#i’m a real fungi

[a-birdbrain]

i went hiking today for my stupid mental health

plus the dogs got exercise which is great

saw some freaky mushrooms hell yeah

the dogs got really icky swamp monsters

everyone had a great time yaaaaay

then i got back, and its been 6 hours . i realized, i lost my fucking earbuds in the woods

[catwingsthespatula]

Put in the tags:

Which of these are you currently Real Good At, and still growing and improving?

Which are you currently Real Good At but in the process or in danger of becoming rusty through lack of practice?

Which were you Real Good At at some point in your life, but are no longer at that level because you stopped using it and lost the skill over time?

Which are you just starting the process of Getting Real Good At?

Which would you like to Get Real Good At someday but haven’t yet had enough hours in the day to put in the time?

And

Which would you theoretically like to Get Real Good At, but realistically given time and energy constraints it’s not a priority and probably never will be?

Feel free to include other skills besides those listed, and to adjust the categories to those that make sense for you!

There aren't enough fucking hours in the day to get real good at chess, violin, piano, singing, crosswords, film photography, contemporary dance, literary analysis, writing, film criticism, historical analysis, political commentary, tennis, Latin, French, German, Italian, identification of invertebrates, programming, cooking, musical composition, watercolour painting, philosophy, stage acting, fencing, psychoanalysis, and sickoposting online.

[ryuzakemo128]

MDNI 18+ | Adults Only

Pairing: GHOAP x Serial Killer! Italian! Housewife! Female Reader!

Content Warnings: Italian cursing| Swearing, Italian sarcasm, implications of smut. Polyamorous Relationship. Smut implications. BJ mentioned. Soap is real horny for both you and Simon. Female Reader is curvaceous, Junoesque, curvy, voluptuous. Italian Swearing & Sarcasm (Female Reader).

Note: Junoesque meaning: (of a woman) imposingly tall and shapely.

Word Count: 2922

Summary: Johnny meets you and then understands why Simon didn't want him to meet you.

Simon didn't want Soap to meet you at first, thinking the Scotsman wouldn't know how to handle an Italian woman like yourself. Better to keep you far away from him. Simon's British sarcastic nature was one thing. But yours?

Yours?

Your Italian Sarcastic nature compared to Simon’s British sarcasm. Your dry, “Hai fatto la scoperta dell’America.”

Simon Still thinks you would leave in a heartbeat if it meant he would be happy with Soap. But he didn’t want that. No. He wanted both of you. And you’re far too selfless for your own good. If a serial killer like yourself can ever be called or labelled as selfless in any kind of capacity.

Curvaceous, Junoesque, curvy, voluptuous. These words were always used to describe a woman like yourself. You always wore black, a neutral colour. A favourite of yours.

Soap met you when he saw you in your backyard shed tending to your mushrooms. Part of your large green house you get most of your food from. The large reason why you don’t need to spend nearly as much on food as someone else would have. The smell of various fungi filling the air as Simon warned him.

“Don’t touch the mushrooms.” Simon warned him with a slight smirk. “She won’t forgive you otherwise or at least she’ll lecture you on the complexity of cultivation of whatever mushroom your fingers touched.”

“Cazzo! I’m not that bad!” you protested from inside the mushroom shed.

Simon yelled back with a definite smirk this time, “That’s only because you’ve never seen him try to cook anything beyond toast and tea, love!”

“You mean burn toast and make tepid tea?” you retorted. “Almost like he loves the taste of charcoal. How truly and utterly devastating for his taste buds.”

The black gardening overalls, the 3/4 black shirt underneath and the wide brimmed black hat shielding your eyes from the sun, didn't hide your allure. The matching black gardening gloves that you have sewn yourself reaching your elbows.

The ducks, chickens, and geese wandering around the backyard only made the scene more whimsical than Soap was ever expecting Simon to be part of. The chickens were only ever allowed to wander in a small patch due to their tendency to tear up with moss lawn.

No wonder you were determined to smack on the hand when he suggested on eating chicken eggs scrambled. But when you gave him soft boiled salted duck eggs? Simon laughed when Soap’s eyes widened.

“You can tell she’s Italian right?” Simon remarked with the smugness of a man who knew the antics of an Italian’s temper all too well to ever be ‘bothered’ by it.

Soap is given a full Italian style breakfast, Soap didn’t know it was against your ‘rules’ to make himself breakfast. But Simon said he was the ‘guest’ and ‘guests’ don’t do such things. Unless the host said they could. And Soap wasn’t given that go ahead.

Simon snickered as Soap rubbed his knuckles. “I told you this could happen. Blatantly warned you too. ‘I don’t think you could handle her’ and you were all ‘I can handle her. A little tap on her lovely peach and she’ll be fine’ and yesterday is was more of ‘Oh shit!’ than ‘Oh darling, that was delightful’.”

Soap looked at the notes written by Simon, all of which were pertaining to what he liked about his lunches. Clearly you cared about knowing what he preferred to eat because there is no such thing as a picky eater in your mind. Just a preferred palette that hadn’t been fully explored yet. All of these were written on a coloured white lined rectangle cards.

Things Simon wrote for you in his notes were like ‘I liked the way you roasted the potatoes yesterday. But the steamed carrots were too plain for my liking. And don’t forget the rosemary on the chicken this time’ & ‘I don’t like oranges. But I like orange flavoured things like marmalade or chocolate’. You suggested him to write notes on what he liked more about certain meals so you could replicate it again if he wanted or wished for that same meal or a similar one.

You knew he didn’t like talking all that much and you were insistent on him at least writing notes down when he wanted to get a message across but didn’t feel comfortable voicing it aloud.

A happy middle ground.

Now that Soap had met you? He had to keep you and Ghost as soon as possible. A giant British man is one thing. But A giant British man with an Italian Housewife? It’s like a dessert on top of a hot meal. A two for one combo.

Two people just for him and him alone. Who cares what others thought? He’s the lucky one.  Luckier than most people possibly to think.

You were laying on the couch one afternoon, watching a shark documentary a few hours ago, and you had fallen asleep. Soap might have sucked off Simon a few hours ago. But he planned on getting his two warm hands on your body. On your curves.

As soon as you got in that velvet soft lace lingerie you bought last weekend in a pastel blue? The white lace edges and the tiny white silk bows. The tanga underwear in matching white lace. Your breasts looked like watermelons about to burst through the material. Your thighs? Like a pair of marble pillars. Strong enough to choke the life out of him.

You looked like a delicate dessert. A delicate painstakingly long made dessert. And Soap? He had a large insatiable sweet tooth.

The sight of you like this made his mouth water. Aroused. A delicate sleeping beauty. Or perhaps a sleeping Venus or… perhaps even Aphrodite herself. A living goddess in front of him. Using shark documentaries as a way to self soothe into a semi-decent sleeping pattern.

The whale shark body pillow clutched between your arms. The shark themed weighted blanket draped over you. The velvet shark shaped cushions all around you on the charcoal-coloured couch.

The other three had black dresses you liked the look of from certain model runways. Sometimes taking certain aspects and mushing them together to make something you personally thought would ‘look better’.

He assumed you bought it. Until he saw the sewing room or what Simon had lovingly called it your ‘Workshop of Horrors & Lustful Nature’. Where you had at least six mannequins displaying your most recent creations. Three displayed shark themed lingerie. Each one designed after a specific type of Shark species.

The whale shark body pillow was definitely yours. The shark themed weighted blanket and velvet cushions, all yours. The couch was definitely Simon's choice though, a stark contrast to the rest of the room.

Though, once Simon saw the soft shark shaped cushions decorating the couch? And the recent strawberry shaped mugs you made in your last weeks pottery lessons? The same ones you use for your morning cappuccino.

You certainly knew how to decorate. If you counted the eery paintings done by artists like Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Salvador Dalí, Edgar Degas, Otto Dix, Rembrandt, El Greco, Caspar David Friedrich, Diego Rivera, Théodore Géricault, Peter Paul Rubens, Zdzisław Beksiński, H.R. Giger, Enrico Pollastrini, John Everett Millais, Jacques-louis David, Gustav Klimt, Albert Edelfelt, Piotr Stachiewicz.

Soap looked at all the artwork your house had. He had to admit the collection is eclectic and extensive. Not too hard to imagine the ‘why’ Simon had married you to begin with. Now that he’s taking in all you particular tastes.

The black coffin shaped bookshelf either side of your television unit with fiction books by authors like Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stroker, Edgar Allen Poe, H.P Lovecraft, Marry Shelly, Oscar Wilde, Robert William Chambers, Stephen King, and many others. All of which are in their original bindings.

The living room alone felt like a museum of the macabre and the avant-garde, Simon saw soap taking it all in. The black woollen rocking chair you sit in whenever you read at night before bed. You say those books are comforting. If one could be comforted by fictional horrors. Then maybe you had found a rather peculiar yet ‘holy grail’ to ‘resting well’.

Perhaps the real horrors were the ones you were more scared of. If the ‘Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable’ Cesar a Cruz quote on the wall inside the entryway of the mansion| estate.  If that is anything to go by. Then perhaps he shouldn't be too surprised that you had a penchant for the macabre.

The flooring in the entire building is a deep ebony cherry wood, your choice and he still remembers Simon gushing over how his wife’s aesthetic choices were impeccable. Soap assumed he was only being polite to you, but now that he’s seen what Simon was talking about at the time? He couldn’t agree more. It appears the man had good taste after all.

Simon’s choices were obvious, the charcoal grey couch in the living room, the instant hot water dispenser, the stainless-steel dishwasher, the sleek black counter tops and stainless-steel cabinet handles. The glass containers with black & white shark shaped labels like, ‘Sugar’, ‘Tea’ ‘Coffee’, ‘Cookies’ and ‘Loose Leaf Tea’.

The loose-leaf tea being crafted with herbal blends of either calming chamomile or invigorating mint, picked fresh from your very own garden. It's a blend that suited Simon's moods perfectly.

You shared a Chocolate, pistachio & nougat semifreddo with Soap. Soap thought Simon was a daring romantic to sweep you off your feet. No. He just as a sweet tooth just like you and you suggested trying it on a first date.

“It had dark chocolate, so it has a little bitter tang to it, but for the most part it’s sweet, it’s rich. The pistachio & nougat adds a crunchy and chewy texture. On the first date I took him on, don’t get it twisted, I asked HIM out first, I took him out to dinner in a nice little restaurant, hole-in-the-wall, then to a nice dessert place where they had the best Semifreddo. My personal favourite place, ever, that man was on it like he was a starved beast in the middle desert. And that is when I knew. I knew ‘I’m keeping this one’.” You remarked.

“Though I did tap him on the arse, wink at him and say, ‘call me if you want a second date sweetheart’. After that first date.” You added painting an even clearer picture of Simon and your first date. “So, imagine that with the added finger guns as I walked away backwards for a few steps.”

Soap’s eyes grew wide at the image you painted for him. “And that was enough to win over Simon?”

Simon overheard the conversation, he spotted the dessert on the kitchen counter alongside the one you made with a cotton candy machine. A cotton candy cake, an experiment to see if you’d like it before sharing it with him.

Simon remembered the first date from a different perspective, he remembered how you approached him. How you looked him up & down. He thought you were looking at Soap or John Price or Kyle Garrick. No. No you weren’t look at either one of those three. When he heard the pick-up line ‘You come here often?’ used on him?

And the added, ‘Then what’s a sweet thing like you doing in a place like this? You should be in my bed, your clothes on the floor and your lips on something far more delicious than that whiskey glass.” From you?

At the Simon was at the bar with the rest of the Task Force 141, Simon thought you were going to approach one of the other three. But no. No. It was like you didn’t see them at all. Like you honed on his large figure and his broad shoulders. Like you said ‘He’s mine’ without saying it aloud.

You had bought him a gin & tonic to see his reaction, the bartender handed to him and told him an anonymous patron bought it for him. Simon didn’t know you’d approach him soon after. The look on John’s face? Priceless when he heard the bartender’s words. Followed by your pickup lines he only heard a man use on a woman.

You didn’t ask for his number. That would have been far too easy. You gave him your number like you expected him to call you. The way you used your charm to win him over through dessert, and the fact you weren’t asking to marry him. You just outright hinted at the fact that you expected to be in your bed by the end of the week.

When you tapped him on the arse after the first date though? The ‘Call me if you want a second date sweetheart’. Simon didn’t expect you to be so bold, so forward. He assumed you were playing hard to get. But no. You were extremely blunt and knew what you wanted. No. No you were a shark rather than a lioness.

You wanted him. You clearly wanted Simon.

As soon as he also saw that you had a sweet tooth like him? Simon the man who hides his face with skull balaclava?

Though it was your Garfield pyjamas you bought him to match yours on your sixth date? Simon didn’t expect you to buy him such a gift. Your wrapped the pyjamas in a black wrapping paper and placed the black mug sized gift box. His name ‘Simon Riley’ with a metallic gold brush marker.

The feeling of being addressed by his actual name rather than his callsign?  He felt seen. Heard. Caressed without the act of physically touching him.

Your Alaskan Malamute, Cardigan Corgi and two black cats. The Alaskan Malamute is the stray you found in the woods as a two-month-old pup you had named Butterscotch. You adopted the Cardigan Corgi with Simon, he named her ‘Moss’ and you found it too cute to change. So, Moss it remained.

The cat were already your two babies before you met Simon. You named the long haired, chubbier one, Mayhem and the slimmer long haired one Bullet. Both are pitch black with sapphire-coloured eyes. Mayhem with a lavender collar and Bullet with a red collar.

The felines greeted him at the door when he first got there. The two following him around like he was the most fascinating ‘cat’ they’d ever seen. You found both cats abandoned inside of a box on the side of the road. Taking them in the same care and love you have for Butterscotch.

Butterscotch didn’t know what to think of him at first. You also warned them. That Butterscotch just needed to adjust to him first. She is a skittish pup, an anxious pup and easily frightened. Despite her larger size.

Moss on the other hand chased Soap, nipping his heels like he was an animal he needed to herd. The corgi’s excitement is infectious making Soap chuckle as he dodged the small corgi’s attempts to nip the back of his feet. His attempts to dodge only excited the little furball more.

Soap spotted Simon with Mayhem and Bullet. Speaking to them, reading to them despite them being unable to understand a thing he’s saying. It was a routine thing he did when strangers came around, a safety blanket of sorts, a way for them to get comfortable with the new person in their home. Though, it was information about the new person Simon read to them. He said it was to keep them safe.

“Watch out for how people treat cats and dogs, that will tell you everything you need to know about them.” You told the both of them.

Soap replied. “Yeah. I noticed some sour types get keen on getting their rocks off by harming defenceless animals until they snap at them. Taking pleasure in knowing in their torment, torture and whimpering sounds. It makes my blood boil.”

Simon gets really moody, talkative, and more ‘Ghost’ when someone threatens to shoot their animals. “Threaten me all you want. But you go near my animals, and I’ll show you what a real ghost looks like.” You remembered that one time too clearly.

You always had a thing for big guys who loved their pets. Simon fit that bill 11%. And you LOVED it.

The way he talked to them like they were his babies? You were putty in his hands.

The way he cuddled Butterscotch and took her out for runs in the woods with Moss? Oh baby, that was it for you.

The way he helped you take them to the vet during their trimonthly check-ups? You had never felt so cherished.

The gentle giant is the best thing that had ever happened for you. Despite your insidious nature. He loved you.

Soap on the other hand couldn’t wait for the moment he would be able to put his hands on your luscious deliciously tasty curves. Scrumptious. A delight from all angles.

Simon saw Soap gazing at your figure as you slept. “Are you absolutely sure you want to do that? Are you certain you want to even try it?” he asked in a teasing tone and a raised eyebrow.

“You know the rules. Ask before you take.” Simon chastised gently. “Wake her first. Consent is a big thing in this house. And don’t wake her without tea or coffee in your hands first.”

Divcider Credit: @cafekitsune

[f1nalboys]

Reunion - Frank (Adam Barrett)

Frank x Fem!AFAB!Reader

hiiiii guys >:)) i promise ill get to requests soon!!!!! i just was mentally being attacked by this freak and Needed to write something super quick for him!!!! lmk if anything is ooc for him, i did my darndest writing for him!!!! i hope u all enjoy and lmk if youre interested in me writing more for him!!!! ALSO!! i know his real name is adam but to make it easier for myself i just called him frank in the fic, lmk if u guys prefer that or using his actual name 😝 <3

WORD COUNT: 3190

WARNINGS: nsfw, vampire!frank, human!reader, oral (afab + amab recieving,) choking (to the point of nearly passing out), biting, slight blood play, slightest bit of scent play??, degradation and praise, handcuffs, restraints, face fucking, multiple orgasms (afab,) creampie, this was meant to be short and then i was attacked...., pain play, mating press, implication of more sex, brief mentions/threats of being fucked until you pass out but you are fully concious the entire time, proofread but u guys know me by now

Frank tilts his head, tongue gliding across razor sharp teeth, a sinister grin gracing his normally soft features. You watch him from your spot on the bed, handcuffs tight around both your wrists and the bedframe. Tugging at the restraints, you wince as the cool metal digs into your warm flesh, squirming when you feel Frank's gaze finally land on you. 

“Keep struggling and you’re gonna make yourself bleed.” Frank grins, the bed shifting with his weight as he sits down beside you. He’s still fully clothed, a far cry from your bare skin still covered in healed-over bite marks and a layer of sweat. He leans in, hand trailing up your stomach lightly, too lightly to feel good, his nose brushing against your wrist. Frank breathes in deeply and you watch as his eyes roll into the back of his head. “Fuck. Y’know what? Keep doing it. I want you to bleed.”

You whine, shaking your head. “Frank, c’mon, please!” 

“C’mon, please,” Frank mimics, fake pouting. You stay silent. When he was like this, all sharp teeth and sharp tongue, it was better to take whatever he was going to give you. A fight wouldn’t stop that. His hand trails up your chest, fingers calloused and rough, before landing on the base of your throat. His grip is loose, for now. “You always been this damn whiney or did this vampire shit give me better hearing?”

You swallow heavily. “I’m sorry.” You squeak and he grins, shaking his head. His hand grips your throat a bit tighter, feeling your pulse pumping heavily under his fingers. You watch his face as his eyes close. His breathing, which you learned he had to pretend to do after getting turned, matches your own. He stays like this a while, feeling your heart beat and the air fill and leave your lungs, feeling the humanity and life pump through your body on instinct. 

Frank didn’t miss many things about being human. He was stronger, faster, more agile, smarter, more ruthless, and so fucking powerful it could make your head spin. The things he didn't have anymore he could, for the most part, recreate it well enough. Breathing was now a conscious decision, one he only did when around other people. The sunlight thing didn’t bother him, only resulted in him moving to a city where the nightlife was more important than the daytime. The bloodlust was easy to satiate with his job. 

The one thing that he couldn't ignore or replicate, however, was a heartbeat. 

His chest felt empty, a dead thing lying there doing nothing but rotting away, maggots and fungi eating away at the carcass that was his humanity. On occasion, he’d find himself laying down, eyes closed, hand over his heart, imagining the thump of it, vibrating his chest, telling him and anyone who touched him that he was something, that he was alive. Your heartbeat was the closest thing to his own he could get to anymore. Frank loved to hear it quicken, skip a beat, change in its normal soothing rhythm, all due to him. Him and his hands, his tongue, his teeth, his words. 

Him.

Frank’s eyes open again, blue eyes dark, and he sighs, letting go of your throat. “Spread your legs.” His voice leaves no room for argument and you listen, your face growing hot from embarrassment at the wolf whistle he lets out. “So fuckin’ sexy, you know that? S’why I keep comin’ back.” He murmurs, leaning over and kissing you roughly. 

It’s too much, but everything Frank did was too much; he sprayed cologne until you felt like you were suffocating, he kissed you until your lips were bruised, he went down on you until you couldn't remember your name, he killed until he was covered in blood, he betrayed anyone and everyone who was dumb enough to trust him. Everyone but you. The only person he had stayed (mostly) gentle with, loyal too, was you.

Sure, he wouldn’t ever call himself your boyfriend, but he’d kill any guy you talked to and leave their decapitated head on your doorstep, fucking you into your mattress till you couldn't walk, and tell you that you were his. For now, that was enough.

Frank kisses down your neck, sharp teeth nicking at the thin flesh, a low moan being pulled from your lips. He loved the noises you made, could get drunk off them, could pull them from you for hours, and he has. “I need you,” you whimper as his mouth latches onto your nipple, his warm tongue flicking over the hardening nub. He hums around it but doesn’t stop. You can feel him relax over top of you, his free hand squeezing at your other tit, the days stress melting away. “Please?” 

“I’m takin’ my time.” Frank says, narrowed eyes flicking up to meet your own, but he lets go of your nipple, sliding down the length of the bed. “Bet you’re fuckin’ soaked though, aren’t you? That’s why you’re begging me.” You can’t deny it even if you wanted to because his hand is cupping your cunt, thick finger prodding at your slick opening to see, and you’re moaning so loud you know your throat is going to be sore tomorrow. “Fuck, you are. Guess it has been a bit, hasn’t it? Missed me or something, sweetheart?”

“Missed your cock.”

“Just my cock?” He asks, rubbing your wetness on your clit, a shiver going down your spine. “Not my fingers? The ones on your sloppy fuckin’ pussy right now, you didn’t miss them?” He asks, a smug fucking grin on his face, his fingers moving expertly against you. “Not my mouth? Bet your pussy misses my mouth. Shit, last time we fucked you didn’t seem very happy when I stopped tongue fucking you, so what changed, huh?”

His voice is sharp, working himself up the more he talks, his eyes focused on yours. He loves the microexpressions you make when you’re trying to hold back; the furrow of your eyebrows, the twitch of your lips, the flare of your nostrils. It's so incredibly human, so incredibly sexy, he wants nothing more than to bite into your neck and drain you, keep you inside him forever. But, he can’t. He’d miss you. Instead, he slips two fingers inside your hole, the stretch making you gasp, eyes widening, heartbeat picking up. “O-okay, okay…missed you.” 

“Yeah, you fuckin’ did.” He says, sliding down the rest of the bed, strong hands on your thighs, tongue swiping across your clit. Your legs try to close, your back arching off the soft mattress, the clang of the handcuffs bringing a smile to his face. Frank moans against your cunt, his fingers massaging your thighs as he enjoys himself. 

You want to touch him, to run your fingers through his hair and tug, bringing him closer, but these damn handcuffs keep digging into your wrists and it hurts and his fingers won’t stop pumping and scissoring inside your cunt and his lips are wrapping around your clit and he’s sucking and suddenly you can’t think of anything as you cum. Your legs shake and your eyes roll into the back of your head and all Frank can do is laugh against you as he draws it out. 

“S-stop, hang on,” you stutter after what felt like hours, your body going limp. Frank listens for once, moving his face off of your cunt but he leaves his fingers inside you, curling them just to pull a whine from your throat. You watch as he runs his tongue over his teeth and lips, tasting you, cracking his neck to stop himself from bending you in half and shoving his cock inside you. It’s been a while, almost two weeks, and he wants to savor this. Or, he wants to try. Self control has never been his strong suit. “Can you take the handcuffs off?” 

“They hurt?”

“A little.”

“Not yet.” Frank crawls over top of you, pressing his lips to yours. He’s gentle now, but you know he’s holding back. Despite how rough he gets with you, he’s always holding back from the primal urge to rip you to shreds. When he pulls away, he moves forwards even more, his knees just under your armpits. You stare up at him and he knows you’re nervous. His smile is gone, his eyes dark as he works on undoing his belt. “I’ll take ‘em off you real soon baby. I just need you to earn it first.” 

You swallow heavily, your heartbeat spiking as you watch him take his belt off. He tosses it to the side, unbuttoning his pants and shoving them down to his thighs. His pants rub against your bare chest, scratching you, but you can’t be bothered to care, not with the way your mouth was filling with saliva at the sight of his bulge. Frank laughs as you try to sit back onto your elbows, an annoyed whine stuck in your throat, and he pulls his underwear down, sighing as his cock springs free.

His cock is hard and he strokes it slowly, just out of reach. “Fuckin’ look at you… you ain’t embarrassed acting like this?” He asks, clenching his jaw to keep from moaning at the sight of you. You didn’t know it, or, at least, he hoped you didn’t, but he was addicted to every fucking thing you did. Your voice, your facial expressions, your movements, your back talk, your anger, your sadness; he was obsessed with it all. It was all for him, even when you were alone. 

Smiling slightly, you shake your head no. “Were you embarrassed eating me out?” You counter and he smirks, rolling his eyes slightly before leaning his hips forward, the tip of his cock brushing against your lips. Your mouth opens, your eyes laser focused on his dick. Frank teases you, rubbing his cock across your wet tongue.

“Mmm, fuck, I wasn’t,” he answers, tilting his head as he watches you strain your head forwards in an attempt to take him into your mouth. “But I wasn’t doing that.” You roll your eyes and look up at him, doing your best to look doe-eyed. His eyes narrow; he knew what you were doing, and he knew it would work. “So slutty, aren’t you, sweetheart? All for my cock.” As he talks, his voice low, he uses his hand to press his cock against your cheek, thrusting shallowly. His precum smears across your cheeks and you moan softly, your tongue rolling out of your mouth to slide against his shaft as he does so.

Finally, Frank pushes his cock down your throat. He does so slowly, hissing as he savors the heat of your mouth as your lips wrap around him. Your eyes close and you hum, enjoying the weight of his cock on your tongue. His cock was perfect for you; long, thick, and curved upwards, it always filled you to the brim, hitting that spot inside you to make your eyes roll into the back of your skull. 

“There you go, Y/N,” he grunts, his hips flexing. The rhythm he sets is slow and deep, making you gag each time and giving you enough time to recover before he repeats it. “Fuck, your mouth is so good, you know that? Just wanna, fuck,” his hand comes to rest on the headboard behind you, leaning over your head, plunging his cock deeper into your mouth. You hear the metal headboard creak and you know the grip he has on it is nearly enough to break it. “Just wanna fucking shove it down your throat till you pass out.” 

You gurgle around his cock, heart jumping at the thought, and he grins. “You want that, slut? Huh? Missed me so fuckin’ bad you want me to fuck your tight little throat? Make you take it even after you’re fuckin’ knocked out, using you like my own little fuck toy, my little puppet to do whatever I want with?” His thrusts get harder, deeper, and now you really are finding it hard to breathe, but you don’t want him to stop. Not yet. You have no way to stop him even if you did, and the realization is almost enough to send you into a panic. But you know Frank. He knew your body better than you did, knew what you could handle and what you couldn’t, knew what would make you cry in pain or pleasure; you were safe with him, even if he was bruising your throat. 

The edge of your vision begins to blur, the lack of oxygen making your head spin, and right when you swear you’re about to pass out, your tugging at the handcuffs finally stopping, he pulls out. You suck in a harsh breath, sputtering and coughing, not registering as Frank gets off the bed and kicks his pants the rest of the way off. It’s only when you feel his hands pressing your knees to your chest that you realize what he’s about to do. “Wait!”

“What?” He grumbles, swiping his cock through your folds, focused on the way you coat the tip. “Don’t tell me you don’t wanna fuck… that’ll be cruel...” You respond by tugging at the handcuffs again, clanging them against the bed frame, and he nods, tsking, a grin on his face. “Ah, right, right. Forgot about that. My bad, baby.” 

He grabs the key from his pants pocket, wetting his bottom lip as he unlocks them, tossing the handcuffs and keys to the side. Your wrists are raw, a few droplets of blood bubbling up along the skin. “You made me bleed.” You say softly, no venom in your voice. He grabs your hand gently, bringing it to his mouth before he licks the cut. It tickles.

“Fuck, your blood…” Frank says, giving you a look you can’t quite place before he’s back at the task at hand. Your knees are pushed to your chest, your hands positioned to hold them back as far as you could, and before you know it his cock is bullying its way into your hole. “So fucking tight.” He grunts as he sets a brutal pace, each noise of pain you make only fueling him onward. 

He doesn’t ever want to hurt you, but it’s hard not to when you sound and feel and taste so fucking good when he does.

“My cock too much?” He leans over your body as he fucks you, using his weight to keep your legs trapped above his shoulders. Frank's face hovers above yours, his eyes locked onto every twist of your face. “Too fuckin’ big, too fuckin’ thick, it hurts, Frank.” He mocks, emphasizing each word with a sharp thrust. Your arms, now free from the restraints, wrap around his shoulders tightly. “Too fuckin; much but you don’t want me to stop, fuck, ain’t that right?”

“Yes! Yes, fuck, don’t stop, please!” You cry out, the pain of being stretched out finally beginning to melt away into toe curling pleasure. The fire in your stomach is burning white hot, his stomach bumping against your clit with each thrust, his grunts replacing your own thoughts. Every word he said, every name he called you, it all blended together perfectly.

He begins to kiss at your neck, sucking marks onto your flesh only to soothe them with his tongue. “Missed you too, y’know?” He whispers against you. “Missed this fuckin’ pussy, the way you get so god damn tight. Couldn’t, shit, couldn’t even play with my cock ‘cause it didn’t feel as good as when you do it.” He laughs at this, shaking his head at himself for admitting it. He missed the other stuff too, like your smile and your laugh and the way you smelled when you were curled up in his bed asleep. He’d never tell you that, though. 

Franks thrusts grow sloppy, his patience finally snapping. “You better fuckin’ cum on my dick, Y/N.” He grunts, lifting his head for a brief moment to look you in the eyes. When he sees them squeezed shut he growls, one hand wrapping tight around your throat. “Fuckin’ look at me.” Your eyes pop open, your gasp of shock stuck in your throat. “Your greedy little cunts gonna milk me dry, you understand, bitch?” 

“F-fuck,” you gurgle, your hand grabbing onto his as he tightens his grip again. You do your best to nod, feeling spit collect at the corner of your mouth, your heart beating so quick you think it’s going to burst. You can’t breath but he’s fucking you so well you don’t give a shit; you just hope if you pass out he’ll hold off on cumming inside you until you were awake again so you can feel it. 

“There you go, baby, fuck, cum for me.” Frank grunts, feeling your orgasm just before you do. His hand lets go of your throat as you cum, shoving your head to the side to sink his teeth into your flesh. Somehow, someway, he’s able to hold off for a few moments longer, savoring the feeling of your cunt spasming around him before he cums, the sweet taste of your blood pooling into his mouth tipping him over the edge. He doesn’t let go, groaning into your shoulder as he spills inside you.

Your gasps come out shaky as he feeds. He swallows a few times before finally letting go, your blood covering his mouth. He kisses you roughly, his hips flexing, making sure your cunt gets every drop. “Gross,” you tease when he pulls away, your tongue swiping over the blood he had left behind on your tongue. Your face screws up at the metallic taste but Franks changes to be softer. He runs a finger down the side of your cheek, taking the sight of you in. “What?” You murmur, feeling your face grow hot. 

“I did miss you. For real.” He admits, corner of his lip twitching upwards at both the look of shock that crosses your face and the way your heart skips. He never admitted that to you before; it was always about how much he missed your cunt or your mouth or your hands, how he missed fucking you and making you his, and you always accepted that this was the way it would be. Sure, you dreamed about this moment time and time again, but you never actually thought it would happen. “Being away, you know, made me think some things through.”

“What kind of things?”

“Well…” He tilts his head slightly, surveying your face. “I’m thinking maybe it’s time you joined me.” His hips flex again, pushing his cum deeper inside you, and you gasp, back arching off the bed slightly. Frank moves your legs down off his shoulders and you wrap them around his waist. “Hm? How’s that sound, sweetheart?” Frank purrs, kissing you gently, his cock plunging in and out of you slowly. He pulls back, lips hovering just above yours, a smirk on his face. “You want me to turn you?

[vidvana]

I know that nobody asked, but here's some Telvanni lore for all the foodies.

Before you begin this culinary journey, check out this post about ash yams it's essential.

-----------------------------

Telvanni Cuisine

It’s obvious that Telvanni have an extensive knowledge of fungi.  After all, they live in huge mushrooms and collect and plant numerous species from all across the Tamriel to use them in their potions. It goes without saying that their cuisine is also quite fungal. The commonfolk at Telvanni settlements as most of the Dunmer source their protein both from fungi* and insect meat. But Telvanni nobles love nurturing peculiar worldviews and traditions that differentiate them from other races - or even other Dunmer. One of them is their distaste for anything that doesn’t grow in soil. They frown upon hunter traditions of Ashlanders and stock-raising of house Redoran and regard them as “primitive” in contrast to the delicate art of growing fungi. The alchemy ingredients are an obvious exception from this rule, but in general as their occupations don’t usually include menial work, their light and low-calorie cuisine perfectly matches their lifestyle. This resulted in traditional cuisine of the nobility being solely plant-, or more specifically, mushroom-based**, that contrasts sharply with the cuisine of Skyrim that is rich in venison and other animal-based foods***. Noble Telvanni shun debilitating ingredients such as alcohol and moon sugar in their everyday cuisine, as keeping their minds sharp is their main priority. In order to get an indulgent sweet taste marshmerrow is used instead. Telvanni rarely import vast quantities of vegetables from other provinces as house Hlaalu does. They use commonly grown foods like saltrice, ash yams or mushrooms as the base ingredients of the dishes. In some aspects they prefer to stick to the Dunmer traditions. The nobles, though, indulge themselves in expensive imported berries - not only because of their magic-enhancing abilities but also because of their extravagant taste. As the Telvanni ranks feature numerous alchemists the import of alchemical ingredients is obviously very common. Telvanni chefs gradually incorporated some of the exotic spices into traditional cuisine. Especially valued are the most characterful of them that fancy up the bland taste of mushrooms, such as juniper, ginseng or garlic****. * In real life mushrooms are a rather poor source of protein compared to legumes like beans and lentil. But since there are no legumes in TES universe (at least as far as I know) let's suppose there are some protein-rich mushrooms Telvanni can plant. ** It’s also worth mentioning that I’m a Telvanni-fixated vegan ass myself so that’s a more probable reason why I made my beloved house also vegan xD *** A lovely example of that contrast you can encounter in @thana-topsy ‘s fanfic “Breathing Water”. This would nicely explain Neloth’s preference for apple cabbage stew. **** This recipe for example resembles Telvanni cuisine, it was one of the inspirations from my imaginary dishes above.

Above I’ve come up with some examples of what noble Telvanni would eat on a daily basis.

Thanks for reading that and take care :3

[rebeccathenaturalist]

An App Does Not a Master Naturalist Make

Originally posted on my website at https://rebeccalexa.com/app-not-master-naturalist/ - I had written this as an op-ed and sent it to WaPo, but they had no interest, so you get to read it here instead!

I have mixed feelings about Michael Coren’s April 25 Washington Post article, “These 4 free apps can help you identify every flower, plant and tree around you.” His ebullience at exploring some of the diverse ecological community around him made me grin, because I know exactly what it feels like. There’s nothing like that sense of wonder and belonging when you go outside and are surrounded by neighbors of many species, instead of a monotonous wall of green, and that is a big part of what led me to become a Master Naturalist.

When I moved from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest in 2006, I felt lost because I didn’t recognize many of the animals or plants in my new home. So I set about systematically learning every species that crossed my path. Later, I began teaching community-level classes on nature identification to help other people learn skills and tools for exploring their local flora, fauna, and fungi.

Threeleaf foamflower (Tiarella trifoliata)

Let me be clear: I love apps. I use Merlin routinely to identify unknown bird songs, and iNaturalist is my absolute favorite ID app, period. But these tools are not 100% flawless.

For one thing, they’re only as good as the data you provide them. iNaturalist’s algorithms, for example, rely on a combination of photos (visual data), date and time (seasonal data), and GPS coordinates (location data) to make initial identification suggestions. These algorithms sift through the 135-million-plus observations uploaded to date, finding observations that have similar visual, seasonal, and location data to yours.

There have been many times over the years where iNaturalist isn’t so sure. Take this photo of a rather nondescript clump of grass. Without seed heads to provide extra clues, the algorithms offer an unrelated assortment of species, with only one grass. I’ve gotten that “We’re not confident enough to make a recommendation” message countless times over my years of using the app, often suggesting species that are clearly not what I’m looking at in real life.

Because iNaturalist usually offers up multiple options, you have to decide which one is the best fit. Sometimes it’s the first species listed, but sometimes it’s not. This becomes trickier if all the species that are suggested look alike. Tree-of-Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), smooth sumac (Rhus glabra) and eastern black walnut (Juglans nigra) all have pinnately compound, lanceolate leaves, and young plants of these three species can appear quite similar. If all you know how to do is point and click your phone’s camera, you aren’t going to be able to confidently choose which of the three plants is the right one.

Coren correctly points out that both iNaturalist and Pl@ntNet do offer more information on suggested species—if people are willing to take the time to look. Too many assume ID apps will give an easy, instant answer. In watching my students use the app in person almost everyone just picks the first species in the list. It’s not until I demonstrate how to access the additional content for each species offered that anyone thinks to question the algorithms’ suggestions.

While iNaturalist is one of the tools I incorporate into my classes, I emphasize that apps in general are not to be used alone, but in conjunction with field guides, websites, and other resources. Nature identification, even on a casual level, requires critical thinking and observation skills if you want to make sure you’re correct. Coren’s assertion that you only need a few apps demonstrates a misunderstanding of a skill that takes time and practice to develop properly—and accurately.

Speaking of oversimplification, apps are not a Master Naturalist in your pocket, and that statement —while meant as a compliment–does a disservice to the thousands of Master Naturalists across the country. While the training curricula vary from state to state, they are generally based in learning how organisms interact within habitats and ecosystems, often drawing on a synthesis of biology, geology, hydrology, climatology, and other natural sciences. A Master Naturalist could tell you not only what species you’re looking at, but how it fits into this ecosystem, how its adaptations are different from a related species in another ecoregion, and so forth.

Map showing Level III and IV ecoregions of Oregon, the basis of my training as an Oregon Master Naturalist.

In spite of my criticisms, I do think that Coren was absolutely onto something when he described the effects of using the apps. Seeing the landscape around you turn from a green background to a vibrant community of living beings makes going outside a more exciting, personal experience. I and my fellow nature nerds share an intense curiosity about the world around us. And that passion, more than any app or other tool, is fundamental to becoming a citizen naturalist, Master or otherwise.

Did you enjoy this post? Consider taking one of my online foraging and natural history classes or hiring me for a guided nature tour, checking out my other articles, or picking up a paperback or ebook I’ve written! You can even buy me a coffee here!

[avocado-writing]

HI IT’S THE CHILLY ANON, first off thank you sm that fic/drabble was absolutely tasty, very delicious

secondly !! if requests are still open (I tried to scroll back on your page to double check) could I perhaps! Request another astarion x tav/reader that’s afraid of the dark ?

giving you big hugs and a glass of water ^^

notes: thank you anon I am slurping it down mwah xx if you like my work, please reblog!

words: 1.1k

rating: T

pairing: astarion x reader

He hates the Underdark. 

More than anything because it reminds him of his life before, chained into the shadows without the possibility of being free in the sun, and he hates the idea of returning to that voluntarily. But the group insisted that it was the safest path to the Shadowlands - and gods know that sounds like a barrel of laughs, too - so here he is. Trudging. 

The excursion itself was bad, with its exploding fungi and minotaurs charging from nowhere, but things got catastrophically worse when that damned Bulette had appeared. Astarion is never a fan of enemies he can’t keep an eye on at all times so that thing surfacing scared the un-life out of him, and when you called a retreat the damned group got carved into two halves: Shadowheart and Karlach headed one way, towards the wide open mushroom fields, and the two of you another - into the shadowed safety of a cave. 

And then there was a bloody rockfall. 

It closed you off from them, splitting the bloody party like fools. Both of you trapped in a tunnel, covered in dust and dirt and feeling incredibly stupid indeed.

Alone together. 

Luckily Shadowheart had used a Sending spell to let you know they were attempting to find a way out, but it might take a while. Looks like they’ll have to source some explosives from somewhere in order to clear the debris from the cavemouth. With little else to do, you stayed put.

So here the two of you are, waiting for your rescue to be sprung with no real idea of a timeline. Astarion has been pacing, complaining as loudly as he can about the situation and listening to the echo of his own gripes, but you’ve been oddly… still. Sat against the rocky wall with a torch gripped so tightly in your hands that it’s changing the colour of your knuckles. The torch which, now he comes to think of it, you haven’t let go of since you climbed down that ridiculous ladder into this wretched place.

“We should have risked the damned mountain pass is all I’m saying. A handful of githyanki are hardly the worst choice when you compare them to all this bloody… gloom. I mean gods, I’ve not seen the sun in two hundred years and now we are actively choosing to hide from it. What’s the point of this damned tadpole if I’m hundreds of feet beneath the earth?!”

“Can you not?” you say, voice so quiet he almost misses it. For a moment, Astarion pause, turning with his whole torso to look at you. He inspects you through narrowed eyes.

“You’re the one who led us down here,” he sniffs, as if this justifies his bitching.

“Yes, because the group voted. Everyone but the two of us and Lae’zel chose Underdark.”

Your eyes don’t meet his when you speak. They’re locked solidly on the flame in front of you, a flame which is beginning to dwindle. A gentle sheen of sweat has broken out on your face and Astarion doesn’t think it’s from your proximity to the heat.

You’re right. You didn’t want to come down here either. A couple of things click into place for him, and his eyebrows raise as Astarion uncovers a secret about you.

“Are you… are you afraid of the dark?”

“Fuck off, Astarion,” you sigh. This is totally unlike you. Usually you’re willing to parry his teasing with your own, engage in a little sharp-edged banter. It’s one of his favourite parts of the day, actually - when he can volley back and forth with you. But right now you simply lack your usual gumption. When he attunes his attention to it, Astarion wonders how he was so obtuse; he can taste the fear in your blood without a drop of it needing to hit his tongue, the way it courses round your body, flooding you with adrenaline.

He hesitates. Part of him wants to slip back into pettiness and attempt to goad you into an argument, at least that way maybe you’d be a bit distracted. But another, far larger part of him, a part which he knows is going to win out, wants to reach out in genuine kindness.

“Ignis,” he mutters under his breath, and a Firebolt appears in his hand, flooding the cave with light. He doesn’t launch it at anything, and the flame is hot and uncomfortable against his palm - but not enough for him to care when he sees how you let out a held breath at the sight of it. The cave is bathed in warm light which illuminates every crag and cranny, a couple of spiders skitter away into splinters in the rock, but you don’t seem to care - quite the opposite. This is the most relaxed he’s seen you in a while.

“Better?” he asks. You nod, grip finally loosening a little on your torch.

“Much better. Thank you, Astarion.”

He saunters over, back against the wall and sliding down the stone as carefully as he can. Your eyes soften in the light he casts. From this close, he can admire every inch of your face. It’s a nice face. He’d like to admire it more.

“Didn’t pin you as the type to be afraid of anything. Well, except for the whole possibly turning into a Mindflayer thing, but that’s a given,” he reasons. You groan in frustration.

“I know. It’s silly, really. I’ve hated it since I was little, and as I got older… well, it became less about the dark itself, and more what might be hiding in the dark,” you sigh. Astarion nods. It’s a simple but honest explanation. It seems that, around every corner in this damned place, there’s another beast waiting to jump out at you. He’s been surprised more times in the past few days than he’s been in his entire life. 

“Well, we’ll be out of here soon. Here,” he nods at the cave-in, “and here,” he gestures widely with his free hand, as if to indicate the Underdark itself.

“Yes. And into a place literally dubbed ‘the Shadowlands’.”

“Exactly!” he agrees, and then, “...oh. Right. Shit.”

His genuine reaction of regret makes you laugh, and he realises he hasn’t heard that in days, either. You let your head fall to the side until it lands softly onto his shoulder. Astarion is filled with warmth, and it isn’t just from the fire.

“If I was going to be stuck with anyone in here, I’m glad it’s you,” you mutter. He’s worried it would show too much of his heart to reflect the sentiment, so he just lays his cheek against your scalp, and waits for the others to find you.

taglist: @ghosti02art @sadandanxiouswtf @yeethaw13 @trappedinlimbo15 @infinitely-kate @dhampling@wereallbrokenangels @tilldeathdousnugget @somethingblu3 @hopeful-n-sad

[deathlywounded]

The Bear and the mushroom shepherd ram – Chapter 1

I`ve finally wrote about how Halsin and my spore druid, Revna, met. It's a longer, more detailed take on the comic I did about them. I hope you enjoy this journey as much as I’m enjoying crafting it. No warnings are necessary for this chapter, but rest assured, I’ll provide any required ones in the future as the story unfolds.

The first autumn leaves fell onto his snout as he ate truffles at the base of a chestnut tree. Halsin had navigated the whole afternoon in bear form, taking the opposite path he usually followed. The Drow attack during his walk with Nettie had repeated itself several times. In every case, the attackers were infected with mindflayer parasite. Each specimen lay cataloged in jars in his study, waiting for answers. This uncertainty added a new layer of concern to the tension already present in the grove, so he had spent the last few weeks patrolling the surroundings. He had strong suspicions about an area that seemed too ideal for an infected colony: isolated, wild, and unexplored—the heart of the mountain.

In his youth, he had listened to the elders tell terrifying stories to the children about that valley. They said that somewhere, buried under the roots of a white hawthorn, lay the heart of a giant who couldn’t stop searching for it, finding no peace for hundreds of years. The children trembled with fear, imagining the terrifying descriptions of the monster tearing apart unfortunate villagers and adventurers who had crossed its path while seeking the rumored treasures of his domains. But Halsin had always felt a sort of melancholy when hearing those tales. His small self imagined the pain of losing one’s heart—of someone stealing it and hiding it beneath the cold earth, in darkness. He imagined winters passing without knowing where it was, and the sensation of an invisible thread tugging desperately at his chest in all directions with the unbearable feeling of emptiness. He felt nothing but compassion for the giant.

His mind filled with those memories, with others villains and monsters: similar stories, creatures, witches, malevolent fairies peering through shifting shadows, now just tales to keep children from wandering too far from their villages. Real dangers lurked in the shadows—real enemies infected by a greater evil spreading like a disease. There was no time to search for any giant’s heart. What mattered was finding the source of these parasites.

The first thing that caught his attention as he ventured deeper was the unusual number of mushrooms on the trees and ground. The truffles were especially large and flavorful. The trees were adorned with beautiful, glowing fungi that became brighter and more varied as the darkness deepened. The grass under his paws was thick and soft; it had been a long time since he had seen a place with such an abundance of untouched, pristine vegetation.

The second thing that drew his attention was the behavior of the local animals. They didn’t display the usual ease he was accustomed to. Most watched him from afar, with the exception of a young sparrow that perched close, as if wanting to speak.

“You’re Halsin, aren’t you? You’re like the guardian,” it said, tilting its head. Its young voice carried the sweetness of a bird that had just learned to fly. “I’ve heard the crows say good things about you. Be careful—the guardian must not catch you snooping.”

“The guardian?” Could the stories about the giant be true? Had the being, resigned after losing its heart, taken to guarding the mountain, accepting only the precious company of birds and flowers?

“Who is your guardian, little one? Do you know where I can find them?” The small bird hopped onto his snout. Silvanus had bestowed upon Halsin the gift of calming beasts, of earning their trust simply by speaking.

“I won’t tell you! He mustn’t see you!” The birds on the other branches whispered along with the little one: “He mustn’t see you! He mustn’t see you!”

“Let’s make a deal. If you answer one questions, I’ll leave—just for today. Is that fair?” The little birds looked at one another, discussing in a language only they could understand, a lost tongue of the forest only for the beasts and the trees. “Very well, but make it quick. He-mustn’t-see-you!”

Halsin asked if they had seen more people recently, specifically Drow. Had they seen their guardian handling any kind of larva they hadn’t seen before? The birds replied that the guardian had dealt with several strangers with lilac skin and white hair. He had extracted worms from their heads as they slithered out of their ears upon death and crushed them—all except one, which he had carefully opened with a sharp thorn and observed for many hours, writing in his wordless books.

This meant the infection was not only unrelated to this unknown being, but also that the guardian wasn’t some wild giant. They were a rational being capable of dissecting and studying larvae. Could Halsin be in the presence of one of the hermit dark druids he had heard about many times during his novice years? He would have to proceed with caution. Decades ago, his order had tracked down several sectarians in small groups around the region. But this was not the time for investigation. It was nearly nightfall, and he had given his word—losing the favor of the birds was never a good idea.

Back in his study, he exhaled the smoke from his pipe slowly while his gaze was lost in the rhythmic dance inside the fireplace, but his mind wandered miles away. It still roamed those knotted trees, covered in luminous pearls and beautiful turquoise bells. Usually, he would go straight to discuss his discoveries with Nettie, but this time he had only mentioned some trivial information, omitting anything about the unknown being living in the mountain. He had searched the grove’s library for the names of the mushrooms he’d seen that evening. Three were listed as extinct, and the rest had no record. He was certain the being was connected to the abundant vitality of these species, and this only piqued his curiosity even more. What if one of those mushrooms had some kind of unknown healing effect? Beyond preserving their species, was this being propagating those fungi for a reason?

He spent the next morning solving problems within the grove: arguing with Khaga, helping the Tieflings—the usual. It was 3:00 PM when he set off for the mountain. By the time he arrived, the sun was high in the sky. This time, the birds didn’t greet him. A peculiar silence filled the spaces between the branches, the rocks, the grass. Only the sound of the wind whispering its unintelligible poems filled the clearing he had reached. He was deep in the forest when a sharp breath made him turn suddenly. Before him stood a ram, black from the tips of its horns to its tail. Its long, wavy hair seemed to absorb the light around it, but its expression and bright golden eyes betrayed its nature—it was as much beast as Halsin was.

The beast rose onto two legs and let all its weight fall onto the ground, sending the birds perched on its horns flying in different directions and cracking the earth beneath its sharp hooves. A familiar golden vapor surrounded it sinisterly as it took a menacing step forward.

The bear also took a step forward, but to close his eyes and offer a small, courteous bow with his massive head. “You must be the guardian the birds spoke of. Please, don’t be afraid. I’m nothing more than a servant of nature, just like you.”

As he finished speaking, the druid allowed the same golden vapor to return him to his human form, and he knelt before the being. In his outstretched hand lay a bundle of Goodberries. “My name is Halsin. Would it be too much to ask for yours?”

Some minutes passed before the ram began to approach slowly. After circling him a few times, it leaned its head in and sniffed the berries in his hand. Eating a couple as a gesture of peace, it spoke without changing form.

“Revna.” Its voice was rough and raspy, as if it had been a long time since it had spoken aloud. It wasn’t too deep or too high—a brownish tone, like dark sugar. “Hal-sin,” it repeated slowly, as if absorbing the syllables little by little. “The birds speak of you too.”

After saying this, it walked away slowly, studying him, memorizing his face. “I’ll let you pass. Thank the sparrows—they spoke up for you.”

It hopped off into the underbrush until blending into the darkness. In the distance, only a pair of golden eyes were visible for a moment before disappearing.

Halsin spent the following weeks visiting almost daily. He always arrived in bear form and returned to his human shape once there was no danger of being seen by any villagers. During the hours he spent there, he observed the different species of mushrooms taking notes in the small notebook he kept strapped to one of his paws on the way there. There were many more than he had seen the first time. The deeper he ventured, the more colors and shapes he discovered. Occasionally, he would see Revna walking slowly in ram form in the distance, observing his activities calmly. When not visible, Halsin could still feel his gaze from some indiscernible location—so much so that, over time, it became a game to figure out which direction he was being watched from, to turn quickly and catch him in the act. When he did, he always saw the bushes subtly rustling, and could have sworn he had once heard his spy’s snort of laughter.

During all that time, he didn’t dare take a single mushroom, though he was very interested in collecting a few samples and asking questions about their qualities—their effects upon ingestion, their origins, the reasons for their preservation.

At the end of the fourth week, he arrived determined to enter the forest in the form of a wild cat, trying to remain as stealthy as possible. The brownish color of his fur blended perfectly with the thick foliage of the valley. A part of him feared that venturing deeper without being watched would ruin the trust he had gained, but he couldn't contain his curiosity about what lay beyond the glades, beyond the ram form. The further he went in, the more insects he saw: moths, butterflies, beetles, caterpillars. Species he thought had long since migrated had settled there, in the peaceful and solitary darkness, cared for by that faceless being. At some height, he began to wonder if his ears were deceiving him; someone was singing, a soft voice, a bit hoarse, sweet, so very sweet, carried by the wind to him, lulling him in like sirens pulling sailors into the deep sea.

At the foot of a gray apple tree, a beautiful structure of red and purple oyster mushrooms grew. It looked like a miniature castle from which, at any moment, a swarm of fairies or an army of tiny myconids might emerge. They emitted an iridescent light that faintly illuminated the pale fruits of the tree and the long ivy hanging from its branches. At the base of the structure, a stream of cold, pure water gently sprang forth, and crouching in front of it, whispering its melancholic song, was a small figure. Upon paying more attention to the texture of their skin, he noticed that, just like him, it was a Wood Elf. But this one had a very long tail with black curls at the end, a thick bandage on the left thigh, and a pair of horns, long and curved, like those of a mountain goat or a wild ram. Their body was slender but small, and their dark olive skin was covered in freckles, full of thick scars. Long black hair piled up on the ground beside them, like a serpent. There was no doubt—it had to be him.

The Druid filled his lungs with air and, after returning to his human form, took a step forward. He had no idea how they would react, so he immediately took the same posture as when they first met and extended his hand, full of Goodberries.

“Revna? Is that you?” His first reaction was a look full of alertness and hostility, his arched back like a cat indicated he was about to pounce at him, claws first. All he could see was red. There was a stranger in his home, at the foot of his apple tree—how dared he? How had he come without being seen? And what kind of guardian was he to have allowed such a thing?—All of that passed, and the alertness melted away upon seeing the hand full of Goodberries in front of his face. It was the Druid, the bear who came almost daily, the one who observed the mushrooms without damaging them, the one the sparrows said was caring and gentle.

“Hal-sin,” he said, the same way he had the first time.

“How did you get here?” The words came slowly, as if he had to remember how to talk to people.

“I’ve been looking for you. I have many questions I’d like to ask you about the insects and mushrooms you’ve been caring for, about the strangers who’ve been attacking our valleys.”

“Our valleys,” Revna repeated. Halsin also had a valley to protect, beings to care for, and species to preserve. Had he too been attacked by those strange white-haired ones?

Despite how alarming the possibility was, the thought brought calm. To feel that they both had too much to lose, too much to protect. He extended his hand, this time it was his long fingers that took a handful of berries and gave him the approval to follow with a head gesture.

Revna seemed wonderfully comfortable walking naked through life. Halsin watched him with the fascination of someone seeing a white deer in the snow for the first time; this time it was his eyes following Revna’s steps. A pair of small birds perched on his horns, one of them the little chick that had welcomed him the first time. It jumped onto his shoulder and spent the rest of the journey chirping next to his neck, among his reddish braids.

They walked in silence for about twenty minutes or so until reaching a stone structure covered in ivy and white clusters of flowers at the end of the valley. It was half buried at the base of the mountain, half built with large stone blocks sticking out. In front of it were a pair of baskets with straw in which two geese were having a heated discussion about who was eating all the worms from the pond. Halsin saw the guardian smile for the first time. When he spoke to the animals, he did so in a very soft voice, almost a whisper.

“Sonia, Sur Sur, there are enough worms for both of you.”

Once the ladies were calm, he turned and gestured for Halsin to sit on a thick wooden chair by the water ravine in front of his home. Placing a few bright pink apples in front of him, he reclined on a log against the porch and began to eat the Goodberries the Archdruid had just conjured.

His thick, dark hair fell over his shoulder like an ebony waterfall, his eyes were yellow like those of a goat, every gesture careful and precise. Before bringing a fruit to his mouth, Revna examined it as though it were a ruby between his fingers. Halsin tried to tame his curiosity so his host wouldn't misinterpret his gaze, but he couldn't help but let his eyes fall on the deep scars across his body. The bandage on his thigh had nearly fallen apart during their walk, and a fairly recent wound peeked out beneath it. A wide gash along the muscle, still half-healed.

“It was the first of those strange white-haired ones,” he said, his eyes fixed on him.

“Would you let me heal it for you?”

Revna slowly sat on the table in front of him, and Halsin gently placed his hand, eyes closed, over the deep wound. It must have taken a long time for such a deep injury to heal naturally; it looked like it had been made with a spear. When he removed his hand, there was nothing left but a faint change of pigmentation.

“I’ve never been good at healing. Thank you.”

There was a weight in his words, it made the Druid think of the giant, searching for his heart in the darkness.

“Now you have me. You can ask me whenever you need.”

Their faces were very close, but neither of them seemed intimidated or shy, rather curious. Revna studied his face, and Halsin remained still, so he could observe as much as he pleased.

“Did you build it?” He gestured to the house with his hand.

“No. There was another before me, but he was already dead when I arrived.” He took one of his thin reddish braids in his hand and stared at it. “I found his bones in his bed, buried him there.” He made a brief gesture with his head toward the base of a vine as thick as a poplar and returned to his meticulous investigation, his brow furrowed in concentration. Halsin stretched out his hand slowly and took a lock of his long hair between his fingers; it was soft, as black as a raven's feathers.

“How long have you lived in this place? How did you get here? People fear this valley—they tell all kinds of stories, don’t they?”

Revna listened with an amused air, a tad of pride on his smile. He had worked hard to keep those beliefs alive.

“I know.” Now he was inspecting the clasp on the ribbon in his hair, running his long claws lightly over the surface of leather and bronze.

“Take it,” said Halsin, closing his eyes as his skilled fingers untied his hair.

“Forty summers. I would’ve lost count, but the trees count them for me.”

The Druid opened his eyes in a mix of surprise and dread.

“You’ve been alone for forty years!?”

Their gazes met for the first time during all this time.

“I was raised by shadow druids, Hal-sin. Loneliness does not scare me.”

He looked at the brooch in his hands as he spoke, his words, unaccustomed to concealment, dripping with unfathomable sadness.

“I ran away when I saw the cruelty they were capable of. I lived for a long time in the city, saw many people, so many people. I got sick of them and wandered aimlessly until I arrived here. Haven’t left since.”

The Archdruid pulled his eyes from his face and slowly began to braid the hair in his hand in an effort not to wrap his arms around him.

“How old are you, Revna?” 

“Seventy-seven summers, I think.” He lifted his head to watch the two geese fighting again, now about whether or not to make room for a third.

“But I don’t feel lonely.”

He took the braid Halsin had made in his hair and looked at it, then placed it alongside his own and observed both up close.

“You’re the first being I’ve spoken to in all this time who isn’t an animal or a mushroom.”

A shy, tired smile graced his expression, Revna gently ran the tip of his fingers over the red mark adorning Halsin's face, concentration visiting his expression again. The little bird that had been hidden among the reddish hair of the bear all this time had now returned to his caretaker's nape. Halsin stretched out his hand and gently stroked the scar beneath one of his heavy horns.

“Guardian of the mountain, would it bother you if I kept coming often to your home to spend time with you? I promise your secrets are safe with me.”

When was the last time he had touched another person’s hair?

Revna thought of the night he first arrived at this place. His exhausted body tearing off his light armor and throwing it away, assassins and hunters be damned. Crying until growling, feeling the weight of all those years in Baldur’s Gate, having moved from the violence of his upbringing to that of the powerful, the wealthy, those with names that were supposed to mean something to him. The world had always seemed harder for him to understand than for others; his mind would freeze when he had to defend himself, and he ended up acting like a beast filled with fear and panic, being treated as one as well.

He left the forest in his adolescence, drawn by the tree beneath which the shadow druids had killed his father. It called to him, whispering the truth they had hidden: his father hadn’t abandoned him to starve or be devoured by beasts as they told. Seeking the remnants of his family in the city, he found nothing—only the same cruelty, disguised under different names.

The forest and the mushrooms were simpler, honest. With time, they told him his father had been a hunter, poor but kind, that he sang to him to make him fall asleep at night. That was enough.

Now, a druid with reddish hair like freshly cut wood sat at his table. He smelled of meadows and homemade bread, he smelled like sunlight. His eyes held a sweetness he had seen only a few times before. Perhaps it was because the first time they met, he too had looked like a beast—just like him—or maybe it was simply the exhaustion from endless solitude, but this one seemed good.

“I choose to trust you, bear. Don’t make me regret it.”

There was no trace of threat in his voice, it was a plea.

Halsin pressed his forehead against his and nuzzled him with his nose.

“I promise, little ram.”

They talked for hours, about the drow but mostly about the uses of the spores Revna could produce. Slowly, his broken voice became steadier, gaining strength. Still, it retained a naturally soft, hoarse quality. He passionately explained the possible medicinal uses of the mushrooms—how to differentiate them, how to catalog them, and which ones to avoid at all costs. The reason for their preservation was none other than fascination and study. This is how the Archdruid learned that the guardian was a devoted Spore Druid. His creations could be used to help as much as to harm, in equal measure. It began to make sense that he had chosen a life of solitude; his heart seemed as peculiar as those strange beings—so vital for the natural balance of life and yet so alien.

By the time they parted, it was nearly night. The last rays of the sun tinged the sky with reddish hues, casting a golden glow on their skins. Rev looked smaller beneath that pink mantle, sweeter. The late wind swayed his long hair like the branches of a willow, and Halsin had to force himself not to take him in his arms and carry him away. It pained him, thinking about those forty years of loneliness; he knew that one more night wouldn’t make a difference, but in his heart, he didn’t want him to be alone anymore. Perhaps the fearsome giant of the shadowed borders would never be able to discover where his heart was buried, but he wished with all his being that he could help him fill that void with his own.

As they said their goodbyes, Rev placed a small cloth bag into his hands.

'Before you leave, this is for you.' The bag was made of natural fabric, likely crafted by him from the herbs of his terrains.

'Are these... spores? It smells like earth kissed by rain!' The scent was nostalgic, fresh.

'Haste spores, yes. Bring a basket when you return, and I’ll give you others—the ones we talked about today, and any others you want.'

He paused, a flicker of worry crossing his expression. 'You’ll return, won’t you?' His eyes began to shine as response to the darkness growing over them, and the druid, already struggling to resist taking the guardian with him, had to hold himself back even more at the sweetness of that question. Would he return? As many times as he could, as many times as fate would allow."

He took his slender, scarred hand in his and held it for a moment, contemplating.

"You’ll have me here every time I can, as soon as I find an opportunity."

Revna had accompanied him to the boundary between his forest and the meadows, his eyes scanning the horizon as if it had been a long time since he had seen those fields. It was as though he had forgotten the world, and the world had forgotten him. He had awoken from a forty-year dream to discover that life had continued beyond the mountains. Halsin's voice was what finally woke him up.

"I’ll bring different fruits and books. I saw you had some, but you’ll probably want to read other things. Tell me anything you need, and I’ll bring it to you."

"Could you bring me paper? I like the paper you use—it smells like sunlight, like you."

A small gasp escaped his lips when Halsin embraced him, but he didn’t pull away.

"Paper. Noted," a thread of a voice.

Rev let himself be held, perfectly still, his eyes closed, taking it all in. When Halsin finally released him, he stepped back slowly, almost reluctantly.

"I’ll be waiting."

The druid, in bear form now, waved his paw at the hill of the meadow, where the golden horizon kissed the grass. All that could be seen was his silhouette and his two glowing golden eyes, shining like his own. Revna returned to his stone house with an uneasy heart, wondering if that had truly happened. He sat by the entrance, holding his trembling knees, and two large tears slid down his cheeks. Instantly, the sparrows surrounded him, whispering sweet nothings.

"What’s wrong, gentle guardian? What hurts?"

"Little ram," he murmured softly, recalling the Druid’s words. "are we sure we can trust him?"

A rat in the winter of its life, climbed onto his shoulder and gently nuzzled his cheek.

"Don’t worry, guardian, the tall druid is kind to everyone, he’ll bring berries for you too!"

In the heart of the mountain, at the foot of a stone staircase surrounded by white Wisteria and all kinds of colorful mushrooms, the guardian slowly ran his fingers over the small braid at the end of his hair, as if reading a love note in Braille. Meanwhile, on the other side of the valleys, the Archdruid of the Emerald Grove entered his study and filled his bag with paper.

[mogcubed]

i’ve been thinking about the logistics of undertale a little too much. biologically, what are monsters? like hypothetically what biological phyla would they fit under?

is this too niche of a question?

if it’s two races: humans vs. monsters, then there has to be a genetic difference in between the two sentient species. humans are mammals, descending from apes and the like, suggesting that monsters are inherently different from mammals entirely. however, we see monsters that heavily represent a lot of mammal species (dogs, goats, deer, etc) as well as a plethora of other animal-inspired characters (undyne having fish like qualities, alphys with lizard-like qualities).

do humans and monsters share the same common ancestor and just have adopted similar animalistic traits through convergent evolution, or are monsters something else entirely?

if the latter is true, i’m wondering if monster biology could be considered as something completely different than how we understand life. if we take into account that mr toby fox based the world of undertale on the scientific principles of our own (minus the whole concept of SOULs), given that monsters behave in a completely different nature than most living species, how exactly did they come to exist on earth?

basically, what if the monsters represented a seventh kingdom of life?

organisms are typically classified under six distinct kingdoms of life (Archaebacteria, Eubacteria, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia). the first three kingdoms are basically microscopic, single celled organisms. the last three are probably the most familiar, being fungi, plants, and animals (with animals in this argument representing us, humanity, humans). monsters clearly don’t seem to fit into any of these categories

i mean, for one they (mainly) don’t bleed, instead decomposing into dust following the death of their physical bodies. like all other organisms, they run off energy, but this energy seems to be exuded outwards from a central point (their SOUL) rather than equally made and distributed throughout the cells of an organism like we see in all of the other six kingdoms.

essentially for us, yknow, mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. but i’m wondering if, for monsters, their SOUL serves as their mitochondria, in a way. it’s how they live and breathe. their food, too, is noted in undertale to be different than “food from the surface” or human food. it seems to completely rejuvenate their energy, instead of the traditional way that we as humans eat (by digesting other organisms). it seems that they don’t consume other organisms at all. instead their food is completely different and only MODELED after surface food (because yknow, they don’t exactly have digestive systems. take sans and papyrus for instance. real human food would just fall right through them probably).

ANYWAYS just some ramblings i could probably write a whole essay on this

TLDR: sans undertale is the secret seventh kingdom of life

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #34 – Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Overview

I have had this on my list for long enough for my request that the local library get a copy actually result in me getting my hands on it. It’s the third instalment (the last? I’m not sure – the ending here felt like far less of a natural conclusion than the ending to either of the previous two) of what is for my money some of the absolute best space opera (maybe even just science fiction writ large) of the last decade. I actually opened it with a real sense of trepidation; Children of Ruin had ended on an optimistic, open-ended note, with the creation of an interstellar and inter species society that was both deeply aspirational and incredibly alien. I wasn’t sure how a book from their perspective would even work. Thankfully, my fears were basically misplaced – there’s definitely a drift in tone and focus from where the series started, but the thematic heart’s still there, and this was overall a joy to read.

Synopsis

Following the end of Children of Ruin, we have a nomadic society of uplifted spiders and squids, Humans (the capitalization signifies infection by an engineered retrovirus to help with empathy and accepting/valuing the Other), the formerly all-consuming alien microbal parasites of Nod (who have agreed to only assimilate the identities of those who expressly consent to the process), and various instances of Avranda Kern (millennia old upload of a meglomaniacal mad scientist who is by a quirk of history now the OS all computers run on). After making tentative Second Contact with a half-terraformed world now inhabited by a civilization of debatably-sentient crows, an exploration ship takes on a pair of them as ambassadors before finding their way to way what seems to be a struggling but holding on colony founded by one of the last arkships of refugees to escape the ruins of Old Earth. .

Intercut with this is the narrative of that arkship arriving, very much the worse for wear after two thousand years and change hurtling through the void with its crew and cargo in cryo. The world is hardly what they hoped for – only ever half-terraformed, breathable atmosphere and some basic engineered microbal life, but entirely lacking any sort of biosphere – but it’s not like they have another option. They make the best of it they can, using what working technology they have to bootstrap a basic ecosystem of pigs and trees, a few species of bugs and fungi, enough to farm and build with. And the core crew holds out hope that the faint trace of a strange signal buried in the hills near their colony might lead to something more.

Intercut with that is the story of Liff, a young girl in the colony as things take a turn for the worse. That’s when things start to get weird.

Xenophilia

The best way for me to get across the central theme of this whole series is ‘more star trek than star trek’ (or at least, than any star trek produced since I’ve come of age). It believes is absolutely nothing so strongly as it believes in the pure and perfect virtue of curiosity, that the point of existence is to discover, and to share what you have discovered with those around you. It is an oft-repeated point that the overwhelming majority of the universe is cold and empty, and anything different is worth seeking out and treasuring for its own sake – that every shred of diversity is the cosmos is a wonder in its own right.

Which is the entire purpose our protagonist’s civilization has set themselves – the distributed fleet of pathological scientists and novelty-seekers, leaving behind teeming cities and orbital habitats for a life seeking the mysteries of the universe with tiny circles of peers. It’s very Starfleet, in its most idealistic and elevator-pitch form.

And even beyond them, curiosity, discovery and exploration are treated as basically heroic wherever they’re found – Captain Holt and the Enkidu might have been doomed, but they’re still presented as deeply and wholly admirable for trying.

It goes beyond that, too. This is one of vanishingly few space opera settings I can think of with a cast full of distinct and dissimilar species, where none of them are orcs. Or dragons, for that matter. No matter how monstrous and horrifying a species seems – spiders the size of your head, the mad remnant of an ancient demiurge, all-consuming and replicating alien parasites – the answer is diplomacy, outreach, communication. Both sequels in the series have begun with a civilization formed through the total (though not seamless) integration of alien societies from the last book into a greater whole. The parasites from Children of Ruin best exemplify this, I think – convinced that consuming and assimilating everything it can reach will result in nothing but a universe of itself, compared to walking through the world with a soft touch and appreciating all the different dynamics that can develop through so many myriad perspectives. And now one of them is basically the book’s main protagonist (and very guilty about all the nonconsensually-eating-people thing).

Whereas in Memory it’s not exactly subtle that the intolerance and violence against social deviants is presented as basically a symptom of material scarcity and desperation. When Landfall is doing well, the little band of infiltrators – strange, nonverbal artist, discomfortingly informative schoolteacher, standoffish and thoroughly gender nonconforming woodswoman – are affectionately tolerated and appreciated for what they can do. When the harvests are bad and the forests are rotting – well who even needs abstract art or history lessons to begin with? They’re lashed out at, used as just one of a growing set of scapegoats, and when things are dire enough, again and again, they end up on the noose. Intolerance is a self-harming reflex, a wounded animal lashing out because it can neither understand nor change the actual source of its pain. Again, Star Trek but moreso.

The ‘moreso’ does a lot of work in this comparison, to be fair. The series shares Star Trek’s deep love of science just like it shares its pathological liberalism – it’s just consistent about it. The crew explorers are casually transhuman (transarachnid, transcephlopod, etc) - immortal and physically enhanced, capable of sharing and downloading both memories and skills, visibly aging or carrying scars only as a fashion statement. It is treated as a casual fact of life that letting an experiment progress might mean going into cold sleep for decades or centuries, if there is no better way for a group of six on a small ship to while away the time while they wait. Technology has conquered scarcity on anything like a personal scale, and the explorers take full advantage.

Which is probably downstream of the books not being particularly caught up on ‘humanity’. I mean, humans are there – are very important! - but to the extent they’re the axis the universe turns upon, it’s only the ghosts of the old empire. Modern humans are just one part of interstellar civilization, and not even its most numerous or prominent. Humans have a unique way of thinking (as does everyone else) but no monopoly on heroic drive or virtue.

Curious Corvids

Each book in the series feels marketed around a different uplifted animal arising from the ruins of humanity’s imperial glory and galaxy-spanning hubris. This is not wrong, but it definitely becomes less right as the series progresses.

Children of Time is about the spiders. There’s humans too, sure, but I’ve yet to see a single person who read for the Gilgamesh plotline. By wordcount and thematic focus and just what makes it an interesting book, it is about the evolution of Portid intelligence and civilization across the millennia. The real protagonist of the novel is the species.

Children of Ruin is still kind of about the uplifting of the Squids. Senkovi’s efforts and relationship with them gets a decent amount of focus, as does the development of their civilization after the terraformers’ death. They just share top billing with the alien aliens, and rather than just being the climax of the story Second Contact is the real meat of the entire plot.

In Children of Ruin the introduction of the corvids almost feels like a publisher mandate – their history and backstory is basically brushed over in the prologue and one interlude, Second Contact basically a triviality. It’s not that they’re not important to the book or its themes, or that they’re not interesting (in both cases they very much are!), but they feel like a b-plot. Supporting what the book is about, not defining it.

Which to be clear, is from a writing perspective almost certainly the correct choice – ‘Children of Time but with a different species’ would still be fascinating, but it really doesn’t cohere as a continuing and linked series. I just think you could have dug some more meat out of the abbreviated history given there. What fanfic is for, I suppose.

It’s a funny sort of distinction that unlike the others, the corvids aren’t technically uplifts – the considered opinion of the series is that while spiders and squids would require millenia of nanite-assisted directed evolution to develop anything that looks like human-level sapience, in the right environment crows would just Do That (admittedly with the addition of alien radiation scrambling DNA and increasing mutation rate by an order of magnitude or two).

The other trend with the different uplift species as the series has gone on is that with each book they become neurologically and psychologically weird. The spiders had Understandings and a bunch of predator- and cannibal-instincts, but they’re still each an individual intelligence. The squids are a central brain and a bunch of semi-autonomous limbs which are only barely on speaking terms with the conscious mind. And now the crows are not individually intelligent at all – they think and live in pairs, one observing and recalling, the other analyzing and inferring, actual intelligence appearing only in the dialogue and interaction between the two. Which makes chapters from their POV very entertaining, at least.

Sentience and Identity

The book’s very interested in both – it’s probably the most central and explicit theme of the entire thing. Our crows, having given the matter thorough and careful reflection, eventually decided that they weren’t sentient at all (that nothing is, really) – or at least, that’s the series of sounds they make when asked. Our other main characters include:

an alien parasite which has assimilated a copy of a woman’s consciousness and now imitates her so well she often forgets she’s anything else

a copy of a sliver of an instance of an upload of an ancient terraformer, who for a nontrivial period of time was running on hard that was mostly ant colony

an extremely detailed simulation of someone who could have but never did exist

(arguably) the simulation they are running on.

The book comes down pretty solidly on a ‘if it quacks like a duck’ model of personhood – and cheats a bit in terms of giving most of the above POV chapters and obvious internal monologues – but the question of who counts as sentience and as a person, and of what ‘sentient’ and ‘person’ even mean – are ones that various characters spend a lot of time and angst on.

The answer the book arrives at isn’t exactly a surprise – see above, more star trek than star trek – but it’s still an interesting angle to look at everyone from.

Genre Ambiguity

The book is clearly, self-evidently science fiction, but Tchaikovsky still has a lot of fun playing around with some fantasy tropes and imagery in it. Liff is an adolescent who dearly loves her book of ancient fairy-tales, and so our view of Landfall and the world beyond it, which means basically her entire plotline is narrated with a fairy-tale sensibility. In fairness, Kern and the crows do an excellent job accidentally seeming like a witch and her familiars. Landfall’s whole deal seeming a lot more like a fairy curse than anything from the inside doesn’t hurt, either.

While it’s science fiction, Memory is definitely softer science fiction than the previous books in the series. In general, human- and human-descended technology all at least has the convincing appearance of rigour and plausibility, while anything alien falls solidly into the real of space magic plot devices. So we get elaborate narration on the exact details of how the crew of the Enkidu bootstrap a functional ecology around Landfalll before their high technology begins giving out, but the simulator buried in the hills Just Works. Which as neat a way to do the division as any, really, but there’s a real shift in tone from Time where just about everything feels like it’s from the first category. I mean, they have fTL now!

Conclusion

This isn’t really a book I’d call groundbreaking – Children of Time has much more of a claim to novelty in both subject and presentation – but it’s one that I think solidly achieves everything it tries to? The writing’s good, the characters all cohere, the themes are explored intelligently. Plus, Kern is probably one of my favourite characters of all time.

So y’know if you don’t have major issues with spiders, multiple POVs and unclear timelines, or existential angst, would solidly recommend.

[acti-veg]

(keep public for discussion) is there any evidence of non animal (plant, fungi, etc) sentience? How about bug? And should sentience be the bases of what deserves basic rights (food, shelter, safety, etc) ?

There is no real evidence of sentience for any organisms other than animals, no. As far as we can tell, in the absence of nerve ganglia to transmit a pain response, a nervous system or a a brain to process it, nothing resembling suffering as we understand it can occur. I think it is perfectly possible that there is some sort of ‘sensation,’ and ‘will’, I’m thinking of in large networks like funghi or lichen, but it would be so radically different to anything we understand that we can’t observe it in the same way or use the same language to describe it. Sentience is a human concept we impose on the world, and it isn’t an exact one.

For insects, they’re a diverse group but by and large, they have a relatively simple central nervous system, made up of groups of nerve ganglia attached to a simple, central nervous system through multiple sections of the body. They also have brains to process that nerve response into something resembling pain. All of this would have to essentially be there but not work in the same way it does in all other animals for them not to be sentient.

That said, with insects (and arthropods more generally) it is still much less of a settled debate. Insects have many traits we associate with sentience, most notably nociceptors, which are capable of processing a negative stimuli response. You can find a review of the current science on this here, but the short answer is that we think that at last many (if not most) of them are sentient in at least a simple way, but we need more research to say for certain.

Sentience is a useful benchmark for determining the extent to which a creature has subjective experiences, and therefore can experience their own oppression and cruelty inflicted on them. If they can experience pain, we shouldn’t be hurting them. As for rights, sentience is far from perfect as a measure of who should have rights and who shouldn’t. Sentience is a useful benchmark, but any way of distinguishing who should have rights and who shouldn’t will always be fairly arbitrary.

The way I think of it is that sentient beings obviously need some fundamental rights, we can interpret, at least to some extent; what the interests of sentient beings actually are based on what they pursue and which stimuli they experience as negative. For insentient beings, things are less clear, but if we aren’t going to use sentience as our relevant factor, it is hard to think of what else we might be able to use. We can’t really use complexity, or intelligence, or behaviour in any way that would apply across organisms.

Theoretically though, I am not opposed to rights for insentient beings. Why shouldn’t a 500 year old Oak have the right to exist? Why shouldn’t a whole forest, a stretch of wetlands, an ocean? At the very least we can consider insentient beings to have interests in the sense that we should factor their existence into our decision-making on issues like land use and climate policy.

Personally, I’d love to have more discussions among vegans about the relevance of sentience, and what rights (if any) might be desirable for other forms of life, particularly plants. The problem is that we don’t really have the space to have these discussions because we’re endlessly fighting off the bad faith arguments of plant sentience from meat eaters. They want to talk about this because they see it as a way for meat eaters to (counter-intuitively)kill and consume both animals and vast numbers of plants, regardless of whether or not they are sentient.

[mellorphic]

In Defence of c!Niki - a Four Part Analysis of Every Arc

People who didn’t watch C!Niki see, in the fandom, a big sister type character with girlboss energy who wants to kill a child. Niki isn’t that. She has a well-written narrative which focusses a lot on her relationships with others. Here is me breaking it down!

PART ONE: c!Niki’s Early Days (you are here)

PART TWO: c!Niki’s Rebellion

PART THREE: c!Niki’s Disillusionment

PART FOUR: c!Niki’s Healing

Niki joined the server a little while after the L’Manberg War for Independence and she immediately joined the nation as Wilbur invited her to it. Of course, Niki was close with Wilbur from the beginning and quickly she got close to Tommy and Fundy too. But a relationship that I find interesting was her bond with Eret.

From the get go, Niki is told by L’Manberg (read: Tommy and Wilbur) that Eret was a traitor and wasn’t trustworthy, and while she understood their apprehension, she remained friendly with Eret as they were nice to her. She had no real reason to dislike him because she had not been there during the war and therefore wasn’t betrayed by her.

Wilbur ends up talking to her about this.

N: you know I’m loyal to you, Wil! You know I’m loyal to you.

W: I don’t- I want you to be loyal to L’Manberg.

N: and to L’Manberg! I am!

W: […] just stick with L’Manberg! That’s all I’m looking for- that’s all I look for in- in a woman- <laughs>

N: I promise, I promise I will

W: okay..okay, I’ll trust you..

N: I mean, y’know, that is why I joined! I joined to join the independent nation, didn’t I?

W: you did.. you did. You did. And just not their independent nation.

N: no. Our independent nation.

I think this is the first really important bit of Niki’s character - she is loyal. But she won’t take what people tell her and trust it blindly. She wants to form her own opinions on things and on people rather than listening to what others tell her about them. And yet, even when she ends up disagreeing with someone on something it doesn’t affect their relationship. Niki quickly begins to trust Eret a lot and Wilbur doesn’t trust him at all. Despite this Niki remains loyal to Wilbur and assured him she’s loyal to L’Manberg too.

That’s another thing - she promised Wilbur she was loyal to L’Manberg. And she kept this promise for as long as she could. Throughout this analysis I’m going to reference this promise a lot because while it’s a mostly forgotten piece of lore I think it has a lot of potential to be bigger and to be talked about a lot more often.

Additionally, I think this shows that Niki is pretty good at reading people - she obviously knows Wilbur very well and can read him because of this, even starting to say ‘and to L’Manberg’ before Wilbur had even finished saying he wanted her to be loyal to it. At the same time, she’s able to figure out from Eret’s behaviour that he’s trustworthy. Analysing motives and behaviour is how Niki figures out who to trust and it’s important to remember this for the Manberg era when suddenly the behaviour and motives of people around her didn’t match up.

Niki showed her loyalty by making the nation’s flag, by telling Wilbur her fox Fungi was the mascot of L’Manberg, by creating her bakery, and by giving everyone lots of gifts. I’ve said it before that she was the soul of L’Manberg. She loved that nation and she lived and breathed its ideals. C!Niki was an idealist. I truly think she would’ve been happy to remain in L’Manberg forever, if it hadn’t changed. Unfortunately, though, change is inevitable and attachment is a main theme on the Dream SMP, and there were many people attached to L’Manberg. It wasn’t ever going to remain the same.

The first pet war was the first time we really saw how strong of a moral code c!Niki had, and it’s something a lot of people think she only developed later on. While she was initially angry at Sapnap, Niki only wanted an apology (but she refused to beg for one). She never wanted revenge like Tommy and Fundy did.

Early Niki is often regarded as naive, but I genuinely don’t think that was ever the case. She was kind and compassionate but she was never a pushover and she’s always been headstrong.

Niki joined Coconut2020 in the elections as Fundy had told her they could bring peace to the Nation and make it better. It’s important to note that she was extremely upset when she learned he had committed voter fraud. Niki cheered despite coming in last place and this made it clear she’d be happy regardless of whether or not she won, as long as the people were happy.

[spores-and-such]

Blog intro

Hello! I am a biomedical science student very interested in science and nature, and this is my blog for posting about those things.

I will mostly be posting pictures of and trying to identify fungi I find out and about. I am by no means an expert, this is just something I find fun, a lot of my identification attempts will likely be wrong and so if anyone knows better please feel free to correct me.

As well as fungi I’m interested in microbiology and marine biology, as well as anything to do with animals.

Feel free to request shitty mspaint doodles or posts about a specific organism !

Also this should go without saying, but if you’re a TERF, transphobe, or otherwise anti-LGBT, stay the fuck away from this blog. This blog is about real biology and not transphobic bullshit

[hellhoundmaggie]

wait whats the big SH headcanon you aren't into? I love SH but haven't interacted with the fandom a ton

Thank you for asking!

The theory I can’t agree with is that Wayne is a sentient fungus colony occupying Sam’s body. I do agree that there’s something inhuman puppeteering Sam Wayne’s body, but there isn’t any clear textual evidence suggesting the something is fungal.

There’s a couple of supporting arguments people tend to make for Fungus Theory, but I find them weak and tenuous:

Wayne’s body is rotting at a fast pace. Fungus is a cause of decomposition. Therefore the body must be colonized by a fungus.

Fungus may be a cause of decomp, but it’s not the only cause. Many kinds of organisms contribute to decomposition — insects, scavenger animals, microbes, etc. — and fungus is not necessary to the process. I’m not completely ruling out the possibility that the rapid rot is caused by fungus, but in the absence of concrete evidence, there’s no reason to assume this has to be the case.

Sybil is helping Wayne in some unspecified way. Sybil specializes in folk medicine, which has potent magical effects in her hands. Sybil specifically uses chaga, a fungus, to make a mind-control tea. According to the homeopathic principle of “like cures like,” Sybil must be using chaga or a similar fungal ingredient to support the fungus in Wayne.

This argument might be more convincing if Sybil used fungal cures exclusively, but she doesn’t. In fact, chaga is the only fungal cure she is shown to cultivate or use. The castor beans she gives Doc come from a plant. She grows poison flowers in her tea nook. Even the unspecified blend she gives to Tabitha is herbal, not fungal. Also, one of the effects of the chaga is to make the drinker trust Sybil, even to the point of not registering information that makes her look bad. If Wayne is drinking the chaga, then shouldn’t he trust her? Why does he assume she would hurt an aged MC? It doesn’t make sense to assume Sybil’s giving him chaga.

Wayne zaps Reese with what appears to be a set of yellow tendrils slithering out of his wrist; there are yellow fractal networks in a couple of Reese’s paintings. Some fungi are fractal networks, some fungi conduct electricity. The thing in Wayne’s arm must be part of a fungal network!

I can think of something else that zaps people with electricity: lightning. I plan to elaborate on this more in a series of theory-posts, but suffice it to say that I find my theory about lightning to have more textual support than the fungus theory while requiring fewer assumptions. Occam’s Razor, baby!

Abby Howard tends to take inspiration for her monster designs from her study of evolutionary biology. Reese’s monster design is an excellent example of how biology influences Abby’s art: he is a chimera of several real animals, both living and extinct. It would only make sense for her to have based Wayne on something biological too — like fungi!

This makes sense to me as a meta-textual argument. But again, there’s no textual evidence that Wayne is fungal, so there’s no reason to accept that Abby took inspiration from fungi when designing Wayne.

Again, I plan to write up my own pet theory — which not only explains what Wayne is, but also helps explain Reese’s origins, the nature of the Seals, the influence the Scarlets had over the town’s past, and the parts MC and Tabitha have to play in the town’s future — someday soon. But I hope this post helped convince you that, despite Wayne’s sense of humor, he is not a Fun Guy. Have a good one!

[saccharinescorpion]

sorry i swear it’s not like i’m super angry about that one single comment, i just can’t get over the irony of spending the last couple days toying with the idea of basing the fantastical elements of a story off of some of the real life properties of fungi and then being told “sorry you can’t appreciate the beauty and horror of fungi” because i thought a tumblr shitpost was corny

[minecraft-inspo]

Why are slimes placed as an early branch off of the kingdom Animalia? 

Slimes are enigmatic. Taken at face value, they could fit anywhere or nowhere in the tree. They tick all of the boxes required to be defined as an animal, but don’t closely resemble any real phylum, though they do bear some resemblance to certain basal animal groups such as ctenophores and cnidarians. 

Why is the elytra branching off from the insects?

The word elytra refers to the hard wings of beetles. This is where beetles would be placed on the tree.

Why is the shulker a mollusk?

It’s a shelled invertebrate - anything beyond this is unclear. It has a pair of shells like a bivalve, but could belong to any of a number of different related groups. 

Why is the sea pickle so close to vertebrates?

The sea pickle is either based on a real life sea cucumber (an echinoderm), or a sea pickle (a tunicate). Either way, both of these groups are deuterostomes, which means they, like us, develop their anus before their mouth. Yeah. 

Why are guardians labeled as manufactured?

It’s an idea I’m not totally sold on, but a theory nevertheless. It has been posited that guardians were created to guard underwater monuments and are not actually animals. I am of the opinion that if this is the case, they are still at least partially biological, as they do drop edible raw fish. In this case, they likely represent a lineage of jawless fish comparable to real life ostracoderms that was further modified for their role as temple guardians. 

Why are the dragon and sniffer related? Why do they branch off the tree so early?

Both are 6 limbed, meaning they are not tetrapods, the group which includes all real terrestrial vertebrates. Instead, they may represent a different lineage of fishes which separately developed a third limb girdle and then followed a line of parallel evolution with the tetrapods. This is comparable to the various invasions of land by arthropods, in which arachnids, myriapods and insects separately evolved mechanisms of terrestrialization while also convergently evolving many of the same structures as each other. 

Aren’t creepers described as “plant-like?” Why are they included with the vertebrates?

They have indeed often been described as plant-like by various developers. It is my belief that they are vertebrates with a symbiotic relationship with some form of plant, probably a moss. This is why they are also included in Bryophyta on the other side of the tree. All promotional merchandise that shows creeper internal anatomy shows the presence of bones and the general anatomy reflects a familiar yet distorted version of the common tetrapod body plan. They do not share much in common with either reptiles or mammals, and so I split them off early in the vertebrate portion of the tree. While creepers share a developmental history with pigs, they do not actually bear any synapomorphies to suggest this relationship is canon, and so I chose not to place them nearby. 

Why are phantoms reptiles?

I’m honestly not sure what else they could be. The underside of the texture reminds me of the plastron of a turtle, though the wings are arguably more bat-like than anything else. Phantoms are all undead and their living version is likely now extinct, so we can’t fully understand the anatomy they would have had. 

Why are striders synapsids? What is a synapsid?

Synapsids are mammals and their extinct, reptile-like ancestors. Striders have hair, like living mammals, but otherwise share very little with modern mammals, suggesting they split off early in synapsid evolution.

What is the warden/sculk?

I don’t know. It’s very purposefully the most alien life in Minecraft. Most realistically, I think it’s not from the overworld at all. However, that’s not really in the spirit of this project. Therefore, I hypothetically place it as a fungus, as fungi are capable of the sprawling growth in dark environments and possible parasitism in the case of the warden itself. 

Why are blazes labeled as “manufactured?”

I haven’t got a clue what blazes could be. Are they sentient fire? Are they living creatures that mimic fire? Who knows. I finally ended up considering them to be something akin to vexes or golems - summoned by someone or something to guard nether fortresses, rather than naturally evolved creatures. This is actually supported by a really old (and likely since retconned) article from the Minecraft website. https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/visit-nether- 

Why is glow lichen connected to two separate branches?

Because lichen is a symbiotic structure formed by both algae and fungi!

Why are chorus plants where they are?

They are angiosperms, meaning they bear flowers and fruit, but do not have the characteristics of either of the more derived major lineages of flowering plants.

Why are dripleaf plants alismatales?

To me, they bear a great resemblance to members of the arum family, such as elephant ear plants, arrowhead plants, and Monstera. 

Torchflower?

It bears greatest resemblance to bromeliads, a group of plants related to grasses.

Why is the spore blossom placed where it is?

The spore blossom is another anomalous species. If “spore” is taken seriously, it must be a fern. However, ferns don’t have flowers, so I assumed the spores are actually just pollen. I placed it as a dicot based on the fact that dicots typically have flowers with 4-5 petals, while monocots have flowers with petals in multiples of 3. 

Why aren’t vines and glow berry vines placed together?

The “vine” form has evolved dozens of times in separate lineages of plants, just like the “tree” form. It alone is not enough to indicate a close relationship. I tentatively placed vines where the grape family would go, and placed the glow berries where staff vines (Celastrus) should be. 

Why aren’t dead bushes grouped with sweet berry bushes and azaleas?

Like vines and trees, “bush” is a description of a body form and not an evolutionary group. I depicted the dead bush as a real form of desert bush, a tumbleweed, specifically the Russian thistle, a common tumbleweed in the order Caryophyllales.

Sweet berries, on the other hand, are most likely based on lingonberries, a commonly grown crop in Sweden, where Mojang is based. These belong to the order Ericales along with azaleas, as well as many other common plants not yet represented in the game such as blueberries and cranberries. 

Pitcher plants are real - why isn’t there a “confirmed” lineage on the tree?

Pitcher plants have evolved several times in different lineages, and there is no clear indication which ones the ones in Minecraft are. In fact, most likely, the Minecraft pitcher plants don’t belong to any real group of pitcher plants, as none of these produce “pods” nor do they have similar leaves. However, the most likely candidates are the family Nepenthaceae (order Caryophylalles) or the family Sarraceniaceae (order Ericales).