What roles do drowners and drowner-tadpoles play in their local food chains and ecosystems?
we gotta come up with a name for the tadpoles. like how salmon get to be alevins and fry and parr and smolts before they’re salmon. does someone who speaks Polish know what the diminutive of “vodnik” would be?
ok ok ecology. this is a pretty nonspecific question so I’m just gonna start spitballing! lmk if you have a follow-up to something
here are some things we know about adult drowners:
habitat generalists. can be found as far north as Kaer Morhen and as far south as Toussaint or farther. inhabit a range of environments from lakes to shorelines to bogs to rivers to sewers.
amphibious. require water, but is comfortable on land, and hunts in both environments.
diet generalists. carnivorous and technically necrophages, so will scavenge dead bodies, but seen eating fish and known to kill humans and eat them fresh. not picky eaters!
toxin-resistant. this is, according to the bestiaries apparently how they live in sewers. I’ll buy it. it’s also how real ‘necrophages’ (scavengers) handle eating dead flesh.
extremely common. they’re everywhere. implies they breed easily and frequently.
not that dangerous. they’re predators, but relatively easy to avoid and/or kill.
loosely social. never found alone, and known to react strongly when they watch other drowners die.
basically, we’re looking at something pretty similar to a lot of small predators with aquatic or urban associations! first ones that come to mind for me are raccoons and American bullfrogs.
like bullfrogs and intertidal fishes like midshipmen and sculpins, their wildly plentiful eggs probably nourish a bunch of different insects, supporting a huge range of animals up the food chain—same for tiny newly hatched larvae. as adults, drowners probably exert predation pressure on a bunch of different fish species (possibly upsetting fishermen in more ways than just the danger of drowner attacks), and improve the water quality of rivers and lakes by eating dead animals in and around their habitats.
as adults, they’re midsized and not particularly well-armed predators and thus intermediate on the food chain. they’re probably preyed on by everything from bears to draconids—and, in fact, canonically by humans. I also think that Skelligers eat drowners but that’s my own pet headcanon.
their wide range of tolerated habits, indiscriminate eating habits, and the size of their tadpoles probably means that if they’re introduced to a new area, they’re an extremely effective invasive species, like American bullfrogs (whose fat-ass tadpoles eat other tadpoles and thus outcompete native frog populations in a bunch of places). try not to ship drowners or drowner eggs around anywhere or you will never get rid of them.
also, since they like sewers so much, I still maintain that as human development on the Continent increases and the populations of bears and large monsters like draconids continue to decline, the lack of predation pressure and the abundance of new habitat will absolutely skyrocket the drowner population! and it’ll be difficult to get rid of them because, as toxin-resistant as they are, they likely can’t be safely poisoned (as has been relatively effectively deployed against lampreys in the Great Lakes, cw images of fish with nasty wounds).
For the title ask meme, the "Two Stories" and "Haunting of Hill House" ones?
TWO STORIES
i try not to think too hard about this one because of the guilt 😂 it’s a fandom trumps hate fill, which means that i absolutely WILL write it. someday. the idea is that it’s fake married, but twice over: mi6 assigns a gorgeous wunderkind to provide technical support as bond infiltrates an arms dealer or somesuch, and then years later, after skyfall, bond and the wunderkind (now q) have to go undercover as a married couple again at a couples resort that is a front for some nefarious business.
an excerpt!
“Come in, 007,” Tanner crackled through his earpiece.
“Tell her I don’t need micromanaging,” he said bluntly.
“Well, you’re getting it regardless,” M’s voice cut in past Tanner’s protestations, as he knew she would. “Initial satellite scans have informed us that Mr. Friedrich’s security systems are far more advanced than we originally anticipated. The reason there are so few guards is that everything is automated—and on a closed system, so we can’t help you from here.”
“Shall I just blow a hole in the wall, then?” Bond asked dryly.
“Control yourself, Bond. We’ve detailed a specialist to assist you with the technical portions of the job. Try not to get him killed.”
“That was once, and he was an FSB plant.”
“Regardless,” M said unsympathetically. “Check your phone for the details. We’ll likely lose you once you’re inside the building, which is what the technical assistance is for. And I don’t need to remind you—the German government does not know we’re running this operation, and we’d like to keep it that way.”
Tanner muttered something uncomplimentary-sounding from far enough away that the microphone couldn’t pick it up. “Quite,” M said crisply, obviously not caring either whether Bond had heard or hadn’t, and clicked off as abruptly as she’d come on. Bond rolled his eyes and glanced at his phone, taking in the baby-faced features of a tech even greener-looking than the teenager the CIA had running SciOps. Lovely. At least they’d be close enough to speak in person instead of over comms; if he had to tell one more idiot not to touch their ear when speaking into an earpiece he might turn actively homicidal instead of his usual passive lethality.
IT-HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE
last year i watched it part 2 and went insane when i realized bill denbrough & steven crain are the same character. 😔 still salty that all the richie/eddie fic means i couldn’t prompt this for yuletide last year. anyway, this is a short-ish relationship study of bill & steven encountering each other in the LA writer’s circuit, sort-of-accidentally falling in love, & discovering that actually each of the horrors they’ve written about are real, and that maybe they’re attracted to the darkness and those who write it.
an excerpt!
Steven has heard of Bill Denbrough, of course. Blurbs with words like “spine-chilling,” blockbusting movies… crappy endings. He’s one of the bigger horror writers in the field, and based in LA, too, but the two of them have to go to Vegas to meet. They’re at CreeperCon, the biggest horror convention in the Western US, and someone has the bright idea of getting Steven to fill in when Joe Hill drops out of the headline panel. Steven’s a big enough name for it, to be sure, but he’s the only nonfiction writer on a panel ostensibly about horror inspiration. He thinks everyone in the audience knows how he gets his inspiration.
They shake hands before the panel. Denbrough is distracted, glancing out at the crowd. Searching for someone, maybe, Steven thinks. He knows that ever since… ever since Hill House, he finds himself looking for Nell at the oddest times. Denbrough has a firm handshake, bordering on too-tight, but his hand is cool and dry and Steven has had worse meetings. They take their seats, plush and yet somehow terribly unergonomic red velvet chairs all in a line behind a long table. Ruth Ware is moderating; Steven makes a mental note to tell her how much he loved her latest novel. (He hasn’t read it. He’s not much of a horror fan.)
The panel goes well. Steven talks a little about interviewing technique. Denbrough is wry and self-deprecating, in spite of the way his latest film grossed $600 million. Steven doesn’t see Nell. Everything is fine.
actually i quite like both of these. wow, i wish writing didn’t suck. thanks cas 💛
castillon02 replied to your post “look "there was only one bed" is some excellent food, don't get me...”
to add onto trcunning's note, "there are 2 beds but there's 3 of us" but it's an OT3 situation and no one wants to be the one who DOESN'T share the bed
*walks into bathroom*
*comes out with a bucket full of water*
*pours bucket of water on the second bed*
ohhhh nooooo, I guess I have to just....snuggle you both.
To be back in Q branch is fun with villainy, I am...
there once was a boffin named Grey/Lapsang-and-Earl so they say/she proclaimed she would fight/with poems for the right/to win the Fest’s fierce Poem Day
Hey! Thank you for the prompt! I’m not sure how closely I stuck to it, but it was a lot of fun to try!
Prompt is from here if anyone would like to send another!
Okay, we’regoing to focus more on the “wilderness” part, as opposed to the “survival”part, because I’ve no idea what to do if a person is stranded in a jungle or ona deserted island and frankly the idea is disturbing, so. Wilderness.
Let’s saythat someone is after Q. Hardcore after him, will stop at nothing, wants Q deadas a doornail, whatever that means. And they’re good at what they do – they arevery good at what they do. No one issure how, but they manage to track Q through three different MI6 safe housesand it’s really getting ridiculous, so they revamp their approach. They narrowdown the amount of people who know where he is and what’s going on to exactlythree people: M, Q himself, and Q’s newest bodyguard – the one and only (thankgod) 007. Then they shuffle Q right off the grid.
Like,really off the grid.
They havesomehow acquired—Q wasn’t particularly keen on the how so much as the why, god,why—a cabin in the woods. Very, very far into the woods. If “nowhere” wasan actual location and that location had a forest, Q thinks they would actuallybe somewhere beyond that forest.
At thiscabin, they have a generator and they have running water. That’s really it. Itis politely described as “rustic.” It is less politely described as “bloodyawful, Bond, just let the terrorist have me and get it over with.”
Bond ismuch too amused with the situation.
Of course,for all Q complains, he’s doesn’t actually want whoever’s after him to get him.His sense of self-preservation might not be the strongest in the world (andwhose in their line of work is, really), but he’s not actually suicidal, andhe’s fairly certain Bond knows that, which he’s fairly certain only amuses Bond more, because the man is terrible.Really, Q can stand not having modern amenities, he can, it’s just – well,after the last safe house went up in very literal flames, he didn’t have muchtime to grab anything. They picked up a few changes of clothes and some foodand some other necessities on their way up to the cabin, but what Q didn’t havewas his work.
A laptopwouldn’t have been much use, of course, since they’re very, very far fromgetting any kind of internet connection, but Q wouldn’t have minded having oneof his pet projects to work on. There were all sorts of thing he was designing andbuilding that he could have brought along. Instead, he’s stuck in a cabin inthe woods with nothing.
Bond ratherunkindly tells him to stop moaning about it (and he’s hardly moaning, really, he’s raising valid pointsin favor of keeping himself mentally stable) and to look at it as some timeoff.
That’s easyfor Bond to say, of course; his job is to guard Q, so technically he’s alwaysworking and therefore always busy. He got to bring his work with him. Q, on theother hand, is about ready to climb the walls after the first day.
He needs to work.
Hedisassembles and reassembles their few electronics (a toaster and a stereo thatwill only play static and cassette tapes), cleans them, ensures they run atpeak function, and does it one more time to be sure. He does the same thingwith the two lamps in the cabin. Bond sits by the front door as much to guard Qfrom any threats as to stop Q from going out and fucking with the generator(and Q doesn’t plan on doing so, really, because he likes having electricity, thank you very much, but he is a littleinsulted that Bond thinks he’ll actually break the generator).
Day threedawns and Q can’t just keep disassembling and reassembling the toaster. Hetells Bond as much while confiscating and cleaning each of his weapons in turn.Bond is perfectly capable of caring for his own weapons (the ones he doesn’tlose), but he leaves Q to it because it keeps him quiet. Really, Bond finds Q’scompany perfectly enjoyable so long as the man is occupied.
Cleaningthe weapons gives way to cleaning the cabin. Bond is fairly certain the cabinhasn’t been this clean since it was built. He suspects the oven would actuallysparkle if he shined a light inside. Never mind Q’s physical safety, at this pointhe’s growing a little concerned for the quartermaster’s mental health. Whilegoing back to civilization is decidedly not an option, Bond needs to intervenebefore Q makes good on the calculating looks he’s started throwing the vehiclethey drove up in.
So heassigns Q the task of keeping them warm and fed and comfortable. Fetchingfirewood, tending the fire, cooking, cleaning, et cetera. Q tells Bond he isnot some kind of housewife. Bond agrees wholeheartedly – and not just because Qsays this as he is brandishing the axe for the firewood. He does mention thatit seemed as though Q was looking for something to do, however, and he’s certainlya better candidate for all that stuff that Bond himself is.
Q grumbles,but throws himself into it anyway, because at least it’s work. This all works fairly well for the remainder of their timethere, but of course, there’s only so much time two characters in a fanfictioncan spend in close quarters, euphemistically cleaning weapons before they fallinto the cabin’s one (surprisingly comfortable) bed.
Really, bythe end of their stay, Q is ready to admit that he’s not completely miserable; he’sstill missing his work and itching to be the one tracking down whoever’stracking him down and missing hiscats and his flat, too, but he’s also getting some fresh air and staying busyand being shagged regularly (being guarded from very, very close up, Bondinsists), so it’s not all terrible.
The personhunting Q does of course manage to find the cabin, where Bond and Q stage alast stand and cabin and the bad guys are blown to smithereens (and Qabsolutely did not decide to blow up the cabin on purpose, that was just a happyaccident, really it was) and all returns to normal except for the part whereBond and Q decide to make a go of being together when not isolated in the woods, which turns out quite nicely.
A yearlater, Bond suggests renting a rustic cabin for their anniversary, fornostalgia purposes.
Q suggestsBond go fuck himself. For nostalgia purposes.
