#there is hunted fresh seal in the video if you are sensitive to that

[darkwood-sleddog]

This episode of PBS's "Human Footprint" features Devon Manik and his Inuit sled dog team. Devon is an incredible photographer and well worth a follow online.

[thefallenofbajhiri]

Never Ending Survey: Toshi

Rules: Repost, do not reblog. Tag 10 blogs!

Tagged by: @gildedandgolden​

tagging: Everyone I wanted to tag was already tagged but I shall throw in a few peeps AKA @benes-diction​ @theaetherhealerffxiv​ and @talechaser-ffxiv​ <3

basics.

FULL NAME: Toshinaku ‘Bajhiri’ formerly known as Sozoh’a Bajhiri

NICKNAME: Toshi by just about everyone really, he prefers it to his full name most of the time.

AGE:  Unknown, Looks to be in his Early to Mid Twenties. He is a voidsent after all, Age means nothing to him.

BIRTHDAY: 29th Sun of the 6th Astral Moon

ETHNIC GROUP: Au Ra (Cursed Form), Voidsent (True Form)

NATIONALITY: Former Memeber of the Bajhiri Clan

LANGUAGE/S: Eorzean Common, Huntspeak (Keeper and Seeker), Dravanian/Draconic, Ancient Allagan and Voidsent. Knows enough about other languages to manage.

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Homosexual

ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: Panromantic

RELATIONSHIP STATUS:  Not really interested, No one can sway/win him over

HOMETOWN / AREA: A dense forest found in the deepest parts of the North Shroud.

CURRENT HOME:  Nomadic

PROFESSION: Master Alchemist and Engineer, takes up the study on Genetics and Genetic Altering (As well as a darker business in the background selling Fantasias). Entertainer and Belly Dancer in Ul’dah, offers his services as a male prostitute as well.

physical.

HAIR: Long and down to the top of his tail, Burgundy colored with purple tips, usually kept fairly decent.

EYES: Burgundy that matches the color of his hair but it is blocked out most of the time by the Lavender Limbal Rings.

FACE: Sharp but somewhat ‘soft’ looking, has a very young and youthful appearance

LIPS: Full, Plus, Silken Words

COMPLEXION: Pale, Greyish-Lavender skin with Opal-Moonstone Scales

BLEMISHES: Body looks to be in perfect condition with nothing staining it

SCARS: Pristine and almost unreal in appearance, whatever scars he might have heal quickly

TATTOOS: Numerous Tattoos that cover all of his form with the most notable being on his torso and back which cover the entire area.

HEIGHT: 8′9″ far taller than any normal Au Ra

WEIGHT: 290lbs.

BUILD: Muscular and very toned with legs that many dancers would be jealous of.

FEATURES: Golden Claws, Somewhat Dragon-like Feet, Adorned with Silks and Jewelry

ALLERGIES: While not allergic to it he is extremely sensitive to white, holy and light based magics and Aether.

USUAL HAIR STYLE: Long and left completely down most of the time, will sometimes tie his hair up into a high ponytail that cascades down to the middle of his back like a waterfall.

USUAL FACE LOOK: Coy, sometimes playful, teasing and flirty in some cases. When in hunt mode however he seems to have an almost smug and cunning look.

USUAL CLOTHING:  Dancers clothing that is made out of long silks usually in Grape Purple, silks are transparent and show most/all of his skin. Wears a Kohakama to reveal as much skin as possible since he is an entertainer.

psychology.

FEAR/S: While he will never admit to them, Toshi has a fear of being alone though he has gotten far better with it obviously.

ASPIRATION/S:  Breaking the seals on his body and earning his freedom once again.

POSITIVE TRAITS: Attractive, Observant, Playful and Resourceful

NEGATIVE TRAITS: Aggressive, Deceptive, Impatient and Obsessive

TEMPERAMENT:  Generally Coy and Playful at the start but can quickly turn to wild and destructive.

SOUL TYPE/S: The Warrior

ANIMALS:  Snakes, Serpents, Dogs, Wolves, Dragons.

VICE HABIT/S: Murdering People who Upset Him, Obsessively on the Hunt to break the Seals, Extreme Pride and Looks down on others, Constant Lies and Manipulation to get what he wants

FAITH: Formerly Menphina, the Lover (When he was Sozoh’a) now he follows no one.

GHOSTS?: He’s seen the souls of his deceased family... so yes.

AFTERLIFE?: He did destroy the souls of his family after killing them so... very much yes.

REINCARNATION?: Going through what he has, there is a small thought that it could be possible.

POLITICAL ALIGNMENT: Keeps well away from it.

EDUCATION LEVEL:  Well Educated at the very least to get what he needs to get done. Basically he knows what to do in most situations to the best of his abiities.

family.

FATHER: Name Unknown, Keeper of the Moon possessed by a High Ranking Voidsent

MOTHER: Sozoh Bajhiri (Deceased, Keeper of the Moon)

SIBLINGS: Sizha (Eldest Sister), Rosah (Sister), Vekhe and Zahveh (Twins, Youngest Sisters) All Deceased

EXTENDED FAMILY: Una’to Bajhiri (Clan Branch, Relationship Unknown), Sebha’to Bajhiri (Clan Branch, Relationship Unknown). Various other Bajhiri Clan Branch members.

NAME MEANING/S: Bright (Toshi), potentially ‘Gift of the God’ for Naku.

HISTORICAL CONNECTION?: None...

favorites.

BOOK: Fictional, Fantasy, Horror, Mythology and some Folklore. Also anything regarding Ancient histories.

DEITY: Formerly Menphina, does not truly hold to any deities now however.

HOLIDAY: All Saints' Wake

MONTH: April

SEASON: Fall

PLACE: The Alchemists Guild

WEATHER: Heavy storms with intense thunder and lightning

SOUND / S: Boiling Water, Bubbling Potions, Wind Blowing and Rainfall

SCENT / S:  Fresh Rain and Dew, Blood and the many scents of brewing potions.

TASTE / S:  Savory and sometimes Sweet. Also has a fondness for Saltiness.

FEEL / S:  Smooth Scales with Soft Skin, Silken Hair.

ANIMAL / S:  A Beady Eye that he calls Kuso because it’s a piece of shit. It counts as an animal right?

NUMBER: 355

COLORS: Burgundy, Lavender, Grape Purple, Silver, Gold, Opal, Moonstone.

extra.

TALENTS: Potion Crafting, Tinkering/Engineering, Belly Dancing

BAD AT: Not Killing People, Controlling his Temper, Staying in his ‘Cursed’ Au Ra Form

TURN ONS: Gentle Caresses to his Scales, Touches to his tail specifically at the end, Roughly Grabbing at his Hips

TURN OFFS: It’s hard to say what would turn him off really...

HOBBIES: Murdering People is Fun, Seeking a way to break the seals on his body, Fantasia Crafting

TROPES: Dark is Evil, Always Chaotic Evil, Eldritch Abomination, Power of the Void, Demons Lords and Archdevils, Our Demons are Different, Sealed Evil in a Can and Unstoppable Rage

QUOTES: "Are you looking to strike a deal for a potion?” “I want to know where he is...” “I will find you little clan mate...”

mun questions.

Q1 :  If you could write your character your way in their own movie,  what would it be called,  what style would it be filmed in, and what would it be about?          

A1 : Pretty sure the movie would be called “From the Darkness” or “The Fallen of Bajhiri” since those are the big things I go with for Toshi. It would easily be a Horror film and it would likely be a trilogy where the first movie is about his past (When he was Sozoh’a) leading up to his transformation to Toshi, the second would be focused on him getting sealed away and his hunt to break the seals. Third is likely him either breaking the seals and getting his freedom or something... I dunno.

Q2 :  What would their soundtrack/score sound like?          

A2 : Mostly Horror Music and Themes, Likely Horror Video Game music such as things from Silent Hill.

Q3 :  Why did you start writing this character?          

A3 : Toshinaku was retired well after I created him, I had originally wanted to make him as a sort of adopted into the Miqo’te Clan type character and to RP someone with my good friend @skyysinger​ with Sebha’to. But I quickly tossed it out... and now that I’ve had a lot of fun RPing and talking with amazing people like @unatobajhiri​ and @nyrs-nook​ I got inspired to bring him back. I guess the big reason I wanted to start writing him is because I really wanted to write horror stories.

Q4 :   What first attracted you to this character?          

A4 : I have way too many muses and ideas at times though when I originally made Toshi again it was him being seen as an Adopted outsider into the Miqo’te Clan. After revising him and RPing with my friends I started to develop a greater lover for horror aspects and I wanted to play with something I never really delved that deep into before. I had done things with Dragons and Halfbreeds for various races but I never touched on any creatures from the Void.

Q5 :  Describe the biggest thing you dislike about your muse.

A5 :  I suppose if I had to pick something that I ‘dislike’ about Toshi is I guess that his content can be very... mature and 18+ themed which means that it’s not really suited for everyone. I do love the horror and body horror that I write for him but I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea obviously. I am also always afraid of creating characters like this because of how people might take them (Him being a Voidsent, how he turned, things like that) and how people tend to be at times.

Q6 :  What do you have in common with your muse?          

A6 :   Do... I share anything in common with this asshole? Honestly... I do not know and I’m almost terrified if I do have something in common with him...

Q7 :   How does  your muse feel about you?          

A7 :  I’m pretty sure Toshi hates me just for the simple fact that I keep throwing him into hell and putting him through a lot of pain and suffering because I find it so relaxing to write those body horror stories of his. I think he might want to tear me apart because of how many times I’ve had him just... well you know... 

Q8 :  What characters does your muse have interesting interactions with ?        

A8 :  When it comes down to it Toshi really finds most people he interacts with interesting... unless it’s @unatobajhiri‘s Una’to because then it’s just a game of how much can the Keeper annoy the shit out of him. He finds characters like @gildedandgolden‘s Aure very... curious because he is trying to learn why they are how they are. Any other characters he has interacted with were just NPCs for story purposes and he usually goes to characters so that he can try and achieve his goal.

Q9 :  What gives you inspiration to write your muse ?        

A9 : The biggest inspiration for me is just knowing that people enjoy seeing the things that I post about any of my characters. When people praise me I don’t know how to take it but that shows me that people are indeed interested in these characters and stories that I have to offer. It helps me fight the bad brain demons that I have where I’ll usually give up on a character entirely either because I feel that I am bothering and annoying people with that character or because I feel like I am wasting peoples time with them or it’s simply because I feel like no one will want to see the character. A lot of the times I feel my stuff is trash or garbage so knowing that people want to see more is always an inspiration to keep me writing.

Q10 : How long did this take you to complete ?          

A10 : Hrmmmmm roughly an hour but I also had a cat get on my lap and in the way during the middle of this so... RIP

[originaldetectivesheep]

The Thirty and One Nights' Momentary Diversion - In the Track of the Albatross, part I

Le'von, Lew, Hurley, and Allison return from "When John Frum Came Back to Peliwak" (collected in Monsters of the Week), with a new plane, a new employer, and a new wild-goose chase: a German sub missing for near on a hundred years.

In the Track of the Albatross

I spread out my toes and felt the rivets under my feet, the exact curve of the wing, as I leaned in, getting up on the edge, and hucked the tool bag down and across to Lew.  He caught it out of the air,  cracking a smile as he rocked back under the impact of the canvas, bare feet kicking against the side of the ship under the access door.  With a motion half back inside, he chucked the bag somewhere in, down, inside the belly of the plane.  "If there's a good thing about dropping off that Navy pension and coming up on this contract crap," he said, coming back, blond curls shaking as he leaned back out of the frame, "it's that now, the damn plane's big enough that we can keep all the crap we got to fix'er with inside."  He patted the doorframe of the Scooper.  "I tell ya, Le'von, thisn's a good plane; days I loved that old Cat, but every time you go up, she like as to break up around you."

"I hear you," I said, sidling along the roof over the door, getting ready to drop down and swing in as soon as Lew budged up from the doorway.  "I'm sure glad that this plane is, like, younger than me and she don't take near as much work to keep up, but the other side of being big enough that we can keep all our stuff on board means we got to. I don't miss being cooped up on Tuganga, not so much, but sleeping in a hammock strung up between a stack of vacuum tubes and a crate of MREs gets kinda old, y'know?  If they'd just let us home-port in Guam, I wouldn't have nothing to complain about."  Below me, Lew nodded vigorously, staring out over the lagoon to the distant sandbars of the Chuuk reef line.

Of course, you couldn't take an ancient Catalina and its crew back to Guam, someplace civilized with modern equipment, once you closed up the antique radar station that the bird was assigned to in favor of a damn satellite.  But after that business on Peliwak, and what we'd reported before the island blew up, the service wasn't about to just let us walk and go talk to whoever – and not Hurley and Allison either.  They had to stick a flying boat pilot and his maintenance dude somewhere, and also their radar-ops buddy and their not-totally-useless station chief: where they stuck us, and it was all of us, was into an almost-modern Bombardier Scooper and the world's most obvious black-ops bullshit cover story.

The plane belonged to Northern Stores, technically; I found out during the 'orientation' video for our new 'employer' that this was legit the Hudson's Bay Company, still a weird mercantilist almost-arm of the Canadian goddamn government two hundred years later.  Which explained why the Island Fresh supermarket in Kolonia, the capital of Pohnpei state in Micronesia, could suddenly get a seaplane attached to it and nobody blinked.  When we were 'home-ported', we slept in the plane in the harbor, parked between leafy sandbars and sunken hulks blocking the channel, but we were never home in port – there was always something that someone wanted somewhere, somewhere out in the big empty of the Pacific Ocean that jets couldn't get to correctly and boats couldn't get to fast enough.  So we got borrowed: Lew to fly the plane, me to keep it running and the crew from getting tetanus or dysentery, Al to spot storms and handle any kind of ELINT, and Hurley to…. well, to go talk to people that wouldn't take a Melanesian pilot or a black wrencher or a weird, socially mute radio op seriously.  That was mostly what Hurley was good for, mostly what he did.  Like now; that was what he was coming back from doing, standing up in the front end of a motor canoe in his Navy whites, the local pilot back by the outboard leaning way back out over the spray to keep the canoe balanced, or to get himself as far the hell away from Hurley as he possibly could.  The canoe slowed up as it turned in towards the plane, and Lew and I half saluted out of force of habit.

Hurley threw it back as smart and crisp as the dress trousers none of us ever caught him washing.  "Morning, Le'von, Lew; are we shipshape?"

I nodded over at the engine I'd given a going-over.  "Yeah; I popped a panel after those diagnostics came up last time, but everything's in place, fluids are good, nothing's wearing out.  We ain't filled up since we landed, but just driving over here to anchor probably didn't burn that much.  Lew?"

Lew nodded.  "Man's right; we're near full up, still all stowed from coming in.  Most any patrol, we're ready to go as soon we spin up the engines."

Hurley's face was unexpectedly grave.  "That's good to hear, but I'll take exception to part of it.  This isn't 'most any patrol' we've got – we're going to be out a long ways, perhaps for a long time – longer than we've done in a while.  We're going to need to top off what we burned taxiing over here – and to fill up the two water-bomber tanks forward with fuel as a backup."

I shifted myself sideways, edging off the door.  This was serious; whoever had delivered this plane to us through whatever channels had taken out most of the firefighting equipment that had been built into it to start, leaving a lean but flexible long-range seaplane without a lot of extra weight, but there were still two of the bomb tanks opening out the hull – in case we needed to do some firefighting, or in case we needed to go farther, way out in that big empty, than anyone could rationally expect a seaplane to go.  "In that case, I've got to check the doors and make sure they're sealing tight – so we aren't leaking and we aren't pumping water through the engines.  I'll make it quick; wherever this is, you probably want to get going right away."  Hurley nodded, and I shucked off my shirt, throwing it in past Lew as he bent to help Hurley up into the plane.  I slid off the edge of the fuselage and straight down into the sea; there were gauges inside, but the surest way to check the seals on the forward bomb bay doors was to run a finger along all the seams, to feel for the water sucking in on the pressure change, getting in where it wasn't supposed to.

When I climbed back up in, scrubbing off with a microfiber towel before I dripped on something that would be expensive to have short out, the engines were already turning; the electric starters on the new Pratts sure beat the heck out of manually cranking the ones on the old ship. Lew was running through his checklist and Hurley was in the copilot's chair; I picked up my shirt from the jump seat and sat down to pull it on.  "So, what's the mission, boss?" I asked, digging in with my fingers to get the last of the water out of my hair.  "We've got to be going far, and out of the way, if we've got to gas up again, let alone load extra fuel into the bomb tanks.  Where abouts?  Wake? Kiribati?  The Solomons?"

Hurley answered, even though I was mostly talking to Lew.  "You're not far wrong; it's in that area, it's far away, and it's somewhat sensitive – as in the U.S. government is not supposed to be there, by orders of both the FSM and Papua New Guinea, at least one of whom owns the reefs and sandbars in the outer Bismarcks that we have to check first.  They're not allowed to land; otherwise they would have sent the SEALs and might have sent a task force.  Because it's fine and well for small countries to have territorial sovereignty, but when you go about building a submarine dock and berthing a two-hundred-foot boat of no known type there, the Navy gets a little anxious."

I had been nodding through Hurley's World Police ramble there, but when he got to the wild sub, I sat bolt upright.  "Wait.  What? They've got us off sub hunting?  Why?  How?  And what do you mean, 'no known type' – how did nobody spot it before?"

Lew brought the engines up to taxi speed, and checked that the anchor was all the way up as he fed in the throttle to get us moving over towards the pier by the west end of the airport.  "We didn't hear about it out here, being so cut off from the Internet," Hurley said, raising his voice a little to be heard over the props, "but a bunch of USGIS satelllite survey images got wikileaked a few weeks ago, and the usual conspiracy weirdos with more spare time than sense immediately put together a crowdsearch project to find the aliens, or the Jade Helm bases, or whatever rubbish people are getting riled up about this week.  They found nothing like that, of course, but what they did find was a submarine, of no type known to modern navies, berthed to a crude pier on a tropical sandbar.  This was remarked on, but because the leak did not include a way to make sense of the image codes, the amateurs huffing over it couldn't find what particular tropical beach, exactly, the image represented, and after diligently not finding any matching island and submarine dock on Google Earth, the wasters forgot about it and went back to their games or harrassing celebrities or whatnot.

"The government most decidedly did not forget.  The Internet amateurs did not find the submarine base on Google Earth because Google, mindful of their bandwidth, does not include images in sufficient resolution to identify it for grid squares that should be merely an empty and uninteresting patch of the Pacific Ocean.  But the USGIS does have images at that resolution, and as soon as someone saw the image codes, they confirmed that this square of ocean, long ignored as uninteresting, had been hosting at least one submarine base for quite some time."

"I'm not liking the sound of this – especially that 'at least one' part," I said, turning around as I stood up to check the connections between the main fuel tanks and the backup bomb tanks. Lew spun the engines down, and through the windshield ahead, I could see the motor launch from the airport coming in, trailing the hose back to the tank truck.

"I haven't even gotten to the bad part yet," Hurley said, without a care in the world.  "The Navy's identified at least three more potential or former sub docks, strung out along the outer edge of the Bismarck archipelago, or on flyspeck seamounts out in the ocean between there and the Carolines; submarine docks associated with what look, to a practiced eye, like careful copra plantations and drying facilities.  Someone is running a submarine around in the wastes of the Central Pacific, and fueling it with coconuts, the oil or the dry meat for coal."

"Everyone runs copra out here," I said, checking the pressure on the bomb tanks as the gas started to fill in.  "Doesn't mean anything; anybody who can find themselves an uninhabited island will put up some trees and get a grow going, no matter who the land ought to belong to.  Doesn't mean anything."

"Of course it doesn't; not by itself."  Hurley was unaffected.  "But with the submarine, it may – and not just any submarine.  The sub is of no known type – no type known to modern navies.  But there is a historical class that, despite the fairly bad quality of the one half-submerged satellite photo of the ship that we have available, may be a match – and that class has long been legended to be missing a ship."

The gauges were all green.  I turned back around to confront Hurley about this.  "Okay, fine.  So what is this mystery ship?  Some missing Nazi U-boat that flew in from Antarctica?"

Hurley was turned around, and he shook his head, chuckling, in that way he had that always made me wish I had a wrench to hand, and that he wasn't standing in front of anything important.  "You've got the right country, Le'von, but the wrong war.  Our missing ship is the nigh-mythical U-160, not recorded as launched from Kiel in March 1918 as the last of the U-151 class, the long-range cargo subs intended to connect Germany with her distant colonies and reluctant trading partners.  The hull dimensions of the ship seen by the satellite are within ten percent of what we know of the U-151s; it wouldn't be impossible for a German submarine to be found out here, in the old German colonial waters, as an evacuation ship or a commerce raider or both in the dying days of the Great War.  Where this becomes impossible is when that ship survives a hundred years on and is still sailing – and then why, and where, and for whose ends, becomes very interesting to a great many people."

I nodded, and crossed my arms.  "Right.  And when you've got a ghost ship out there doing impossible things within a thousand or two miles of Pohnpei, up and goes the ex-Tuganga Weather Station after it, because anybody knows impossible, it's them."

Hurley turned back around, putting his headset on as Lew brought the engines up again.  "Tuganga's in the past, Le'von; we're with the Rachel now, and with her, well, I guess we've got to always be searching for everyone's lost children."  

"Sir yes sir," I said, ignoring the reference and sitting back down in the jump seat.  I had my own checklists to run as Lew opened the engine up to take us out; I didn't have much to do in the air, but when we got wherever we were going, it was going to be me on the beach – me out on the beach looking for clues to a ghost ship lost at sea for the longest part of a hundred years.

Part II