reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.
my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.
so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.
the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.
also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:
it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.
#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass
On a Watsonian level, sure.
On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.
I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."
I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.
LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)
Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.
#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains
I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:
Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?
I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.
There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.
Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.
(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)
Hab' mir für ein Larp an diesem Wochenende einen "Heraldischen Hauswappenerfassungsbogen" entworfen, der übersetzt einfach nur ein total bescheuertes Formular zur Berechnung einer erfundenen Wappensteuer ist, mit der ich dann bei den Spielern aus Ritterbund und Adeligenlager hausieren gehen werde.
"Wie viele Farben hat ihr Wappen? Mehr als zwei? Sorry, das ist mit einer Sondersteuer belegt. Ach, und euer Wappentier ist ein Fabelwesen? Da müssen wir natürlich einen Aufpreis berechnen"
Aus irgend'nem Grund lieben Larper es nämlich, wenn man sie sehr offensichtlich über den Tisch zieht. Zumindest spielen sie meistens überschwänglich und mit voller Begeisterung mit, auf so überzogene Art dass es zu einer Monty Python Szene wird. Wenn wir alle so enthusiastisch wären sobald es um echten Papierkram geht wären Behördengänge nur halb so anstrengend.
Vielleicht sollten Behördenmitarbeiter für ein bisschen spice und amtliche Extravaganz wieder eingekleidet werden wie mittelalterliche Herolde. Hätte keinen praktischen Nutzen but imagine the fits
Ich bin immer begeistert wenn in irgend'nem Buch oder einer Doku gesagt wird, dass jemand "nach [...] eilte". Auch wenn eigentlich eine flotte Kutschfahrt usw. gemeint ist, muss ich mir immer vorstellen wie der Kurfürst von Schlagmichtot querfeldein losgesprintet ist. Und der Hofstaat hinterher. Nette Vorstellung.
auf verlorene Schuhe und Perücken wird in all der Eile keine Rücksicht genommen, es geht hier um empfindliche diplomatische Angelegenheiten. Wenn man das straffe Tempo beibehält ist man schon in wenigen Wochen in Paris.
Für mich ist "Eilen" nicht Sprinten, sondern eher so in Richtung Powerwalken. Immer ein Fuß mit Bodenkontakt. Die Vorstellung von Adel mit Hofstaat absolutely moving mit Wanderstöcken find ich aber auch irgendwie witzig!
"RITTMEISTER! Holen Sie meine Walkingstöcke aus dem Stall, und machen Sie meine Nordic Walking Gruppe mobil. Oh, und sorgen Sie dafür dass mein Schrittzählerstand in jedem Dorf verlesen wird. Der Pöbel soll inspiriert sein"
und so walkten sie von dannen, hinter ihnen eine Staubwolke aus Perückenpuder
A 50-kilogram anvil floats perfectly on the surface of mercury, because the density of the steel from which it is made is almost half the density of mercury.
Fun fact! Many lighthouses with especially large fresnel lenses would have huge fucking tubs of liquid mercury in the lantern room because it’s a super easy way to make these giant lenses rotate quickly!
Shockingly, however, spending most of your time in close proximity to 500 pounds of liquid mercury is Not Great For One’s Health and tons of lighthouse keepers started to go crazy from the whole. Mercury poisoning thing. Hence why there are a lot of “haunted” lighthouses or wickies that lose it and maybe do a bit of manslaughter.
Anyway, people saw a bunch of lighthouse keepers go crazy and get sick and got empirical evidence that it was in fact related to the 500 pound mercury bath they have to visit every day and then they decided nah it’s fine actually. So we’ve kept the liquid mercury thing and I think that’s beautiful
I love how it is so dense it does not "wet" the anvil, the drops all run and leave with nothing behind them unlike water, oil, sauce... it's super satisfying it's like in cartoons
In a letter written on April 19, 1825, Augustin Fresnel proposed the use of mercury to reduce the friction in revolving lenses. His statement follows: “I propose to float our rotating devices, of the first order, in a bath of mercury, instead of placing them on rollers. This project won't present many difficulties; nevertheless, as I have not put it into execution, I won't require you to adopt it for your first lighthouse.”
Fresnel’s plan for mercury flotation was not put into practice until 1890 when Monsieur Leon Bourdelles, Chief Engineer of the French Lighthouse Service, designed and built a workable mercury flotation system. The mercury bath allowed the lens to operate in an almost frictionless environment and, additionally, allowed the speed of rotation to be dramatically increased.
Lens Rotation by Thomas Tag | United States Lighthouse Society
Under less-than-ideal conditions, you can only see the beam when it’s pointed more or less directly at you. In-between beams you would not be able to see anything. One solution to this was to create multiple beams, and the lenses Mr Fresnel designed usually created 8 beams. But, even still, duration between flashes could be as long as one minute in the old mechanical roller systems.
The nearly frictionless operation of the Mercury suspension system allowed the lenses (large pieces of precisely ground glass weighing several hundred pounds in some cases) to rotate fast enough that they could be redesigned to create fewer (usually 3) beams. Fewer beams from a similar light source will be proportionally brighter, and the gains in speed were sufficient that duration between flashes could still be reduced to as little as 10 seconds.
This was a big upgrade. It didn’t just make the lighthouse signal faster, it allowed them to completely overhaul the lens and derive more visibility from a light source.
I saw this delightful post about cat!hybrid mc and then the next day i saw this painting called the intruder and my brain made this story. i'm planning on a part 2 (hopefully this week if work cooperates??) but i was too tired today to finish the whole thing.
edit: i'm so tired i forgot the summary.
Summary: You're a cat!hybrid living in captivity and sylus kills your owner in a business deal gone sideways. you decide to sneakily follow your savior home without asking for permission.
sylus x cat!hybrid reader/f!mc (she can shapeshift between full cat and hybrid cat forms). 4,701 words. Content: forced captivity, references to physical abuse, caleb's dead and haunts the narrative (a little, as a treat, i'm sorry caleb) murder (sylus is the murderer, bless him) the description always makes it sound worse than it is, i am trying to write a fluffy fun silly story, sylus is a fake nonchalant, mephisto is a snitch. The next part will be pure fluff and silliness.
The night is chilly, but you don't feel it. Your fur is thick, its downy softness insulating against the early spring night. Not that the seasons are that noticeable in the N109 Zone, where nothing grows, where perpetual gloom reigns. It's no place for a wild animal whose heart longs for the scent of green, growing things, for the safety of thick foliage, cover to hide in from the worst predators in existence: human men.
No, you don't feel a thing, here in this concrete jungle where the safest place you can be is locked behind the bars of your cage.
You don't get locked in your cage nearly enough, as far as you're concerned.
At least in your cage, you go unnoticed and untouched. It's harder to hurt you in there. You can shrink yourself, huddled against the back corner, just out of reach.
It's a small act of rebellion, forcing him to reach for the cattle prod in order to get to you. You take what you can get.
But tonight, you carefully feel nothing at all, inside on a chilly spring night, curled in the lap of the man you hate the most. The room is dim, dark-wood paneled. Heavy leather furniture and sound-proofed walls, the faded reek of cigar hanging heavy in the air and making it hard to breathe through your sensitive nose. A gentleman's club VIP room, not cozy or small, not expansive. Big enough to fit an insecure man good at feigning confidence, his overinflated ego, and enough lackeys to make him feel safe.
Tonight, his hands are deceptively tender as he runs his palm along your back, over and over. As he curls your tail around his finger, pulling gently, just shy of pain. A nervous tick, a self-soothing tell. The only one he gives, with his perfected poker face and preternatural stillness during high-stakes negotiations. Your soft fur, your forced compliance, in his lap every time he must make a deal—as your heart races, his calms.
One of the many reasons he keeps you.
Curled in his lap, you keep your eyes on the man sitting across from you and your owner.
Long legs crossed elegantly, huge body leaning back against the brown leather couch, arms spread wide against the backrest—he's the epitome of relaxed nonchalance. And unlike your owner, he's not faking a thing. You can smell it. His genuine ease in the face of the men looming behind your owner, hands folded at their backs at false parade rest. False, as they keep their firearms tucked into their back waistbands and you know from experience that each one already has the pistol grip already fisted, ready to draw and fire.
The man smells… good. Like an oncoming storm. Exciting, powerful.
He smells like the safety of a burrow to shelter in once the storm hits.
You flare your nostrils delicately, trying to subtly inhale as much of him as you can.
You flick your ears. It's strange—he smells like ease, but his heart gallops as fast as yours. As if it naturally beats faster than a normal person's.
You suppress a shudder as his ruby eyes flick to yours, as if he can read your thoughts, your confusion, your fascination.
He's not a normal person.
His eyes not leaving yours, he lifts a thick, silver eyebrow. "Five mil was not the deal."
His voice, deep and bored, ripples down your spine. Its calm, dark notes eclipse the hand on your back, makes the hand bearable.
Your owner's hand presses a little harder as it sweeps along your spine, even as his voice remains calm. "It can't be helped. The Association has been sniffing around, exponentially increasing our logistics costs. It's a miracle that this shipment arrived on time, as promised. It's already a deal for you, considering the rarity of some of the items."
"I'm not interested in your shipping troubles." The man finally flicks his gaze back to your owner, but instead of being a relief, it feels like a loss. "Your failure to adequately plan for predictable complications is none of my business."
"If I accept anything less than five million, I will go under and you will lose your only reliable shipper through the strait. That is your business. Paying a fair price is part of any good business relationship." Your owner still sounds calm, as self-possessed as ever, but the building frustration wafts off of him in nauseating waves.
"You might be the last person I'd take relationship advice from," the red-eyed man drawls, shifting his gaze to you again before losing all interest in the conversation. He begins to examine his nails.
Your owner's frustration morphs into rage, with a curious thread of terror. You've never seen him so shaken before. It's like the more bored the other man gets, the more upset your owner gets. Clearing his throat, tightening his grip on your back, he struggles to maintain his serene facade. "No need for personal attacks."
The man snorts, the nostrils of his long, magnificent nose flaring in resigned amusement. "I find your reneging on our deal to be a personal attack. Two million, or I walk."
"We're both reasonable men," your owner coaxes. "I know for a fact that five million is a drop in the bucket for you while it is everything to me. It's a small premium to ensure our continued mutually beneficial relationship. We both walk away satisfied." His voice, and his hand on you, hardens. "If you walk, I go under. Do not mistake my patience with your diva behavior up to this point as weakness—I will only tolerate it up to a point."
The man on the white couch, his sterling hair shining like polished silver under the soft lighting of the cigar lounge, goes very still before rolling his head leisurely, gaze drifting from your owner's face to yours. "The irony of being called a diva by a man stroking a cat like a B-movie film villain would be funny if it weren't so boring."
Your owner's hand stops. You tense. You know from experience that things are about to get ugly.
"This is your last chance, Mr. Qin. Look around. No matter how powerful of a man you are, you still chose to walk in here, unarmed and alone, while I have my the best members of my security force at my back. The deal is on: five million, last chance."
You stare at the man… Mr. Qin. He remains still, utterly at ease, a slight, disdainful smile lifting one corner of his full mouth. His scent remains the same—electric. It just… intensifies. The lights flicker, faintly. You don't want him to die. But you've seen this scene so many times before.
They always die.
It has been a long, long time since you tried to defy your owner. Nothing seemed to matter, after he killed your littermate. Your only family. Your last link to humanity. He had threatened to do it, and you called his bluff, thinking that your brother was too valuable, just like you, to simply dispose of.
You paid dearly for that gamble. In fact, it cost you everything. You and Caleb were caught by his lackeys, weakened from malnutrition and the evol-suppressing collars. That night, your owner dragged Caleb out of your cage by the tail and you never saw him again.
But something about the man on the white couch, with his lava-molten eyes, regal nose, and machine-gun heartbeat. You feel concerned about another person for the first time in years. Inexplicably—or maybe as simple as instinct—the idea of him being hurt fills you with the same terror that used to overcome you when your owner would punish Caleb for your defiance.
Mr. Qin grunts, derisive, and your racing heart sinks. "Two million, you throw in the cat as compensation for wasting my time, and then you've got a deal." Waiting a beat, he lets the provocation sink in. Then, mockingly, he echoes, "Last chance."
As always, a sense of desolate helplessness fills you. But for the first time in years, you can't just sit back and do nothing. You know what it will cost you. But maybe you can buy this strange, magnetic man enough time to do… something. Even if it's hopeless, maybe the grief will be bearable this time, because at least you tried to stop it, instead of running headfirst into it.
Keeping your eyes open, you deliberately dig your claws into your owner's thigh, as deep as you can, and then drag them through his flesh.
He screams, not used to being the one receiving pain. Reflexively gripping you by the scruff of your neck, he flings your small body off of his lap.
The lights go out.
Gunfire explodes, so many fireworks deafening and blinding you, forcing you to lay your ears flat on on your head, to blink in pain.
You land on your feet, as you always do, but something dark and sparking, something slithering, electric—something inexorable drags you to the couch at Mr. Qin's feet and keeps you pinned to the ground behind his legs. A swishing, wooshing roar competes with the gunfire, muffling the painful blasts in your delicate eardrums.
Sheltered in the swirling embrace of the inky force keeping you pinned, you feel safer than you have in years.
You lift your head, gazing up between Mr. Qin's long legs, no longer crossed but spread leisurely, as if the occasion no longer requires the decorum of his previous posture.
The gunfire illuminates him, strobelights revealing how calmly he remains seated. As he lifts one hand, palm facing forward. As bullets plink to the ground before they reach him, a curtain of leaded rain. Blinding light, pitch black, blinding light, as he lifts his other hand, snapping his long fingers.
You swing your head just in time to see your owner explode in a fine mist of blood, flesh, and ash.
The lights flicker back on, just in time for you to see the guns in the hands of the men behind him disassemble themselves and float in the air, nothing more now than gun schematics rendered in 3d.
"This is the power of Onychinus," a mischievous, mocking voice rings from over Mr. Qin's right shoulder. You look back and up again. A masked man whom you didn't sense at all drapes himself over the back of the couch.
"Surrender and maybe you'll survive tonight," a matching voice, over Mr. Qin's left shoulder, drawls. The owner of the voice wears an identical mask, its beak wickedly curved as if to personify the dark glee in its owner's proclamation. "Keep resisting…"
"And join your boss," his twin finishes.
Each and every former employee of your owner lifts his hands into the air.
Mr. Qin gazes down at you, still crouched between his legs even though the force that was pinning you, now clearly visible in all of its scarlet and ink glory, slowly dissipates. "No. No mercy," he murmurs thoughtfully.
"Boss?" The man on his right sounds surprised.
Mr. Qin leans down and runs one long, elegant finger along the evol-suppressing shock collar around your neck. "They knew, and they did nothing."
"Yes, boss," the other man says, a grin clear in his voice.
Mr. Qin, with a tenderness that surprises you, calls forth that swirling mist again. As its electric current caresses your fur, causing it to stand on end, the weight of your shock collar fades into nothing.
Your neck is naked for the first time in years.
You can't tear your eyes from him, even though you're free, for the first time in years.
He stares down at you and his eyes glow like the sun through a glass of red wine. "Go on, kitten," he coaxes gently.
Ignoring his gentle order, you sit back on your haunches, waiting to see what he'll do.
"Suit yourself," he shrugs and then rises gracefully to his feet. "Exterminate the vermin, secure the goods, and report back to the base when it's done."
"Yes, boss," the two men chirp in unison.
Mr. Qin hooks his thumbs in the pockets of his dark tailored suit and saunters out of the room without looking back.
The twins duck, mirrored images as they lean behind the couch and each retrieve a bazooka.
You turn, tail high in the air, and scurry after the man who just left, not waiting to see the mirrored men heft the weapons onto their shoulders, nor hear the explosions and screams of agony that follow.
His scent is so strong. It hangs in the air, long after he's revved his motorcycle and disappeared into the night in a roar of growling engine and motor oil.
You follow it easily, winding your way agilely through the dark city, across its rain-slicked payment, through its neon-soaked streets. You stick to the sides of buildings, to shortcuts through alleyways, your nose guiding you unfailingly through the garbage and perfume, exhaust from vehicles, cigarette and weed smoke, concrete and despair.
It's been years, since you've been free. Your heart beats wildly with the exhilaration of it. With the grief of it.
Your littermate deserved this too.
Finally, you find the scent's destination. A towering skyscraper in the heart of the N109 Zone. Sleek, windows an impenetrable black as they soar into the sky and come to a vicious peak, hardly visible through the fog from where you are on the ground. You follow the delicious smell to an underground garage, slip underneath the boom gate, slink between the fleet of expensive vehicles, a mix of high octane modern sports models and antique muscle cars. You lose count of how many motorcycles there are. Finally, you find an elevator next to an emergency exit leading to the stairwell.
In this form, you can't reach the elevator button. Shockingly, however, the emergency exit door is ajar. Propped open with a… can of tuna?
You stare at it.
It smells really good.
Tuna in olive oil, not water. Nice and fatty.
Why would the leader of a notorious criminal organization have such lax security?
It's almost like…
You twitch your whiskers.
As far as Mr. Qin knows, you're just a normal cat. Your owner guarded the truth of your and Caleb's natures as his most valuable trade secret. He was paranoid about theft. Although you had rendered yourself functionally useless to him by refusing to shift between hybrid and cat form following Caleb's death, he kept you out of twisted spite. A good luck charm to viciously pet, to smugly parade under rivals' noses who had no idea what you really were.
The power of your evol. The strength of your hybrid form and its utility in a fight. Your value to medical science, military science. The exotic, twisted fetishes your true nature could indulge, if rented out at the right price.
No, no one outside of your owner's inner circle knows what you really are. There's no way this can of tuna is for you.
Maybe Mr. Qin just likes cats, and feeds strays. Or has one of his own. He did ask for you as part of the deal. Maybe he was looking to get another pet.
That's it. He's just a cat person.
A cat person who killed the motherfucker who destroyed your life. A cat person whom you instinctively feel safe with, now that you're free, reeling, without your brother and without a cage.
Since you're in your full cat form, you don't overthink it too much. Instinct drives you forward, and you don't question it further.
You pad across the narrow threshold, ensuring that you're inside the stairwell before turning again and shoving your face into the can of tuna. You devour it, not caring that the grease now covers your mouth and nose, drips from your whiskers. You'll clean it in a minute.
But first, you bat the empty tuna can out from between the door and the doorframe into the parking garage. Only after hearing the click and then beep of the electronic lock do you turn and hop your way up the seemingly endless stairwell.
Someone's got to make sure that the security of this place is tight if the owner himself can't be bothered, no matter how strong he seems to be.
Up, up, up you go. When you get tired, you pause for a moment, licking your mouth and whiskers, running your forepaws gently over them for good measure. No need to look sloppy, even if you don't intend for him to find out that you're here anytime soon.
You continue, following his scent trail as it once again grows thicker and thicker. You're dizzy with it.
Finally, you come to the top of the stairwell and can go no further. There is simply a black door, sleek and shiny. You see your reflection in it.
Huge golden eyes. Glossy black fur. Tufts of fur at the tips of your big, swiveling ears. Your body fur is thick and short, but your tail is fluffy, a silky bottle brush sweeping behind you, betraying your excitement.
This door, too, is slightly ajar, this time propped open by a gigantic black leather biker boot. The chains around the heel are shiny. You bat at them and enjoy the satisfying clink of the links.
Ahem. You will not let yourself get distracted. What is wrong with this man??! Anyone could walk in!
You repress the deep wish that your owner had been so lax with security, less paranoid, more secure. Maybe your life would have looked very different. You appreciate that Mr. Qin killed him, but you do slightly resent the fact that he was exploded so thoroughly that there was no body for you to mutilate afterward. You'd piss on his corpse if one had been left behind.
No. Not your owner. He was never your owner.
The fucker who kept you captive for years and tried to break you. He very nearly did, taking Caleb from you.
You step delicately over the big boot, pausing only for a moment to inhale its delicious aroma. Mr. Qin's feet apparently smell as good as the rest of him.
You follow the long, wide, dark corridor. Black marble flooring with gold veining. Ornate wainscotting along the dark gray walls. Your footsteps are silent, but if you were in your human form wearing shoes, your feet would echo. Flicking your ears back and forth, you follow his intensifying scent as faint music joins the trail to where he must be.
Something soft, classical. Violins. The smell of food joins the intoxicating smell of this place's inhabitant. Cooking meat.
Finally, finally—you peek around the doorway, eyes adjusting from the dim hallway to the slightly brighter open plan kitchen that spreads out before you, a dining and living area stretching beyond until the soaring floor to ceiling windows spill over the cityscape below. The pleasant scent of burning firewood in a huge open hearth fireplace competes with the smell of Mr. Qin and the steak he's apparently grilling on his fancy ass stove.
He doesn't seem to notice you. He's grilling in the same suit that he negotiated in, without an apron or anything, just the suit jacket removed and his sleeves rolled up to reveal his veined, powerful forearms. Like he's begging for stains, just like he's begging for an intruder like you in his house by leaving all the doors wide open. His forearms flex as he lifts the pan. The violins sing into the quiet room, blending with the hiss of the cooking meat, the crackling of the fireplace.
You take advantage of his focus on his task and slink around the edges of the room, sniffing as you go, noting the heavy, antique furniture, the atrocious modern art on the walls, the subtlety of the lighting in sharp-edged sconces along the walls and ornate floorlamps providing light from below. The music is coming from a record playing on an ancient-looking gramaphone. A sharp, metallic scent draws your attention to guns scattered across the hulking, ornately carved dining table, to bullets carelessly spread across the marble-topped coffee table between the sleek, black leather couches and lounge chairs of the sitting area.
There is a chaise lounge next to the windows at the far end of the room, as if the owner often reclines on it and looks down on the city below. You slip silently across the thick, ornate rugs softening the marble floors and slink underneath the chaise lounge. From this angle, you don't think you can be seen, but you have a clear view of most of the room, the fireplace, the man standing behind the kitchen island facing you, his sharp features flickering between light and shadow in the firelight.
You curl up in a little ball and watch him.
He hums along to the music as he cooks, causing your ears to flick back and forth. The vibration in his throat is more pleasant than the humming, but both manage to lull you to sleep.
When you wake up, you're still under the chaise lounge, but the gramophone is quiet, the lights are dimmed to their lowest settings, and Mr. Qin is gone. It must be sometime in the morning, although in the N109 Zone there's not too much of a difference between night and day. But the monotonous gray is paler than at night, and the gaudy, black and golden grandfather clock indicates that it's 11:00 in the morning.
You slip out from underneath the chair, sticking your tail in the air and stretching your spine as far as you can. It feels good to wiggle your toes, to let your claws come out. You then pad out of the room and follow that delicious scent that makes you drunk and lured you here to begin with.
Mr. Qin apparently sleeps with his door wide open, again as if he doesn't have a care in the world. His bedroom is huge, just like he is, just like the rest of his 'base' is, if this is the base to which he was referring when speaking to the masked men. It's lined with bookcases, more heavy leather furniture, sweeping windows now covered by blackout curtains. You stop, sniffing the books. Old paper. Old ink. A little bit of dust. The memory of his scent, from his hands on the pages as he held them. He's read them. The books in here are not for show, like the sterile, color coordinated library of your former captor. Maybe while he's gone you can finagle them off the shelves and do some reading. It's been a long, long time since you were allowed to read.
If you had lost your sense of smell during the gun battle last night, you would still know exactly where Mr. Qin is from the heavy snoring coming from the humongous, four poster, curtained bed at the far end of the room. He sounds like a chainsaw. You pad closer, closer, flattening your ears against the racket, and then jump lightly onto the end of the bed.
He's sleeping on his stomach, arms folded under his pillow. His broad, naked back expands, falls, expands with his relaxed breathing. You sit back on your haunches, flicking your tail thoughtfully.
He's beautiful. Like a sculpture. You would drag your littermate to art museums, back when you were free. Classical exhibitions were your favorite, with sweeping, carved marble sculptures depicting mythological stories. Where stone rippled like fabric under the artist's chisel. Where fingertips pressed into dimpled flesh, belying the cold marble.
This man, even at rest, looks like a god carved in stone.
A benevolent god, a brutal god. A god who, unbidden, saved you after you had stopped trying to save yourself. If you were in human form, you'd touch your throat with your hands, where your collar used to be. Instead, you just marvel at the lightness around your neck. The way your skin can breathe through your fur for the first time in years.
You're glad you're in cat form, and can't cry. If you started, you're not sure you'd ever stop. Over all the things you've lost. All the things that have been taken from you.
Intending to sniff at his feet through the sheets as a treat before slinking back into the dark, you rise to your paws and take a step forward—
when the most atrocious, unnatural-sounding screech splits the silence of Mr. Qin's bedroom.
"Caw! Caw! CAW CAW CAW!"
Sylus is dreaming. A lovely dream involving soft hands, a soft mouth, a sharp tongue, warmth and quiet, smug laughter. No images—just impressions, smears of what felft like memory, the scent of flowers, of wine, of peace dripping with warm blood.
And then he is jerking upright up, gun heavy in hand, Mephisto's alarmed cries splitting his eardrums.
"What? What? I'm wake, what?" he slurs, disoriented in the darkness of his bedroom, in being jerked painfully from a pleasant dream.
"CAW! CAW! CAW!"
Mephisto sits on his perch next to his bed, flapping his wings in indignant agitation, screeching his mechanical head off, ruby eye glowing menacingly in the dim room.
Oh. Kitten.
Sylus turns, sweeping his gaze across his bed, finding the vicious, threatening, feline intruder whom Mephisto is snitching on. Sylus, still holding the grip of the pistol, rubs his eye with his fist. He was so annoyed about the tanked deal, the lack of sleep he's been suffering from recently, the shock collar on—
In all the fuss, he forgot to program Mephisto to register that bastard's 'cat' as a non-threat before he passed out this morning.
The black cat's back is arched, her tail puffed up like a feather duster, and she's meeting each of Mephisto's screeches with a deep, menacing hiss and growl of her own, completely unintimidated by the big bird's aggressive flapping and snapping beak.
Sylus lowers his gun, tucking it back under his pillow, before leaning against the bed's headboard and watching the show in exhausted amusement.
The more Mephisto screeches, the more defiant the cat becomes. She boldly takes steps forward, moving closer to Sylus's feet, until Mephisto has lifted himself from the perch angrily and is about to shoot her with his eye lasers as he flaps in the air.
"Mephisto, stand down," Sylus orders, trying hard to suppress his laugh. Mephisto is sensitive to perceived mockery.
Squawking in protest, Mephisto reluctantly obeys, his eye powering down as he settles back on the perch. His feathers, however, remain puffed so that he looks twice his actual size.
Sylus contemplates the cat. As if to gloat about her triumph, she marches up to Sylus's foot underneath the silk sheets and plants her butt on his ankle, staring at Mephisto the whole time. It can't be comfortable for her, but she refuses to move, almost as if on principle.
"No need to rub it in, kitten," he murmurs, for Mephisto's sake. She looks at him with her bright, golden eyes and blinks once, slowly. "You're the intruder here, technically," he reminds her. She just swishes her tail, back and forth, back and forth, as if to say, And what will you do about it?
He can't help his smile. If he wanted to do anything about it, he wouldn't have left the doors open for her to begin with. Now, he simply intends to sit back and enjoy seeing what she will do. But he has a care for his bird's feelings, too. He was here first this time, after all.
She doesn't disappoint. She flicks those beautiful, amber eyes back to Mephisto and then marches up the line of Sylus's leg, stopping next to where his hip and ass meet the headboard. She turns in a circle, once, twice, three times before giving one last derisive glare at Mephisto and curling up in a tight little ball snuggled next to Sylus's ass.
Not for the first time, he regrets not killing her 'owner' much, much sooner, and much, much more slowly.
Hello I hope you enjoyed it! I want to write a similar length, maybe slightly longer for part two, but i'm so tired of starting stories and getting interrupted and never sharing them for fear of never being able to return and finish so I just decided to post part 1 already! @restinpurples left some really great questions about this fic idea in a reblog of the delightful cat!hybrid post and i'm hoping to answer a few of them in the fic by the time the second part is finished. hopefully. I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts in comments or tags if you feel like sharing!
the town routinely sends a messenger up the mountain to beg the mighty dragoness not to eat them all and raze their town, and ask her what she wants for this month’s holy sacrifice in exchange for her allowing them to live in her territory. they have done this for centuries
the mighty dragoness did pass away recently. she was very old even for a dragon, so it was bound to happen. her niece inherited the cave, and she seems very sweet but she doesn’t really understand the traditional point of the sacrifices and has no interest in accruing further wealth so she just sort of asks for anything on her mind at the moment
a basket of onion rings is definitely not an ordinary sacrifice. but if the dragon wants onion rings, onion rings the dragon will get
the townspeople are banging ritual drums and singing the dragon's praises and a priest is delivering the standard litany to the dragon asking for her protection and her forgiveness that they should dare to build their settlement in her territory
a nervous girl wearing a flowy robe walks slowly along the aisle the service has made for her, a basket of golden brown beer-battered onion rings and a cup of honey dijon mustard in her outstretched arms. she sets them on the sacrificial altar and steps back as the dragon emerges from her cave and bends her nose down to sniff at them
everyone watches with bated breath as she gently picks one up and eats it. as she roars her approval, the mountain ledge explodes into cheering and applause
as everyone is leaving, she holds up a claw, and everyone falls silent again. she says it might be silly but she was going to watch a movie and if anyone wanted to come they're welcome to watch the movie and maybe play some board games with her? about half the congregation volunteers immediately
it's definitely an unorthodox request but the dragon gets what the dragon wants
Listen here friendo I didn’t sit through a year of organic chemistry for you to come into my house and call a carboxylic acid a saturated fatty acid you respect that hexadecanoic acid
And I didnt get a degree in biochemistry to hear you say that carboxylic acids with aliphatic chains arent fatty acids. That hexadecanoic acid IS a saturated fatty acid!
Maria Skłodowska-Curie's notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They're so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes "yea there's a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush." like wat excuse me
you’re dying of radiation poisoning* and then someone casually mentions that there are plenty of transcribed copies you could have read safely without any of the cursed wizard bullshit and you use the last of your strength to strangle them on the spot
"People suck these days, people are so self-centred and rude" OK yes but also, when my grandma died, I had to go to a class that evening, and I was a disgusting snotty mess, all swollen from crying, and the woman at reception asked if I was all right, and I just sort of stammered that my grandma had died a few hours ago, and then she gave me a huge hug and asked me to tell her something about my grandma, so I showed her some photos of my grandma, and she was like "oh my GOD, how is she so cute? Look at her face, she's adorable!!" and she let me tell her stories about my grandma until class started, and then I never saw her again because it was the last class, and it's like... she did not have to do that! She could have just signed me in and ignored the fact that I looked like something that had been dredged out of a river and then thrown under a car! But she did not! And I genuinely think that there are more people who would have done what she did than people who wouldn't.
I was at an estate sale the other day and bought a loveseat. A random man immediately offered to help my husband carry it to the car. While they were trying to get around a corner a random lady started removing the legs so they could get through.
If you haven't heard, the em dash has been getting a lot of attention lately…
Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.
Including (sigh) the em dash.
There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.
A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.
No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.
You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.
Defend the em dash.
(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)
Pünktlich zum neuen Jahr muss ich euch unbedingt das hässlichste traditionelle Gebäck der Bundesrepublik zeigen. Forget about the Stutenkerle, Osterlämmer oder Lucia-Brötchen. Das hier ist der Hefezopf für all jene unter uns, die noch nicht mal Haare flechten könnten, geschweige denn nen gottverdammten Hefeteig:
Der Neujahrsbopp. Nichts symbolisiert das neue Jahr so sehr wie Hefeteig in Form eines explodierten Nudelholzes.
Neujahrsbopp ist nicht fancy genug für dein Anliegen? Dann back dir stattdessen den absoluten Clusterfuck an Hefezopf-Kringel-Kranz-Formationen, die REUTLINGER MUTSCHEL
Uns würde nebenbei nichts davon abhalten, nettere Dinge aus Brot zu formen. Wir entscheiden uns freiwillig für diese formverunglückten Homagen an einen Töpferkurs für Anfänger.
In Indonesien backt man z.B. Roti Buaya zu Hochzeiten, welches Brot in Krokodilsform ist. We could've done sth awesome but we opted for the Neujahrsbopp
Das Kohlenhydratkrokodil steht btw unter anderem für Monogamie. Wofür Krokodile ja bekannt sind? Fragt mich nicht, ich kenne allgemein keine Krokodile und weiß erst recht nicht wie die Scheidungsquote bei indonesischen Krokodilen aussieht.
Ich kann fast die Präsentation des Marketing-Mitarbeiters sehen. "Die Konsumenten wollen Essen mit Effekt. Sell function, not flavor. Proteine sind jetzt das Ding wenn wir die junge Generation catchen wollen!!"
Von allen Lebensmitteln unter der Sonne ist die Nudel- quasi das Maskottchen der Kohlenhydrate- eine sehr ambitionierte Wahl für so ein Eiweiß-Makeover
Fun fact an dieser Stelle: Da ich durch die Ausbildung in der Werbebranche und so eine absolute Marketing-Neurose entwickelt hab bin ich manchmal weirdly up to date was Trends in der Werbung angeht. Und die Nutzer von obskuren Bodybuilderforen sind, somehow, sowasvon zum Ottonormalverbraucher erhoben worden.
Eigentlich ist es umgekehrt: ein großer Teil der Ottonormalverbraucher ist zum Bodybuilderforumnutzer mutiert, zumindest innerlich. Gerade seit der Pandemie ist dieses ganze "Better For You"-Marketing voll in unseren Normie-Supermärkten angekommen. Es geht ja nichtmal mehr nur um Superfoods, sondern ganz konkret um bestimmte Nährstoffe die abwechselnd als Das Ding für den Stoffwechsel, oder die Haut, oder meinetwegen die gottverdammte Darmflora deklariert werden. Proteine sind da ja fast noch basic. Der eine große Protein-Milchgedöns-Hersteller hat inzwischen sogar schon einen Creatin-Pudding auf den Markt gebracht, falls dir Protein-Pudding einfach nicht mehr den gleichen "Boah ich achte auf Ernährung"-Kick gibt. Oder du gönnst dir 'ne Schüssel Corridge- der brandneue Haferbrei mit Collagen.
Die Marketing-Abteilungen der Lebensmittelbranche haben ja durchaus mitbekommen dass wir alle kollektiv verunsichert sind durch *gestures vaguely at everything*. Hilft halt nicht dass man heutzutage auch noch durchgehend mit Informationen zu den Konsequenzen unseres Essverhaltens bombardiert wird. Kaufst du nachhaltig ein? Wusstest du schon dass jedes Mal ein Kind sein Eis fallen lässt wenn du ultra processed food kaufst? Hast du mal über die langfristigen Konsequenzen nachgedacht, die dieses Rosinenbrot auf deine eh schon nicht mehr ganz so reinen Poren haben wird??
Und klar, nicht jeder kauft deswegen jetzt plötzlich Essen aus dieser "Better For You"-Kategorie ein. Aber um zurück zum Punkt zu kommen: jap, die Bodybuildingforen-Ernährung hat's irgendwie in den Mainstream geschafft.
“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”
The husband was writing an article on classic video game records, was surprised to find out that holding the Tetris record is a bit of a big deal, and mentions how good his wife is at it.
The guy he’s talking to mentions that the record is 327, way lower than his wifes usual scores of 500-600.
They travel to a tournament, and she goes to do her attempt. Just after she beats 327, and is climbing higher, a judge brings up to the husband that the specific version she’s playing actually has a different record of 545.
She overhears that she needs to beat 500-something, and keeps going, setting the record at 841.
There was a decent but ultimately forgettable fantasy novel I read a long time ago that had a single moment that stuck with me.
The protagonist has just won the world famous sword fighting competition in the big, rich capital and is talking to his mentor, and says something about being the best swordsman in the world. The mentor frowns and tells him that no, he isn't. He is the best swordsman out of the people that could afford to show up to this tournament. There could be a mercenary way out in the mountains, patrolling a snow encrusted fort's walls that could kick his ass and there was no way to know until he was already losing to the guy.
I think about that a lot, and how for every apparently dominant competitor, there might be a fucking ronin out there somewhere capable of destroying them.
Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?
Deutsche Freunde, could you please create for me a word for the extreme depression I feel when I bend down to pick up a piece of litter and discover two more pieces of litter?
ver = prefix to indicate something difficult or negative, a change that leads to deterioration or even destruction that is difficult to reverse or to undo, or a strong negative change of the mental state of a person
der Müll = garbage, trash, rubbish, litter
-ung = -ing
die Vermüllung = littering
ver- = see before
zweifeln = to doubt
-ung = see before
die Verzweiflung = despair, exasperation, desperation
@shiplocks-of-love I don’t think that will happen. The words make perfect sense. I think if German is your mother tongue you get a feeling for combining words, like a
• irren = to become lost (also: to err, to be mistaken; to wander, to stray)
• der Garten = garden
der Irrgarten = maze, knot garden
• be- = prefix with a variety of functions: ¹as part of a compound word, it denotes a processing or change of state; ²as part of a compound word, it denotes a touch; ³as part of a compound word, it denotes a more intensive preoccupation with or thematization of something; ⁴it forms from a noun an adjective with a pseudo-participle form because the corresponding verb does not exist; ⁵as a prefix, it forms a transitive verb from a previously intransitive verb; ⁶as a prefix of a verb, it shifts the focus and thus changes the sentence structure
• lustig = funny
• -ung = suffix turning an adjective/adverb into a noun
die Belustigung = amusement, entertainment, merriment
der Beitrag = contribution, article in a newspaper or magazine, posting on social media, input to a discussion
The thing is, since in German you have to decline/conjugate many words in relation to the noun they are refering to those monster words actually serve a purpose of making the language simpler.
A common example is a (as in any) red wine (ein roter Wein) as compaired to the compound a red wine (ein Rotwein). If rot is an adjective it has to be conjugated: der rote Wein - des roten Weins - die roten Weine - and many more. But it if rot is part of the noun you only have to decline Wein: der Rotwein - des Rotweins - die Rotweine.
So, die Verzweiflung über die Vermüllung der Umwelt is way longer than Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung and you would have to know three grammatical genders and the words’ respective declinations. Whereas for Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung you only need to know that Verzweiflung is grammatically feminine (die) and its deklinations.
