glanced out, as everyone stared at the imposing sight, and he managed to regain enough composure to comment, “Looks like a really, REALLY big pineapple.”

The multiverse itself seemed to gape at this.

Suki squinted. “You know… it kind of does.”

“I’m calling it the Knowledge Pineapple now,” Asami said from the corner.

“Me too!” Sokka agreed.

Zuko groaned. “You can’t call it that! WHat if they take offense and decide to attack for the insult!?”

Aang considered this. “I don’t know. The Great Khan won’t kill us just for making a joke.”

“It’s not her we are worried about,” Mai said darkly.

Slowly they approached, and it took so long that even as they flew by on the wind, night truly fell. There was only a bit of window between ground and buildings to see the sky now, but one might think that the night sky outside was… strange. The stars moved, not fixed points of light in a void but an ever shifting and fluctuating mess of constellations… real ones, actual visible images flickering forth. The dreams of other universes, Katara had understood it, myths taking visible shape for them, impressed by the powerful magic they lived within and blanketing their world. Their world swam in a sea of spiritual power, and it was one reason that the spirits could come freely into the physical world when this was not always possible unless invited.

To everyone on the airship, the sky was always like that.

Katara knew that it was not like this, in the rest of the material plane. It was a fascinating notion, and sometimes, she wondered what it would be like to walk the ground of another world, beneath an alien sky. Standing side by side with people who knew truths other than the ones she did, who took part in communities far from her own…

She tried to let it go. No ship would ever come down from the sky and come to ask her and her family to see other worlds.

Now they were close enough to the building to see the flags bright, flapping and warning all trespassers of the doom awaiting them should they attempt to invade. The symbol of something that looked like a dreadful owl. Something ancient, primeval, had made this place, and it was still there. WAiting, guarding. And always, always wary.

A sign resembling a boar’s face, flanked by four other animals: a lion, a badger, a snake and an eagle. The sign of an old organization of scholars studying a kind of magic specific to humans, or so it was said, and whom had been given shelter at this place as part of an ancient bargain. In return, they protected it and studied there, with all their potent powers.

There were many others, but one of the most dreadful resembled a great eye, flame surrounding it.

The symbol, lore spoke, of a thousand sons. A thousand daughters, and those who came like bloody ravens to the slaughter, all children of magic itself in human form, gazing with its great eye upon all who would threaten prosperity and knowledge.

This place was well-guarded indeed. It was old, likely older than their world, than the multiverse itself.

It was, simply, the Library. The first Library in all existence. Within its walls, so it was said, there were records of every thought that had been ever had. Copies of every book and scroll and tome to have ever been written… including the ones erased from time, retroactively. Nothing was lost, at least not here, and even records from before the cataclysm had survived here. For every thing ever lost to ignorance and random destruction, it was saved and preserved here. Every relic stolen away and forgotten or crushed, a copy of it was safeguarded here.

A cosmic museum, an omniscient library, a preservation of all knowledge in existence, a bulwark against the constant destruction that assailed the multiverse on what must have been a weekly basis. To go in there was said to be the biggest honor almost anyone could ever receive, and it required years of constant work and duty to its wardens before you were even allowed to approach it, for fear of its wonders being misused.

Katara felt humbled, she felt thrilled, she felt a long of things but mostly she felt kind of numb. Not once had she ever imagined ever being allowed to come here. Not even in an idle daydream; it was simply unthinkable to imagine being able to freely come into the Great Library. Be allowed to seek a specific answer or to answer a mystery, or recieve the aid of the scholars who studied the wisdom of all existence? Yes, perhaps. But never to just be allowed to come in and look at whatever you pleased…!

A shape appeared suddenly at the window. A long shape, not quite owl, nor quite bear, vaguely humanoid and riding upon a bony creature that combined elements of dragon and horse. “Come!” It barked, great bulk shifting upward.

“YEEK!” Bolin squeaked, falling backwards, and even the most hardened of them, from Toph to Katara herself, recoiled at the aura coming off it; a sense of… not menace, but of power overwhelming. A spirit, of what they didn’t know, but it definitely gave off the impression that menace could be on the table any moment.

“Your pilot has been notified,” the owl-creature rumbled, now somewhat sedate. BEhind it, thousands more materialized out of the air itself, each riding its own steed. None carried weapons, and none needed them. Within their place of power, this realm they guarded, they were deadlier than a volcano at point blank range. “You will land soon. Please be courteous, as we have shown you courtesy.”

They all settled down as the owl creatures melted away, vanished into mist as suddenly as they had arrived. And a tall outcropping twisted towards them, flattening out and reshaping itself into a flat surface. Stairs appeared upon it, going inward, and a small group appeared, waiting for them. Their airship turned, and the heat dying down in the envelope, the sky bison soothed, the airship lowered.

Asami swallowed. “Well. Moment of truth, everybody…”

“Maybe they won’t kill us all,” Mako said morosely. “Or maybe this is a big trap.”

“Can we please try to be a little more upbeat?” Aang asked plaintively. “I really don’t think a library as important as this is going to hurt anyone.”

“Hmm,” Mai said. She had been in politics too long to trust anyone, ever.

They exited the airship, and when they came down, the group waiting for them was broadly humanoid. They were all foxes, human in shape; some of their faces were close to human, other long snouts, and all of them had figures similar to Katara and Korra. Their number of tails - anywhere from two to five - had Katara worried. Spirits too, perhaps seekers of knowledge, and very powerful ones at that. Was something trying to impress them, or send a message?

You are being greeted by spirits that could wipe out your countries with a flick of a finger. They bow to you, graceful and courteous, but before them, you hold no power.

Remember: you are here at our sufferance. Do not betray our trust.

At least, that is how Katara saw it.

One of the fox spirits spoke all their names; or most of them. They paused and considered Asami, Mako, and Bolin. “These are your own guests, we trust?” The bustiest and largest of the fox women said, with more tails than the others, but when she spoke, it was with perfect synchronicity with the others.

“Yes,” Katara said thinly.

“Very well. Please. Do you have the relic that has been sought out?”

Aang showed them the book.

One of the smaller fox women bent over to study it. It was probably an accident that causes her robes to slip and show off so much furry cleavage. “Oh, yes!” She said, bending back up with a happy bark. “Yes, indeed. It is genuine!”

“Did you really think it wouldn’t be?” Aang said, sounding hurt. Suki, Toph and some of the others sounded more acerbic about it.

The maidens giggled all together. “We ask you, please do not take offense. But we must be absolutely certain, all the time. This is a very special ocassion, we will tell you, but there are rules that must always be observed and never strayed from. Please, do not think less of us for it.”

“We understand,” Aang said, bowing low in the manner appropriate to spirits of their nature, and after a moment, the others followed his example. When it came to spirits, Aang was never wrong.

Together with the fox spirits, they entered walked down into the stairway, and there was a momentary feeling of discomfort, as if they were being wrenched, of simultaneously being in one place but another and slipping both ways…

And then it stopped, and suddenly they were somewhere else, all together.

“Oh,” said one of the fox maidens. “A little surprise for you. The Master of the Library wishes to see you personally!”

It took a moment for any of them to process this, though. For a moment, all Katara could think was ‘the carpet is very nice’. She slowly got up, and progressed to thinking about how the stonework of the floor was nice too, very polished and smooth. She looked up, and saw…

She looked up, and up, and up, and she kept on looking. There came no end to places to look, and the distance was a horizon with no limit. Perhaps somewhere, there was a ceiling, but it was so distant that there were clouds up there.

The walls were higher even that the mountainous forms the Great Library’s exterior suggested. Every single inch of them was devoted to storage and display. Great rotating racks of books, arranged into massive spirals and twisting around into entirely different realms of space, thoughts transcribed into books and pulled from the ether into physical form, and several book volumes appeared on the spot and were marked ‘Ruminations on Puzzle Cubes’. Next to that shelf was a similar one, but dedicated to scrolls, and descending from it was a dizzying complexity of reading devices for scrolls; magnifying glasses set over flat planes, treadmills to pan through the scrolls for those beings that did not have the patience to sit or the physiology, each scroll sitting in a magically preserved slot by the hundreds of trillions of thousands, each one with a tiny plaque indicating name and author. Those that had never been fully written, or could not have existed, were marked with worrying statements and odd letters.

And not far from them, there were the displays. A case holding a sword that glowed faintly, and it was not a replica at all, but a permanent spell that perfectly captured its image, a three dimensional picture. Sokka had recovered ,and went over to examine it. “The fae sword Caliburn, wielded by the King of the Sidhe in the battle between the Tuatha and the Fomorians. Current location lost to the ages.” HE squinted. Below that was a list of suspected places to begin looking, and appropriate rewards. His eyes widened. “Okay that is a lot of stuff to give for a single sword. And… wait, bless the hero with what kind of magical power? ...Do I really want the power to throw continents around…?”

“We find it is a rhetorical question,” a fox woman said smoothly.

The others began to migrate and look around. Zuko went straight to a roll of scrolls and exclaimed that here, was the writings of a Fire Sage long thought lost for eight hundred years in a fire. The plaque stated it had indeed been lost, and so the scroll appeared here, immortalized and preserving its knowledge of producing fire that could heal injuries and wounds. Mai marveled at a record of smithing techniques relying on automated hammer mechanisms that, she vowed, they would strive to improve upon once they got back home. Everyone found something to admire: museum displays of wondrous relics or still lives of immortalized scenes. Scrolls of something important to them, or just very interesting.

And they had to stay careful not to wander off. One of the fox attendants warned them, to stray off course was to risk vanishing into the depths and never being seen again. “Mortals are not well equipped to understand the navigation of our library,” they said gravely. “Corridors move upon their own. Staircases shift depending on the day of the week. And doorways do not always lead the same place twice. And of course, we are not exactly in the same set of dimensions you may be used to.”

Katara frowned. “What do you mean?”

One pointed upwards, towards a wall. Where Katara had thought she had seen an edifice, too far away to make out, was the edge of a corridor… twisted and bending so that it was on its side and, at the same exact time, enclosed, upside down, and still obeying the normal laws of gravity from its own perspective. Toph, Aang and Suki had wandered off and were walking on what looked like the ceiling of that distant room.

Katara gaped. “How!? They were just next to me a second ago?”

A fox shrugged. “They turned the corner. They lead to… places.”

“WHAT IS HAPPENING!?“ Suki cried out, clutching her head and trying not to be sick as she stood on a ceiling and looked at a floor above her, the whole world gently rotating in absurd degrees.

“Huh. This is… difficult,” Aang said, trying to not get ill.

Toph tried to walk, but the sense of stone she got from the world around here was sending her some extremely distressing things. She started to talk about stone that was in ten places at once and also floating by itself, starways flipping all on their own, bookshelves intersecting when no one was looking, and walls pretending to be doors, and gave up.

Fortunately, by this point someone a bit more experienced with mortal problems arrived. A human woman, built on broadly the same look as Korra and Katara but a good deal softer, came in. Her skin was dark brown, her bushy hair a dense cloud, and her robes a hooded style unfamiliar to any of the group, cut at the sides to show netting lining her thighs all the way down to sensible slippers. At her side was a wooden instrument, a heavy wand, and beside her were several other humans like her, some very pale-skinned like the people from the more wet climates, others more like the nations Katara had personally visited or the woman herself. She said nothing to them, but spoke in a language unfamiliar to Katara, and one of her attendants left and returned, a short time later, with the others, rescued from getting lost.

She wasn’t a Bender. She didn’t have any of the physical mutations associated with the spirit’s blessings. But she was powerful, and somewhere between Katara and Korra in height and outrageous buxom-ness; magical power radiated off her like heat off a furnace. Her elaborate and prim robes, trimed in red and with lion imagery with golden embroidering, struggled before the weight of breasts so big they could have been seen from behind her, and with lower slopes somewhere around her upper belly. They could have been at least

Behind her were much larger figures; some of them were men, some were women. Both were even larger than the new arrival, who just emananted the vibes of ‘scholar’. So did these, but they also suggested ‘battlemage’ to her. They radiated with power, some of them mutated with claws and scaled skin or feathered hair, and all of them were enormously wide and altered in a fashion hard to make out beneath their broad robes, and some appeared to be bound into armored suits, dust flowing within. All wore the symbol of the flaming eye, and some had the image of a red raven with a single drop of blood upon it.

But all of this paled beneath the gigantic figure that made even Katara, Toph and Korra feel small.

He wasn’t, technically speaking, that large. He was enormous to a human, but no more than Katara herself. Yet, somehow, he felt far larger than was humanly possibly, as if this chamber could not contain his full size. His robes, a vibrant gold and blue, seemed reminiscent of an elaborate fashion; Katara did not know what the people of ancient Egypt dressed like, nor did she know of Egypt, but she would have instantly thought of them if she had.

It was hard to make out the man’s features. To the mind, they shifted and flowed like water, ever shifting, impossibly to remember. But somehow, if she had known of ancient Egypt, she would also have thought of them with this man. But what she did see was not dark skin, but red, bright like flame. The only shade more intense was that of his mane of hair, mutating into feathers.

Large horns sprouted from his forehead and… his chest? His arms were bigger than Katara herself, his body seemingly designed for war, and he was massive, absolutely huge and brawny, and magic crackled off him, streams of energy barely contained in his veins and muscles, and his eye glowed with it, as if an avatar for change and power itself, magic with a face and name-

Just one eye. Did he have a great eye like a cyclops? Did he have one eye gone, perhaps traded away or scarred? Her memories told her different stories. He had one eye. That was all she could say afterwards.

Looking directly at him was… difficult, too. She was used to dealing with things mortals were not normally meant to speak with, but even she was dumbfounded by the presence of the entity now looming over them. Even the spirits around them looked intimidated.

“Greetings!” The entity proclaimed in a jovial tone with a heavy accent she couldn’t quite place. “I do apologize for the wait. I didn’t know you had arrived until SOMEONE-” He shot a look at a distant shadow lurking about, a vaguely owl-shaped thing that shifted just out of sight. “Happened to mention to me that you had arrived. I am so very sorry, I wished to be here to see the receiving of the artifact!”

There was a long pause.

“Oh, yes. And greet you as well, I suppose,” he added as an afterthought.

“I’m sorry,” Sokka said, trying to be brave and having a hard time just looking at this figure. “But… who are you…?”

He raised his one eyebrow. “Oh? You don’t know who I am?” A pair of massive wings, feathers bifurcated between blue and red, flapped irritably. “Really? Hrm. You do know where you are, yes?”

“The Great Library, the cosmic repository of all things lost and remembered alike,” Aang said.

“Ah yes, good. One of the vessels of the World Spirit, I take? Well, you’re right. So you know of this place and came here, but you don’t know who I am?” He looked positively injured. “Why not!?”

“They don’t put you in the stories, father,” one of the attendants said gently.

“...Waaait. They don’t!?” The figure looked absolutely horrified. “Why not!?”

“Apparently you scare people.”

“...That’s the point, isn’t it!?” He turned around on them, frowning and radiating energy. “Well then! Do me a favor, you all, and spread the word. When you leave here today, tell all of the Master of the Library, it’s protector, chief cataloguer, and greatest guardian-”

Toph said, in dire tones, “Magnus the Red.”

The eldritch and yet oddly human entity looked pleased. This, it seemed, was Magnus the Red. “Oh? So you HAVE heard of me! ...Did an attendant tell you or something…?”

“Nah. Popped up in one of the books confiscated by my crime boss dad.” Toph scratched her head. “Had a guy read it to me and, uh, he kind of freaked out when he read your name. I followed up on it and you’re… famous.”

He preened. “Well, that is good to here.” The woman standing beside him gave him a poke in the sides as if to say ‘get on with it’. “Fine, fine! This young woman is Miss Granger, Chief Librarian of this particular section of things. She’s here to help you find your way. Do be patient as she can’t actually speak your language.”

“Wait,” Suki said. ”You sent us a guide and… she doesn’t speak any of our languages?”

“Yes?”

“Why?”

Magnus sighed. “Because, she is Chief Librarian.”

“Okay…?”

“And it was thought you should be shown around by the Chief Librarian.”

“But… she needs translators to get her points across.”

“See!? That’s what I said! But… bah.” Miss Granger shook her head, noting the tone, and gave Magnus a look, and asked something. Magnus replied to her, and continued. “Okay, fine, so perhaps we are trying to impress a little bit here,” he said testily. “It wasn’t my idea, believe me. I had a big presentation all ready to go; lots of illusions, fireworks, a small song-and-dance number neatly introducing you to the particulars of the library-”

“Aw, I like musicals,” Aang said sadly.

Korra shrugged. “Eh. They’re overrated.”

Magnus pointed at them both. “You! Monk! I like you! And tall person. I don’t like you. Your taste is terrible.”

“Hey…”

“In any case, I was overruled,” he said primly. “Other elements of our faculty voted against my plan. Wanting things to be polite and sensible… as if that’s any fun…”

Miss Granger coughed, as if to say ‘please focus’, or something along those lines.

Aang stepped forward, and all zeroed in on him. He held the book out. “I believe this is what you wanted?” he asked.

Magnus took it, gently and reverently. “Yes,” he said, softly now. “It is indeed. And I thank you for coming.” He cleared his throat, getting back into the swing of things. “I, Master of the Great Library, Magnus the Red, aspect of the God of Humanity itself and embodiment of humanity’s magical potential, do make this bargain with you. In exchange for this priceless artifact, I grant you full access to the Great Library’s works until your dying day, save if you prove yourselves unworthy. I give you one final chance to decline.” HE held the book away with some discomfort, as if horrified by the prospect of giving it back, but there were greater rules at play than his own preferences.

He said, with an air of great finality, “Do you agree to these terms, and permit us to safeguard and study this relic of bygone ages?”

Aang gave it. “I will, and do.”

“I do as well,” Katara said.

The others, in turn, said the same, earnest and truthfully.

Magnus took the book, and tucked it away. Elsewhere, in the library, it appeared in a dozen copies, which assistants immediately took to study. Miss Granger seemed to sense this and she half-turned, perhaps instinctively about to go off and do some research upon it, even be the first to crack the code. “I thank you.” He snapped his fingers, and for a moment, the symbol of a key appeared on their foreheads, and vanished. “Now, you may return here at any time, and study whatever you wish, until the end of your days. I thank you again for safeguarding this treasure, and permitting us to safeguard it in return.” This had the air of ritual about it.

“You are welcome,” Aang said, returning the ritual word for word, and manners for manners. “I thank on, on behalf of us all, for allowing us to come to this sacred place.”

They bowed to one another, and it was finished.

“Well then!” Magnus clapped his heads, and several of his Thousand Sons (and Daughters, and Blood Ravens) glided up to assist. “You’re the first real visitors we’ve had in some time and I would like to take this honor to show you around. There are some amazing mind-bending spectacles I would delight in showing you…”

“Could you not?” Sokka said uncomfortably. “The ceiling thing was bad enough.”

“Oh, come now! It grows on you, it truly does.”

“But we don’t want it to.”

“Don’t speak for everyone, that’s just rude.”

Korra interrupted, just in time. “Um, sir? The Red?”

“Yes…?”

“If you don’t mind me asking-”

“All questions are valid, except the really ridiculous, embarrassing ones.”

“I gotta know. What is this book you asked us to find, and why would you give us such an honor as letting us in here all the time just for one book?”

Magnus gazed at her levelly. “Hrm. That is a good question. And to it, I pose another. For something important enough, wouldn’t any prize be worth a fraction of it?”

“I mean, sure.” Korra shrugged. “If you’re talking about something important enough. But none of us could figure out what was in the book, or read it. It’s in a language no one speaks anymore, or can read.”

“There are none,” Magnus said. “Who do. The language family is still in use, but so changed that even those fluent wouldn't realize that it is an ancestor to their own languages. The language in this book,” and here he showed it to them again, tapping it with a big red finger. “Stopped being spoken before the cataclysm that destroyed the multiverse ever happened.”

There was a deep, significant stop in, just, everything.

“How is this book still even around? It should have decayed before then!” Katara said, as the others muttered their shock at the book surviving so long. It ought to have rotted long before then.

“Powerful magic, I suspect. This is a singular record of a long lost civilization… no. Not a civilization. This was long before even my time, before our species ever existed. It tells the story of a magical art similar to what you practice among your people. Bending, you call it?”

“Yes.” Katara explained to him, though he likely already knew, that it was common to create works detailing the philosophical underpinnings of Bending; the way the spirits worked, and the great animals who were in tune with their power, the flow of the world in response to those elements, and how they shaped the substance of the physical world.

“Yes,” Magnus said thoughtfully. “It reminds you of that, too?” Katara agreed that it did. “Hrm. That is interesting, because the only thing we know about it thus far is that it is perhaps the only surviving record of something that created… all of this.”

“All of what?” Korra asked.

Magnus waved his hand dismissively. “Everything. You know. The ground. The sky. Our ability to conceptualize them. The principles of reality, that sort of thing. These ancient, cosmic entities, the titans who shaped all we know. Most of them are gone… absent, hiding, imprisoned or weakened into the gods of the multiverse, but there’s very little to be known about them! But this may hold a record to one of them.”

He indicated the cogwheel cover. “This particular thing is a symbol of one of those titans. The records give its name as… hrm, what’s a useful translation? The… Machine-God? The living world? Yes. The Great Maker.’

“One of our researchers - Optimus, I believe - is very interested in any information regarding this entity,” Magnus concluded. “It seems he came here, originally, seeking out information on it, but was unable to return to the greater multiverse after being stranded on this world a long time ago. Ironic, hrm? According to his people’s religious lore, the goddess whose physical form comprised his world was originally a facet of an ancient being who was afflicted with a terrible sickness. And when that sickness was cut away, the weakened god became a new figure; a mother to all life, and her sickness became entropy and death. And the iconography of those figures is identical to the symbols shown in this book.”

This was a bit much for them to take in. “He thinks a bending manual in an archaic language will tell him something about his goddess?” Zuko ventured.

“Perhaps, perhaps not.” Magnus shrugged. “Whether or not this research bears fruit, I’d like to learn of the civilization that produced it. And of course, this book will be a valuable insight into the indescribable ancient culture that made it.” He bowed his head. “Now… I must be going. Much work to do, and so forth. It was a pleasure to meet you, and I hope you find yourself enlightened by what you learn here. Try not to destroy the world with what you learn here. Please be responsible and don’t build any doomsday weapon schematics!”

“Is that likely to happen?” Asami asked, with a rather unsettling interest.

Magnus coughed. “Well, ah. It was absolutely not my fault, I promise you that and anyone who says otherwise is lying very loudly, but… this is not the first world we have kept our library at. There have been… other cases. Ones where we were not very observant about protecting dangerous lore and things… happened. Explodey things. Planets being erased. Civilizations ending in an instant. We, erm, had to move the library a lot before we worked out that perhaps instituting a measure of trials to enter might be a suitable idea. At least that way we could weed out the ones who were just trying to get at the doomsday weapons.”

“...Why do you even have any of those!?” Mai demanded, and by some stroke of luck, her exact pitch of tone made Miss Granger realize she was voicing a sentiment she herself often had, at some frequency and volume to the elder faculty of the library, and they shared an identical look of solidarity despite otherwise being unable to communicate.

“They’re not working models!” Magnus said hotly. “They’re not - why would we keep those!? We have schematics! Which is not much better, I’ll admit, but there is a difference!” He paused. “Hrm. Perhaps we should remove the planetbuster displays. Or at least make it less obvious that’s what they are. And Gabriel! Remind me to raise the suggestion at the next meet to, at the least, remove the talley of ‘worlds blown up’ for each superweapon. That’s getting tacky. And certainly get rid of the list of ones we are indirectly responsible for.”

“I’m sorry but you’re really not making a great impression on your library,” Katara said awkwardly.

Magnus sighed. “At least you missed Miss Granger’s group of reprobates hanging around trying to have adventures. Rounding up feral thesauri and so on… speaking of whom.” He called out something that probably translated to ‘Miss Granger! You’re up!’ and left.

Miss Granger stepped forward, a hand extended outwards and a Blood Raven woman as translator, standing beside her at the ready. She looked deeply apologetic, but a bit resigned to the situation at hand. And as they ventured into the library, she, and her translators, were there to lend a hand whenever it was needed.

Granted, she really, really wanted to get to translating that book, but it would take a while in any case.

The group moved onwards, the sons and daughters of Magnus shuffling forward to guide them as needed, and the presence of the group did not passed unnoticed. The Library itself watched through, through a hundred different eyes, and fifty owls stared at the group wherever they went, silently studying them, all with a single mind. They were not separate owls. They are all manifestations of one single entity.

That entity flew through the library in another body, teleporting instantly to another corridor a long way away. The entire Library, and the sub-realm it existed within, was what spirits might term a place of power, a sanctuary that was a little world defined by their natures, and if he wanted to ignore the rules of space-time, he could. He flew to another chamber.

He - if such identity could even be applied to a spirit like him, divorced from mortal experience - alighted in the form of a mundane owl, and gazed up towards a shining woman approximately the size of a planet. “The… visitors you enquired about,” he said gravely, with clear distaste. “They have arrived.”

A vast white hand paused over a letter. The nature of the library was that space, relative dimensions and enough room for it all was a highly subjective thing. It could be bigger on the inside; a house could fit inside a shelf that held only a few novels. And so it was that a diamond matriarch of the Gem people, grown larger than a planet in her age and power and fully unbound, still was able to sit at a table and write letters suitable for someone of galactic standard giant-size to read.

She filled the room, a hyper-curvaceous sun; blazing white light streaming from her shimmering skin like the nuclear heart of a star, the chair one of the special models designed to accommodate enormous hips with outward swooping supports. Her backside alone was bigger than two planets side by side, which it rather resembled. Her thin waist seemed insufficient to support her broader torso and absolutely gigantic breasts big enough to provide her own table if she required it, and the sheer power implied by her enormous size, unusually massive even by the standards of this world’s mightiest benders, placed a dreadful pressure upon anyone coming even slightly near her. There were gravity wells with less painful presences.

Her head, slightly pointed forward with great back-swept shapes that might have been horns or might have been ornamental feathers or clusters of energy, was impossible to make out. The light of her body, normally more restrained in Gems, shone so brightly her face could not be seen. Now that face was fixed directly at him, and he felt her gaze upon him and fixed like a laser sight.

He was not a knowledge spirit, but the spirit of knowledge itself; the concept of lore and knowing, as an abstract notion, given its own form. He knew all things, when it came to his library, and he knew everything about everyone that stepped within it. He knew what she was, and her deeds.

The full weight, the enormity, not just of what she was, but what she had done. He did not much care for the affairs of those that came from outside his library, but he still knew to be uncomfortable around her.

Nevertheless; he had made a deal with her. “Thank you,” She said, her voice resonating and striking notes that would have organics falling to their knees in moments. Her expression was impossible to see but it seemed that she was smiling, just like a statue might smile; face completely fixed, rigid and unchanging, the smile stony and cracked.

She didn’t ask where they were. It seemed enough to know that they were here, for her mysterious purposes.

She returned to her letters. There were many of them, unfinished and discarded, rough drafts abandoned. The spirit considered them. All of them started thusly: “Dear Rose Quartz” or “My beloved Rose,” or the more formal “Rose Quartz, and all those who follow her” and so forth. The oldest ones were addressed to a Pink Diamond, but that name was furiously scratched out, as if she had remembered too late that this wasn’t right to call her that anymore.

He got the general tone of her intent with the letters. “Do not presume to trespass upon my hospitality and invite the unworthy into my demesne,” he said coldly, and the entire library rumbled with him.

She oscillated into several irate wavelengths, but smiled all the while anyway, staring at him. Eventually she said, “I’ve no doubt they will prove worthy and pass your tests.”

“Hrm.” He felt a stirring of curiosity, but it was idle and largely indifferent. He spread his wings and flew off.

White Diamond, the first Gem and primordial mother of all her kind, stared at the letters and tried to remember how to be nice to people, how to communicate properly.

She wondered what Rose and her swarm of monsters would respond best to.

They take such keen interest in people. Do not mention the Library. Allow them to come, learn that the thing they have sought all this time is here, and let them do the rest.

Just lay the bait with what they would normally do; take an interest in the meat.

White Diamond picked up a stylus and began to write.

“‘Rose Quartz Universe, Matriarch of the Free Crystal Gems, Champion of the Endowed Migrant Fleet, and the last of my creations. I have found something of great interest to you; a world of immense power, populated by civilizations living in harmony with the spirits tied to their cultures and given power by them. Here, perhaps, may be a place for you to establish a permanent homeworld for your fleet and unite your scattered offspring. Hereforth, these are the ways you might arrive, but take a care, for the way is perilous…”

She listed the way. Very well, get Rose’s attention with talk of an intriguing people and their unique ways. Rose commanded respect, and the fleet would likely follow her. She was mother to much of it, after all.

Next, she wrote in an obscure dialect of the Cybertronian city-state of Simfur, formerly the world Eukaris, and these letters were better suited to claws carved into warm oils and marshy sands. It was a notoriously complicated language, and she managed only a short sentence she knew would get the attention of the fleet’s monster slayer and avenger, that… thing, Grimlock. And more dreadfully, the gentle warlord, Elita-1.

“Your Prime yet lives.”

That beast would come, and the Autobots, who comprised such a large part of the Fleet and had such influence, would come with him and Elita-1.

The path was set, and now… she would simply wait.

White Diamond closed her eyes. Her task was done.

[twitchesandstitches]

Firstly, because of your first inclusion of Magnus the Red, I started binge-watching the TTS series (which has been absolutely hilarious), so thanks for that! Secondly, I was wondering if any other WH40K characters (esp. the other Primarchs) play any notable roles within the setting/cosmology of CrossThicc?

now you know the joy i feel whenever Brotrip 40k gets another upload : D you are most welcome!

since 40k is one of my favorite series (if more so with a lighter tone that takes the grimdark much less seriously), concepts from 40k are all over the place: the realms of magic are more or less a gentler version of the Warp mixed with Dragon Age’s Fade (and travel through those realms is essentialy 40k warp travel), the multiverse’s versions of orcs and elves draw heavily from the Orks and Eldar, and thus important characters from those species would be highly important among their peoples here.

for the Primarchs, you have to start with the Emperor. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that he, and the Primarchs, are explicitly magical/divine here, and there’s more of Warhammer Fantasy Battle’s tones here mashed up with 40k. The Emperor himself is the God of Humanity as a whole; the part of the outer realms defined by ‘human’ being a Thing, and he’s very much like his TTS counterpart; loud, complaining and loves to swear and mess with people. he IS more compassionate, though, and has no real problem with aliens and mutants; he’s more concerned that humanity stay alive than that it is dominant or in a specific form.

it should be noted that the Imperium of canon no longer exists; something similar DID, at one point, but that was a long time ago and it has since collapsed, and spanned the multiverse as a fulfillment of the Emperor’s original plans. Similar groups (such as the Imperial Commonwealth) are disavowed by the Primarchs, who REALLY don’t like the Commonwealth. In part, the commonwealth is inspired by the worst aspects of the Imperium from canon... but then, everyone in the know is ashamed of what the Imperium has become in canon.

For the Primarchs, they are also gods who embody a fundamental aspect of the sapient mind/will, as expressed through humans. Vulkan is humanity’s compassion in all its forms, Magnus is its potential for magic and intellectual achievement, and so forth. Their canonical homeworlds are centers of cross-species society that fulfill their goals, and while their avatars may rule there, mosto ften their space marine children (who can be men or women here) are spiritual leaders to them, with varying degrees of directness. Sort of like different warrior societies throughout history; some advise the rulers, others ARE in charge. In general, they’re like knightly orders infused with the power of their god-liege to become something more than human.

All the Primarchs are still alive! This DOES mean that Horus is kicking around somewhere, as is Sanguinius and the others who died in canon.

Vulkan: my favorite primarch, and so one with a great deal of relevance to the AU; he’s largely as per TTS and canon, a big and lovable goofball who embodies the best in humanity and is a paragon of the IDEA of being a paragon; has some draconic aspects, and he has lava-like cracks appear when he powers up. Worshiped as a god of heroism by the orks, he is taking on some of their mannerisms and physical traits. His Salamanders are a core part of the Endowed Fleet, and he himself may be part of the God Squad pantheon. Is a VERY big hugger!

Magnus: Much of his character has pretty much been shown already; his exact plans are mysterious and unclear, and he has arrived at the Library of Wan Shi Tong for unknown purposes, but he probably is just trying to safeguard knowledge for its own sake, and he’s deadly afraid of another cataclysm wiping out civilization for good. Embdies the power of magical achievement, and to an extent, the idea of knowledge.

Jaghatai Khan: POSSIBLY associated with the Air Nomads, revered by him in some capacity; possibly this is what led Magnus to that world to begin with. Chogoris, beneath the leadership of his most trusted heirs, has expanded into a large interstellar empire that is prosperous and just. It’s unclear what his domain is, but its probably to do with controlled ferocity. Somehow a patron to all who revere their rides.

Leman Russ: is an actual werewolf here, as are his space wolves. (Mix them up with the Uratha of the New World of Darkness; shapeshifting man-wolf spirit guardians!) His domain is also unknown, but may involve ruthlessness; his an Magnus’ rivalry is still quite intense, though its less to do with personal vendettas and more with conflicting agendas and ways of doing things. He is likely the source of werebeast-ness in some way, a proto-typical Father of Werewolves; either as far as humans are concerned, or the modern manifestation of that particular gift.

Sanguinius: Not too sure what his domain might be, but I definitely think he has some link with the Dolorosa of Homestuck, and the two of them are somehow linked to the existence of vampires. She is the mother of ALL vampires, and he may be the father of the more recent modern strains! Perhaps they have something going on there, or are reflections of a similar primal concept? Either way, he’s basically the most fabulous and good-hearted vampire knight-ideal there ever was. HE is bitey Galahad

my knowledge of the other Primarchs in general (especially those given most of their character in the Black Library books) is a lot more spotty, so i welcome suggestions or ideas from anyone who has a thought on ‘em! same iwth any 40k character in general, ESPECIALLY the xenos!

[twitchesandstitches]

things i’m getting queued up!

a series of posts covering Pokemon in Crossthicc! It’s very general stuff covering broad strokes to give Pokemon fandom followers ideas as well as a general idea of where things fit in my AU; i couldn’t cover evey generation’s specifics so don’t be shy about asking me to specify about specific character sI didn’t cover, or ones you want more info/random thoughts about

A couple of stories I did about Magnus the Red and Raven, inspired by how 1. Magnus canonically was broken into a lot of shards so what if one got super evil? and 2. Magnus being her dad is too pure, too good

another OC write up for one of my earlier OCs, a shoggoth gal that is super meek; could have sworn i already posted it, but it seems i didn’t!