Before Qaylie was born, Granddad would come down from the mountain to the town when he was needed. But that was over ten years ago; now he stayed in the mountain, and those who needed him went to him instead.
Qaylie liked to go before it was dawn. The sky was brightening now, a hazy shade of midwinter grey. Wisps of windswept snow had covered the well-worn path, and sat on the pines in grey, sullen lumps.
Icicles glittered around the mouth of Granddad's cave, turning the crevice into a grinning, toothy mouth.
She grinned back. She cupped her mittens around her mouth, and shouted, "GRANDDAD!"
The winter air echoed the word. And then the sound began, the low, grinding, scraping noise of metal on stone. It sounded huge. It sounded heavy.
It sounded old.
It was.
Granddad pulled his head out of his cave. Things tied into his horns - jewelery, bottles, skulls, tied together with fishing nets and bits of rope and lengths of yarn - clinked and clattered and clanged against each other in a ghoulish windchime.
He was missing a tusk. The other had been carved into scrimshaw depicting a valley full of fire, the flames twisting into awful, leering faces.
He pulled himself out of the cave. His neck was a carpet of wrinkles. His talons pulled his bloated, scarred belly across the stone. His fleshless wings hung limp at his sides. He was the colour of cold iron, and he was the shape of a nightmare.
He wore spectacles. One of the lenses was a round stained-glass window from the church back in town.
Qaylie held out the pack. "O Great And Terrible Baradir The Red!" she recited. "I Come Bearing A Tithe, In The Awful And Desperate Fear That You May Not Yet Snuff Out Our Fleeting Lives."
The dragon hummed. Pebbles and little bits of ice vibrated with the sound. "And I accept it," he rumbled. "And may you live to grant me more tithes, you tiny, ill-born, insignificant insect."
The two stared at each other, refusing to let a flicker of emotion cross their faces.
Qaylie broke first. She sprung, laughing, and wrapped her arms around Granddad's snout.
"Happy birthday, Granddad," she said.
Granddad laughed. Under the cool, black scales, Qaylie could just feel the furnace glow.
***
"Tolma made you some more string art," said Qaylie, pulling out the awful webby thing from the pack.
"She's getting better at it," said Granddad, hooking it on the end of one massive talon.
"And Burk's made you some more jam - he's trying stonefruit again, he knows you like it."
"Oh, lovely."
"Granddad?"
"Hm?"
"There's another dragonslayer in town."
Granddad didn't say anything. He was staring in apparent fascination at the string art.
She wondered how well he could actually see these days. His black eyes glistened with so many glittering cataracts that they looked like windows into a sky full of stars.
"Dad's seeing how long they can stall him," said Qaylie. "They want to hold it off until after today at least."
Granddad carefully hung the string art off one horn, where it hung alongside a cuckoo clock and the skull of an elf.
He smiled at her. "I'll be sure to send him packing then," he rumbled with something like fierce pride. "Just like all the other ones, eh?"
Qaylie pursed her lips. "Packing" wasn't the right word for it. Qaylie had seen four dragonslayers come to the town over her life. They came in gleaming armor, and they swaggered like the weight of the world made their legs wobble. Then they'd come back down from the mountain, looking embarrassed and rather thoughtful.
Most of them left after that.
But... but there had been some trouble with that last one.
She began tracing a looping shape in the snow with a stick. "Granddad?"
"Hm?"
The words were treacherous and refused to leave her heart.
If she was able to, she'd say something like: "You're getting very old, and eventually there's going to be one dragonslayer who won't care that you're just a silly old crocodile who likes terrible string art and always lights the midwinter bonfire and always tells the terrible dirty joke about the gryphon and always-"
"You know the funny thing about that horizon?" Granddad rumbled.
She blinked, and realized that tears were starting to form in the corners of her eyes. She rubbed them away angrily. "Sorry?"
"There used to be a mountain there," he said, squinting his night sky eyes at a bare patch of horizon. "I remember it well. It was shaped like a - well, it had a very memorable shape.
"But it's not there now. I can't remember what happened to it."
She stared at him. "Isn't that odd?" he said. "A mountain. It should've been there forever. And now that I'm looking for it, I can't see it any more."
He shook his head, his decorated horns making little clattering noises. "Humans think that the world will never change. That tomorrow will be like today, and that old dragons will always be there. Like mountains should be.
"But the world is always changing, Qaylie. Once you get to my age, it never stops changing. The mountains roll and crumble and fold in on themselves. The rivers split and disappear, and new rivers come and carve canyons across my valley. I've watched more empires than you can count form and try to take this valley from me."
He grinned at the images playing in his mind. "Oh, how they burned. The world is always changing, but that sound is one thing that never does. And then someday..."
He sighed. He looked somehow even older than before. "Mountains disappear."
He stared at that empty spot on the horizon.
He said: "Don't use your sleeve."
"Sorry, Granddad."
He unhooked what might’ve been an old battle flag from his horns. "Here's a tissue."
There were some soggy noises.
"I don't want it to change," Qaylie muttered through the fabric.
Granddad butted her with his snout. She looked up into a sky full of stars. "Ah, but that's the special thing about dragons," he said. "I am Baradir the Red, and this valley will never forget my fire."
And then the dawn broke - creeping over the mountain ridge with the dull, inevitable pace of a glacier, and trailing red light across the clouds, the frost on the pines blazing with orange light -
Like little glowing embers.
And as Qaylie watched, the valley below was filled with silent, gleaming fire.
I think that if you had enough daughters AND played your cards right you could spring Mambo Number Five out at the EXACT right gathering and shatter your entire family's trust forever
On an average, assuming genetic invariability with reference to allosomes (which can be premediated via presence or lack of the Y Chromosomes which can be identified by a simple blood test, yadda yadda yadda), you're talking an average of 8 weeks for the pregnancy to be readable enough in re sex of the kid. (Assuming the kid is Cisgendered.) This is typically followed by 9 months of pregnancy (- the 8 weeks) and about 18 months of recommended recovery period after. This gives the conception and birth of each kid an average timeline of 27 months in all, which is about 2.25 years.
Now, in re Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5, there are a total of 9 individuals mentioned. Angela, Pamela, Sandra, Rita, Monica, Erica, Rita (repeated), Tina, Sandra (repeated), Mary, and Jessica. Assuming the existence of a singular Rita and Sandra which were called upon twice in the song, we can assume that this would involve a grand total of 2.25 x 9 = 20.5 years of near constant pregnancies to produce the offspring in question.
Assuming that the embryonic host typically hits Menopause at around 40, we can assume that the primary conception in re the same occurs at around 19.5 years of age. Which is still premature in re sociocultural aspects but the body is more than capable of handling such a strain at that age.
Also, in case we assume that every one of the offspring remain in all cases, cisgendered (which is a variable that is very hard to account for), we can assume that there is always a possibility that the allelomorph of the embryo involved can occasionally involve an XY chromosome. The detection can successfully occur at 8 weeks, and in case an abortion ensues, conception can recur within as little as 2 more weeks. That is an added extra 10 weeks per in re the nondesired sex.
In case of purely clinical states, such as IVF, where the Ova are extracted and externally fertilised each time, a system of Preimplantation Genetic Testing for Aneuploidies (PGT-A) can be incorporated in order to identify XX chromosomal situations and ensuring further that only those are implanted. This, while making sure that the offspring in question are necessarily of the XX karyotype, cannot of course state whether a state of monozygotic twinning can occur or not. More often than not, in order to maximise chances of implantation, more than two embryos used to be implanted into the uterus, typically around five. But technology has significantly improved in the years following which makes sure that there is no need for the same. Elective Single Embryo Transfer (eSET) is now the standard in modern IVF, prioritizing the transfer of one, high-quality, genetically tested blastocyst to achieve a healthy, single-baby pregnancy. This shift minimizes severe risks associated with multiple pregnancies, such as preterm birth for babies and severe complications for mothers, while maintaining high success rates. Clinics now reserve multiple embryo transfers primarily for older patients or those with histories of repeated IVF failures, rather than routine practice.
In case there are more than one embryos that get implanted that are undesirable, the extra embryos can be removed through a medical procedure called multifetal pregnancy reduction (MFPR) or selective reduction.
In summation, assuming of course that we are talking about the most clinically ideal circumstances, where there is the implantation of a single embryo each time, that still gives you about the same timeline of about 20.5 years. In case of preferring to determine sex after (which is cheaper) as opposed to before (which is still pricey as fuck in today's economy), that adds another 10 weeks per embryo. Unwanted implants can be removed via MFPR.
I forgot what my point here was. Anyway. Have fun if you're planning on that.
Over twenty years ago my big brother got me a job at a Taco Bell in the St. Louis suburbs-West County. He warned me that it was the “gay Taco Bell”, but since I was coming from the “gay Howard Johnson’s” I wasn’t shocked. It turns out it was the black trans women Taco Bell complete with black trans women in management. And they’d worked out an arrangement with the local teen Narcotics Anonymous group so that twice a week we would shut down the drive thru and the dining room and exclusively serve 60+ teens in various stages of recovery. And many of the women I worked with were in various stages of being out or transitioning and they were from all generations from teens to over 50. One woman I worked with had a regular corporate job presenting as a man 9-5 Mon-Fri and then came to Taco Bell and worked 6pm -2am Friday and Saturday night so she could be herself surrounded by other black transwomen in those stolen weekends. And we had customers come from all over the metro area because they knew they could be themselves in the dining room. I only worked there from 1999-2001 but for young me, this was a vital, formative experience. Some of the girls came from north city all the way out to the “gay Taco Bell” on Manchester in west county because they heard it was safe to work there. Like- I know times have changed but they haven’t changed much in 20 years. I’m still convinced that for lgbt youth, finding a job at your city’s version of the “gay Taco Bell” is key to survival.
“When we were kids, the Phonics Wizard came to our town to show off how the letter E can change the sounds of vowels. He turned a can into a cane, a pin into a pine. This one kid had a cap and he changed it into a cape, that kind of thing.
“And we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-”
She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. “Things got pretty bad after that,” she muttered. “I know it’s silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We don’t know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if she’s even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when I’m out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didn’t - didn’t really take that well.”
After a moment, she put the ball of twine back onto its pillow. “Anyways. They tried to arrest the Phonics Wizard, but he had a plan in case something went wrong and he turned it into a plane and flew away.”
I've just turned 30! If you follow my blog you know I haven't had the most fun or pleasant life so far and a pretty shit last couple of years, so for my 30th birthday I want to take a little holiday to travel to see where I was born for the first time since I was a child. Unfortunately that's the other side of the planet so it costs crazy money, so I've made a fundraiser.
Anybody interested in giving me something for my birthday, please can you donate to and then share this GFM for me to go see Auckland again
Hello, my name is Sophie and 30 years ago I was born in Auckland, and I mov… Sophie McAllister needs your support for Sophie's 30th Birthday
Reminds me of the time we dared a brick oven pizza restaurant to make a pizza with so much garlic we couldn't finish it.
Boy did they deliver. The pizza had (no exaggeration) a solid inch of chopped garlic on top. It was fucking delicious. Multiple times we spotted restaurant workers peeking at us from the kitchen, with an obvious "my god they're actually eating it!" energy.
Of course we left a massive tip. Leaving the place we felt like triumphant Olympians gold-medaling the Pizza Event.
Only one problem.
This was a lunch time experience, and we worked at a small software development firm and there was a scheduled all-hands meeting after lunch. Our supervisor (politely) asked us to leave the meeting because we reeked of garlic.
"Oh shit... my stomach feels weird, my nose has been extra sensitive, my skin is acting different... must be that time of the month" <- Werewolf who pays attention to this kind of shit
"There's a pretty solid theory that he's the main character's birthing parent, so like he has prior experience.
Almost definitely transgender and we need more tmpreg rep.
World seems designed to give him a migraine, so he's the sort of person who would get knocked up for plot reasons.
It'd be hot, he'd be so flustered about it."
Crocodile propaganda from last season
[Jonathan]
"Dracula probably has weird vampire pregnancy powers and also all those scenes in Dracula's castle were so weird in a homoerotic way. Either that or Mina gets him pregnant (which good for her, Mina is the best). Jonathan loves his wife very much and he'd love to have her babies."
"I just want him to give birth to Quincey and have a happy life after this whole vampire bullshit."
janainaart
prguitarman
snowghoul
vaporwave
blakekathryn
kianamaiart
titsay
germansingergirl
pixelskylines
