#will do Turquoise's backstory someday

[dyxtd21]

Turquoise aesthetic moodboard!!

Description: Turquoise stands at the height of 6'2" and as a figure of awe-inspiring beauty and power, his entire form radiating a vibrant turquoise hue with intricate brown lines accentuating his gemstone body and cape. His superhero suit, a marvel of gemstone craftsmanship, shimmers with a metallic turquoise sheen and is adorned with patterns that catch and refract light, emphasizing his imposing physique. The cape flows gracefully from his shoulders, transitioning from deep turquoise to a lighter, transparent shade downwards the edges, with brown accents that complement his natural patterns.

At the center of his chest gleams his heart-cut gemstone.

Personality: Beneath Turquoise's majestic exterior lies a complex and darker personality, reminiscent of Homelander from "The Boys." He projects an image of charm and benevolence to the public, carefully crafting a facade of a beloved hero. Behind closed doors, however, Turquoise is driven by deep-seated arrogance and a thirst for power. He manipulates others with charm and influence, using intimidation or coercion when necessary to maintain control. His actions are often self-serving, driven by a relentless ambition that sees him viewing others as tools or obstacles to be manipulated or removed.

Powers and Abilities:

Flight: Turquoise can fly with tremendous speed and agility, maneuvering effortlessly through the air.

Brute Strength: He possesses superhuman strength, allowing him to lift and manipulate objects of immense weight.

Superhuman Speed: Turquoise moves at incredible speeds, surpassing that of most other beings.

Superhuman Hearing and Smell: While not on the level of Zebra Jasper, Turquoise possesses enhanced hearing and smell.

Resistance to Ice and Cold Weather: He can withstand extreme cold and ice-related attacks.

Bubble Creation and Storage: Turquoise can create and store bubbles for various purposes, from defense to transportation.

Unique Powers:

Freeze Vision: Turquoise can emit beams that freeze objects or opponents on contact.

Elemental Vision: He can see through elemental substances such as ice, water, fire, earth, and wind, as well as stare at the sun and moon without harm.

Weather Disruption: With a gesture, Turquoise can manipulate the weather, changing it to his liking—from snowstorms to clear skies.

Emotional Projection: He can project his emotions onto others, influencing their feelings and perceptions.

Spectral Phasing: Turquoise can shift into a ghost-like state, becoming intangible and invisible, allowing him to pass through solid objects.

Psychometric Powers: By touching objects or people, Turquoise gains insights into their history, previous owners, or past events.

Memory Manipulation: He can alter, erase, or implant memories in others, manipulating their perceptions and experiences.

Honey-Tongued Lies: Turquoise possesses a natural ability to lie convincingly, using his voice and charisma to deceive others effortlessly. (It only works towards humans)

(I really like Homelander! 💙)

[reddpenn]

Hey, since a bunch of new people are following this blog now, do you guys want to see my Cool Rocks?

To start with, here’s a super amazing stripy colorful rock.  This is banded fluorite, the most colorful rock in the world!  The best way to view this rock is with a little light behind it.

It’s so cool how all the little cracks in the rock cast shadows.  And the way those colors glow!  Look at all those different purples.  That golden yellow gradient!  Those thin stripes of teal and green and blue!!  Amazing!!

Here’s a rock which is business on the bottom and party on the top.  Those pale green crystals up top are apophyllite.  Here is a fun apophyllite fact:  just like zeolite, apophyllite isn’t a mineral, but the name of a whole group of minerals!  This piece might be natroapophyllite (probably not) or hydroxyapophyllite (maybe?) or fluorapophyllite (likely!) but it’s hard to tell without testing its chemical composition.

Speaking of zeolites, this cluster of crystals down below is a zeolite mineral called scolecite!  It has the coolest crystal habit!  Scolecite likes to form these silky white needles which radiate outwards as they grow.  This apophyllite and scolecite growing together make such an awesome specimen.

Turquoise is my birthstone, so it’s always been one of my favorites!  That’s why I need an unreasonable amount of it.  Look at this massive chunk of turquoise.  This monster.  This absolute unit.

Here’s a lovely pink rock.  Rose quartz may be a common stone, but mine has a secret backstory.

Back in the 40s, my rose quartz belonged to someone’s private mineral collection.  The number identifying her as specimen 433 is still attached with resin!  I would never in a million years scrape it off; it’s too cool thinking about all the shops and collectors it must have passed through before it came to me.  What is your story, little rock?  What have you seen?

Desert roses!  A whole huge cluster of them all stuck together!  You might remember my big red barite rose.  These little white roses are made of selenite, and I absolutely bought them because my barite rose needed a buddy.  It’s incredible how they naturally form in this shape.

Here is some more selenite, which did not naturally form in this shape!  But a cube like this is perfect for showing off some Cool Optical Properties.

Selenite is just like ulexite; its crystal structure is like a fiber optics cable!  (In fact, in nicely gemmy selenite this effect is even easier to see than in ulexite.)  Even though the sides of its crystals are opaque and white, the top and bottom will project whatever’s behind it like a screen!  Science!!!!!

This little black rock turns a deep red-orange when I shine a light through it.  It’s amber!  Sadly no mosquitoes trapped in this one, but there are some cool swirls of lighter and darker amber inside.  Since this rock is made from fossilized tree resin, it feels like resin!  Super lightweight and almost like plastic.  Maybe someday I’ll find this guy a friend with some bugs in it.

Halite is the sciency name for this rock, but you might know it better as rock salt.  Halite’s the best because it can form in one of my favorite crystals habits: hopper crystals!!  Just like bismuth, halite makes these weird hollow stairstep-like cubes.  (But unlike bismuth, halite doesn’t need to grow them under lab conditions.  It can just do this naturally!)

Does your monkey brain want to eat a rock?  You could absolutely eat this one!  If you licked this rock, it’d taste salty… but your saliva would dissolve my cool hopper crystals, so please don’t.

This weird shaped crystal is a lab-grown piece of arcanite.  No, not the World of Warcraft item or the Yu-gi-oh card.  It’s a potassium sulfate mineral, and here is a list of Cool Places To Find Arcanite!  It was first discovered growing on railroad ties!  It’s been found around hydrothermal vents!  It can be found in bat guano!  Oh, and big crystals like this can be found grown by humans in labs.  Look, if you don’t collect manmade rocks that’s cool and all but I’ll be over here excitedly telling people about railroad ties and bat guano.

Hm, but now I’ve gotta pick something especially cool for the last rock…

You guys wanna see some fossilized lightning?

This is a fulgurite, also called lightning glass or petrified lightning!  Oh man, this is one of my absolute favorite rocks!!  It’s formed when lightning strikes sandy soil.  The intense heat melts the sand and fuses it into a tube of natural glass, preserving the shape of the lightning bolt!  I can’t get a good picture of it, but the inside of mine has a black, glassy texture.  If you live near a beach, go check it out after a thunderstorm and you might find some fulgurites of your own!

Oh, and if you’re into witchy stuff and crystal healing, fulgurite is one of the few rocks I know crystal healing stuff about.  They say fulgurites are good for contacting extraterrestrials and UFOs!  Please bring me some moon rocks, UFOs.  I’ll trade you some Earth rocks, which, have I mentioned?  Are all amazingly cool.

(You can see more of my rocks over here!)

[sunbird-tells-stories]

I was rewatching one of my favorite episodes of Xiaolin Showdown lately and I’ve been thinking of Jesse’s/Jessie’s character. I really like her a lot. I was always fascinated with that character from the moment I first saw her. Clay was my favorite Dragon, so to learn he had a sister??? Who was a biker girl??? And a BAD GUY?! Like, it was crazy! I loved the episode, and I still love it to this day. I love the lore, the aesthetic, the Black Vipers, the story, and the ending with Jesse under a starry desert sky flying off into the moon leaving behind a magical rainbow trail behind her? Like, tell me that’s not awesome!

So, since I’m bored and have Xiaolin on my mind, I’m gonna rant about her for a little bit.

First off, Jesse’s listed in the credits with the male version of the name, aka Jessie without the ��I.” And the first thing I thought about when I mulled over this choice for a name was that it reminded me of Jesse James, who was a famous outlaw back in the days of the Wild West. So it was maybe a crew choice to give her that name as a shout-out to her criminal nature, and because of that, I like to think that in the show’s universe, Jesse used to be Jessie but dropped the “I” the day she left the Bailey Ranch. You know, to show that a) she was starting a new life and leaving her old persona behind and b) maybe to challenge the stifling old gender norms she was relegated to at the ranch. I mean, Daddy Bailey, as cool as he is, did ooze vibes of toxic masculinity in the one episode we saw him. If he was hyper focused on making Clay the manliest man, then it makes sense that he’d push Jesse to be the girliest girl.

But like, Jesse’s her own person, man. She’s hotheaded and stubborn and determined, and she’s got enough grit and pride in her to say “You know what? Screw this. I’m not happy here, I’ll never be enough for you, and life is too short to live in a place where you’re either ignored because everyone’s paying attention to your brother or being pressured and prodded into being something you’re not.”

So she left. I mean we never got a backstory on that (and I would have loved one, trust me), but she left, and she left on bitter terms too, considering Clay’s instinctive animosity towards her on sight. Like, no “hey, how’s life” or “where have you been.” The first thing he did after recognizing her was to call her a varmint. A nuisance. A lowlife.

That’s....uncharacteristically harsh, Clay. You’re supposed to be the sweetheart of the group, and the first thing you do when you see your baby sister after who knows how long...is to insult her?

Wow. There’s a story there. And if we don’t get any background on it, then maybe I’ll write it later? There’s always fandom, kids! And fanfic. And fanart.

But Jessie really does fascinate me as a character. Like even more than Ashley, or Wuya, or Shadow, or even Kimiko! Out of all the (very few!) female characters in the Xiaolin lore, she’s the one I’m interested in the most. It’s everything about her you know? It’s her backstory, it’s her personality, her skills, her likes and dislikes, the way she chooses to live her life, the way she’s constantly double crossing everyone around her - even her brother! No one is safe from her except for her loyal Vipers, who must also like her and trust her a lot too, since as soon as there’s a brief void in the leadership role, they automatically welcome her and her alone back into it, instead of squabbling over who should be the leader of their biker gang. For all their trouble and deceit, the Black Vipers stick together.

Probably because they’re all they’ve got.

I mean the girls live in a MINE! (An abandoned mine, like seriously, how cool is that?!) and they’ve got pet vultures, and know every inch of their hideout, and the place is falling apart in some areas but it’s HUGE and awesome and it looks wicked cool so it balances out.

But that alone implies that none of them have actual houses or trailers or apartments or condos where they actually crash. None of them have a home to go home to.

And why would they? I mean, you don’t just wake up one day and choose to live a life of crime. The show always likes to hammer in the fact that the world’s not black and white. Everyone’s got some good chi and bad chi in them. Everyone’s a shade of grey. And that includes the Vipers. And something tells me that they’re a darker shade of grey than most girls, and not entirely by choice either. Girls don’t just wake up and become bad guys. It’s a lot more complicated than that.

I worry about these girls. All of them are so young, early-late teens at most, but they’ve each got a criminal record and have scored enough infamy to be known all through the American Southwest. That’s kind of awesome. But mostly really, really sad.

Sadly we don’t get much personality from the girls, but I wish we did, I love the quirks in their character designs like WallEyed Short Girl and Tall Freckled Mopey Girl, and even Belle! Yes, the redhead has a name, and it’s Belle. Personally she’s my favorite design out of all four Vipers. The bright red hair paired with the turquoise in her necklace and hat is simple but unique. And her sass! And the fact that she’s like the ONLY XS character with brown eyes. Aaah! I love her so much!

But even with their lack of screen time or even voice lines, there’s enough evidence to infer that these girls are each other’s family. They’re sisters. They’re partners in crime wherever they go, from the arid deserts of Arizona to the neon casinos of Nevada, from the white sands of New Mexico to the empty-hearted prairies of Oklahoma, and hey maybe even as far west as Baja California!

And of course, Texas.

It’s interesting that even though she cut all ties with her dad and her brothers and her mom (I mean, if she even has one), she still wanders through Texas. The last thing she screamed at Jack as he took off in a huff with no Wu was “Don’t Mess With Texas”! She may have turned her back on her family and the ranch, but she’ll never turn her back on her home state. That’s kind of beautiful. It’s nice to think that the big bad biker chick who rules over a gang that kidnaps people and robs them blind....still has a soft spot.

But I mean, of course she has a soft spot. She’s a person, right? Good chi and bad chi coexisting together in a single human being. She’s got dreams, right? Secret wishes that keep her up at night, keep her going when the chips are down, keep her going when things get hard for her gang and she has to be the one to stay strong and lead them through it despite being a KID...yeah. It’s abundantly clear that Jesse is an adventurous soul. I mean, you gotta be if you spend your days riding through the desert and running from cops, and your nights sleeping in a creepy, abandoned mine that goes on for miles underground. That’s certainly not a lifestyle for the faint of heart, but Jesse seems just fine with it.

Because as crazy and as sad as her situation is, a teen girl with no home and, thanks to her record, no happy future to speak of, she’s happy where she is. Probably the happiest that she’s ever been in her life. She certainly has a lot more freedom, and values that freedom to Hell and back (probably.) She’s seriously gotta love the sweet, simple feeling of going wherever she wants and doing whatever she wants. Stealing from people probably gives her such a thrill, and with the jumps she made with her bike during the Showdown in her one and only episode...yeah, our girl’s an adrenaline junkie. Fer sure.

I wonder if she’d ever leave the desert at some point in her life. I mean, being an outlaw is cool and all but it’s definitely got a lot of drawbacks, and it isn’t very sustainable. And, I mean...people change. Maybe someday she’d just grow out of the lifestyle. Maybe one night she’d sit her Vipers down for one last talk, pass her leadership over to Belle, give them all one big hug and wish them luck, get on her bike and just...leave.

I wonder where’d she go then. Definitely not back home. Probably not with Clay. Being a Xiaolin hero, going to monk school, fighting over Warts...that’s his life, not hers. And I mean, she does have that inferiority complex, which aren’t exactly easy to grow out of. Maybe she’d secretly feel that she wasn’t good enough to be Xiaolin. But she definitely wouldn’t want to go full evil and switch to the Heylin side.

Jesse’s not Xiaolin, or Heylin. She’s just....Jesse. And that’s why we love her so.

I think she would wander. She’d wander all over the US, through every last state, seeing all that there is to see. Some places impress her. Some do not. Some remind her far too much of her home back at the ranch and some are so alien and foreign that her heart almost breaks from the loneliness. Sometimes she falls in love. Then, she falls right out of love, never unexpectedly, but only sometimes by choice. And after a few hours of heartbreak and self care, she’s back on her feet again, hunting down her next adventure. If she sees a Wu, she contacts Clay, and waits for him and the others to come. It’s easier to talk to him now, so they talk often. She sends him a pretty postcard from each city she visits. And with each message, she writes an animal fact about a local critter, just for him.

Home is....it’s not home anymore. Daddy Bailey, Mama Bailey, even Patrick...they don’t consider her family no more. At least that’s what she believes. She never writes to them. She doesn’t see the point. As far as she’s concerned, they all said what they had to say the day she left the ranch. Soemtimes she’s overcome with the temptation to give them a call and see how things are. But no matter how hard she tries, she always hangs up as soon as they answer.

It’s too late to fix what I broke, she tells herself.

And sometimes, she believes it.

But no matter what gets her down, Jessie’s a tough girl. She’s smart and clever and knows how to get by on her own. Her independent nature was hard-earned. She can take care of herself. So she does. And she wanders. And she sees the world beyond the desert.

Hey, remember that one line during her episode where she says “the only thing better than riding is flying,” or that out of all the Wu she could have kept for herself - out of all powers she could have had at her disposal - she opted to keep the Wings of Tinabi, aka the flying Shen Gong Wu?

I like to think that Jesse, like her brothers, is a smart cookie. But while Clay’s got animal facts and Patrick’s got computers, she’s more of an engineer. I mean, she’s got to keep her rides in tip top shape right? And those weren’t ordinary motorcycles either. I wonder if she was the one who designed the Black Viper’s iconic bikes. Maybe she built them all from scratch. Maybe they all did.

And maybe building bikes isn’t all she’s good at. I like to think that as Jesse gets older she takes on a whole new kind of project. As soon as she gets enough material and enough space to house her new baby, she gets to work on something she’s always been wanting to make in the back of her mind but never could before. It’s more complicated than motorcycles or cars or even tractors, and there’s a lot to lose if something goes wrong. But Jesse’s a risk taker, and a dreamer. And above all, she believes in herself. She has to. She’s always had to, because no one ever else did. Not until she chose to be her own biggest fan did she ever have someone in the stands cheering her on. She can do it. Of course she can. She’s Jesse Gotdang Bailey, and she can do anything.

I like to think, after a while on the road, exploring every last corner of America, and hey, maybe even Canada and Mexico, she finally gets around to building herself a plane. Wheels and steel are a beautiful combination, but wings? Wings can take you anywhere. They offer a freedom like no other. Hundreds and hundreds of people over countless generations have looked up at the sky and wished to be up there. And Jesse wouldn’t be any different from them.

I like to think that she finishes it right as she reaches adulthood. I like to think that she actually goes legit - for once - and gets herself a pilot’s license. I like to think that she gives her new ride a bright coat of paint, puts on the last finishing touches, gets herself a viper tattoo as a way to honor the occasion, and takes off towards the Xiaolin Temple the very next morning to show Clay how far she’s come.

And I would like to think that on the side of the plane, in beautiful rainbow lettering, is the name she chose for her new aircraft:

The Wings of Tinabi.