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Jaren awoke with a start. Sitting up, they quickly looked around. The room looked like some kind of study, with scrolls and books filling the shelves along the walls. The paper walls seemed week enough; maybe they could escape from--whatever this place was--before their captors noticed.

Captors. They must be fairies, right? The last thing Jaren could remember before waking up here was going out into the forest to gather herbs and hearing a muffled voice as the forest around them faded to black. It wasn't a drug--that would have been recognizable with Jaren's experience as a healer. The darkness had been some kind of illusion magic like that which the fair folk use. They must have chosen Jaren as their next victim, having seen them come to the forest so regularly. If Jaren had been kidnapped by fairies, they would need to keep their wits about them to avoid falling further into their traps.

Tearing through the wall, Jaren was ready to make a run for it, but had to quickly stop themself from falling off a cliff. This couldn't be right, the fair folk never stray far from the forests. If her captors had taken her up into the mountains, then they couldn't be fairies. But then, who--

"It would be rather rude to run off so soon."

Jaren turned around. The building was farther back than it should have been, and a robed figure now stood only a few paces behind them. This was the person who had kidnapped them? Jaren readied a spell, hoping the old man wouldn't recognize it for the harmless show that it was. "Stay back! I've studied the magical arts well. I don't want either of us to get hurt, so don't move, and don't try to follow me."

The figure shrugged. "Alright. I'll stay right here. Though I would appreciate if you would stay and talk over coffee."

The man's words meant nothing. Even if he actually had such a rare plant as coffee, it seemed like too convenient an excuse to drug Jaren into being an easy captive to be ransomed off to the nearest magic university or to be sold to some warlord who was looking for a new mage. They backed their way to the cliffside, then jumped. They had never really wanted to go adventuring or fight in wars, so they never actually studied any flight spells or spells to soften a landing, but hopefully strenthening their bones would hold them together well enough after hitting the ground to mend the damage from the fall.

Thud. Fortunately, the pain of the fall was somewhat masked by having all the wind knocked out of them. The plan had worked, but as Jaren looked up, they saw that they were in the same place as before, with the man and the tower standing before them as if to mock them.

The man shook his head. "That was a rather clever use of your healing magic, though if I may ask, why didn't you simply fly away?"

"None of your business." New strategy. This time, Jaren strengthened the muscles in their legs before jumping as far as they could. Being lost in the forest wouldn't be ideal, but it would be better than being someone's prisoner to be used for money or as a weapon. As they were about to hit the ground, Jaren closed their eyes and braced for impact.

Again, they had landed back next to the tower in the mountains. "As impressive as your skills are," the old man said, "you're just going to tire yourself out like this."

Jaren was learning to hate this guy. "Let me leave, or I'll kill you!", they shouted.

The man simply stepped forward towards them. "I think we both know you won't." Jaren was stunned. "I've been looking for an apprentice for some time. Coffee does it's wonders, but eternal youth isn't one of them. And you." The man pointed a finger at Jaren's chest. "I've been very satisfied with the care you show in your magic."

"Apprentice? Who do you think you--"

"The world needs witchknights, after all." Witchknights. Jaren had taken them to just be stories for children. Masters of the magical and martial arts, some of whom had supposedly conquered vast lands or worked as advisors to powerful rulers, while others had fought against the powerful to give back to those with nothing or even abandoned the world altogether.

The man sighed. "Fine. I see you need proof." Suddenly, there was a sword stuck through Jaren's leg. The bone was still strong enough from their spell before to not be cut through, but the pain was horrible. Before they even had time to scream, a portal opened beneath them, and they fell through what must have been a layer of the underworld before landing in the open top room of the tower with various animated suits of armor pointing swords and pikes at them.

The suits of armor walked to their displays by the stairs, and the witchknight came to Jaren to help them up. Jaren was about to cast a spell to heal their leg, but felt the familiar feeling of a healing spell already taking effect on it. "You know," said the old man, "dispite the stories I'm sure you know, violence is actually a small part of being a witchknight. Now, about that coffee."

--

Finishing the mug of coffee, Jaren spoke. "So to make sure I'm understanding this, witchknights exist, and you've basically kidnapped me to get me to preserve your ancient form of the magical and martial arts?"

"That sounds about right," the man responded. "Though I would like to say, I didn't have much choice in the matter. If I were to try to teach some other mage, how do you think that would go? So many of them nowadays are too absorbed by power and where that can take them. It would be next to impossible for me to teach them, and there would be a serious risk of having a new story like those about witchknight conquerers abusing their power and ignoring the world around them."

Jaren still felt wronged by the whole situation, but this old witchknight was right about that much: A lot of Jaren's former classmates probably would have learned what they could and run off to use their abilities for power for themselves. Still, there were always calmer ones. Jaren didn't know any others who were completely pacifist, but surely the witchhunter wasn't that strained of options.

At that moment, there was a flash of light from down the stairs and the sound of someone approaching. Jaren started to get up, but the witchknight just gestured for them to remain seated. "Mjorgan! Mjorgan you bastard, where are you!", a voice called as footsteps came up the wooden steps. A tall, slender man in a suit and cape reached the top of the stairs and turned to the witchknight. "Mjorgan! There you are! I-- who is this?"

"Excellent question, Archsage!" The witchnight--Mjorgan, apparently--glanced towards Jaren. "My friend, would you like to introduce yourself?"

First a mythical witchnight, now the archsage was here? "I'm Jaren, sir... I'm Mjorgan's new apprentice." The room was silent for a moment. Moreso than when Jaren and Mjorgan had been drinking their coffee.

After a few seconds, the archsage spoke. "Well, I suppose it's about time you picked an apprentice, but why now? I've come here several times before to try to convince you to take any of the brightest mages our universities have to offer, but you choose now of all times?"

"I believe I chose the right time to do so, Alfred," Mjorgan responded. "Now, what business did you have with me? I'd like to get to lessons for my student sometime today."

"Ah, yes." The archsage gave a curt nod, showing some annoyance at his treatment by Mjorgan. "I came here to ask if you would join my advisory council for..." A glance in Jaren's direction told them not to get involved. "...necessary audience."

"It must be serious if you're coming to bother me."

"It's about her."

Mjorgan suddenly looked incredibly serious. "...Alright. I'll meet with you tomorrow morning to discuss this further." He waved his hand, and the Archsage disappeared in a puff of smoke.

With how the archsage spoke and Mjorgan's response, Jaren could tell that this was probably something very bad. "Should I know what that was about?"

The witchknight looked up at them. "No. Maybe some other time, but for the time being, it's best that you not get involved in this. Besides," he stood up and headed towards the stairs, "we need to start your training."

OK,

I didn't realize I was going to be writing so much (good prompt), but I'm probably going to need to stop here for now and hope that I can get myself to continue this story later.

witchknights are unmatched in magical and martial arts. Unlike the rest of your peers you wanted to study healing magic and medicine not war and violence. So when the witchknight chose you everyone was confused, Even the archsage himself.

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The corollary to "you shouldn't call historical people gay because it's a modern term" is "the word friend didn't always mean what you think it means".

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I actually used to have a friend who decided to get really into mneumonics to try to improve his memory. I remember that when talking about dnd or writing stories, there were plenty of cases where I (with no special memory tricks outside of possibly hyperfixation) would reminds him "ok, but what about [rule that we talked about a few days ago]? Would that be like what you're thinking of?", and he would be surprised, sometimes even refusing to believe that he had seen the rule before. Are there tricks to help you remember things better? Sure, but from my experience helping my friend through setting up his mneumonics tools, I can say that it takes a lot of extra time and effort for a slow result. Might be worth it if that's what you're looking for, but I'm just saying: He was much more serious about actually looking through the 5e rules than I was, and I still remembered better (he did do a good job at remembering various magic items and his campaign without notes, tho)

i'm still mad about that post thats like "humans USED to be able to memoriize long epic poems, but we no longer have Bards so our memories arent as good" boy shut the fuck up. a good chunk of people i went to high school with had the entirety of hamilton memorized for fun and they weren't even autistic.

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Ich meine, Deutsch ist nicht meine Muttersprache, aber ich glaube das "They" funktioniet gut genug als ein Lehnwort für nicht-binäre Menschen. Kann natürlich ein bisschen eingedeutscht werden ("dey" oder "sey"). Xier und sier existieren auch als Neopronomen, aber sie klingen zu mir ein bisschen zu ähnlich zu den schon-existierenden Pronomen

Can we start a GoFundMe to give the German language a few more pronouns, please?

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Do not think for a moment that this admin is only going after trans folks. They are ultimately going after the whole LGBTQ community. They start small, like getting rid of a hotline option, then go BIG.

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Without context, I read it as an abbreviation of "French."

Okay you guys.

IF YOU PRIMARILY DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH reply with what you mentally call it, if you have a nickname for it or something

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Nice catch with the possible morphology in "gnu'ur" completely into "gnurya!" I hadn't actually thought about the possibility of things being compressed like that, but I feel like that actually probably fits better than the two words just sharing "gnu-."

Ang working more like Japanese "no" is also an interesting idea. I could certainly see it working with the example you gave.

And don't worry about seeming arrogant. I mostly just pick up a bit of linguistics for the fun of it too (even if I don't always remember the official terms for everything), and I'm glad to see someone else having fun with puzzling over language like this!

Actually, if you decide that you want to try more language puzzles not-quite-like-this, I recently got around to playing Chants of Sennaar, and while its languages don't use the latin alphabet, I had fun figuring out how each of the little mini-languages work. Could be worth looking into if you decide you want to play around with understanding language like this.

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My attempt to analyse the language because my brain has decreed that this shall be my form of procrastination for the next few minutes:

The only identical word between the two sentences is "ung." Based on the changes in the translations, I'd guess that this is either a negatory indicator ("no"/"do not") or a preposition like "to."

"gnurya" and "gnu'ur" look really similar, so I'd guess they have similar meaning, but without knowing the word order of the grammar for this language, I'm not entirely sure which pairing of words in the translations this matches to. My best guess would probably be "child"/"young woman" (where "gnu-" would probably be related to youth) because of the chance of "ung" being a preposition. That being said, "child" and "young woman" may be different enough concepts here that they could be "ja'am" and "gu'ub," with "gnu-" being related to death instead ("kill"/"murder"), in which case I'd say "ung" is probably either more similar to "about" than to "to" or that it's actually a postposition (literally translating "ja'am ung" to "girl to").

Actually, going back on what I said a bit just there, I somehow didn't see "inga" there at all. Going with my assumption of "gnu-" being related to youth, "inga gnu'ur" may just be "young woman" with adjectives coming after the noun.

For the starts of the sentences (after "Dread," of course), they're different enough that I'm not really so sure, but I guess I can keep going from back to front here.

If prepositions come before the term they apply to ("ung inga gnu'ur" being [preposition] [noun] [adjective] for "to young woman"), then "ang" is in the right place and size to probably be another preposition (in this case, pretty much taking the "of" in "speak of" into the language). If this is the case, then I think I'm making progress with the sentence structure here: ([imperitive verb] and [negatory indicator]) [what is spoken of] [who is spoken to], with prepositions existing as... prepositions, and with adjectives coming after the noun

Remaining words to translate: Sentence 1: "bruul," "k'dak." Sentence 2: "galun," "ga'an," "kirbash"

Oh right, and since I guess I didn't actually write this down in that last big bullet point (not sure why I'm using bullet point format at this point), that placement would mean "ja'am" is "kill" and "gu'ub" is "murder." Possibly noun forms of verbs, based on the similar structure (or at least similar forms of verbs), but that unfortunately doesn't help me with identifying the imperative verb at the start of the sentence.

Ok, so this is where I'm going to make a bit of a leap and say this is probably going in one of two directions: I think that either the apostrophe has something to do with the core structure of the verb ("k'dak" and "ga'an" would be "talk" and "speak"), or... actually, let's go with that first idea. The more I think about it, the more I realize how loose of a thread there is for the idea that "k" at the start of a word has a relation to it being a negatory indicator.

This leaves us with 3 untranslated words, but I'm going to go ahead and say that "bruul" and "galun" are both... probably(?) equivilents of "no"/"not" based on similar placement in the sentence. As for why the words are so different, I'm guessing that it's either part of the mistranslation on the part of the mom (sorry, I forgot the name, but I'll probably check it after I finish writing this) or that "galun" is a more formal/polite word (since "please" was added in the translation).

This would leave "kirbash" to be "please"

Anyway, that was fun! @ask-gadzooks, to answer your question, it looks like it! (or at least a few sentences of one)

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Na, jetzt das ich Tumblr scheinbar wieder nutze (ein bisschen scrolling im letzten paar Tagen), sollte ich auch wahrscheinlich ein bisschen posten. Ich brauch ja immer noch das Deutsch Üben

English Translation:

Well, now that I'm aparently using Tumblr again (a bit of scrolling in the last few days), I should probably also do a bit of posting. I certainly can still use the German practice

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Noooooooooooo I missed international asexuality day no garlic bread for meeeeeeeee 😭 Or... mb I can have it anyway? Is that allowed?

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Wer das jetzt liest und sich umgehend fragt, ja:

WARUM das eigentlich so sei

ist dem Framing und der Relativierung bereits auf den Leim gegangen (und das vermutlich schon lange).

Denn die erste Frage MÜSSTE seit Jahren sein:

WARUM die Bundesregierung nichts gegen die Nazis im eigenen Land tut.

Ist sie aber nicht. Und wird vom Spiegel auch höchstens einmal im halben Jahr gestellt - um dann umgehend relativiert zu werden. Damit ist der Kreis eigentlich schon geschlossen.

P.S. Entsprechend habe ich den Artikel auch nicht gelesen.

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my little brother tried to show me a "cool trick" where he entered my name and hometown into chatgpt and tried to get it to pull up my personal info like it did on all of his friends, then was absolutely shocked when it couldn't find anything on me

so. keep practicing basic internet safety, guys. it still works. don't put your personal info on social media, keep all your accounts on private, turn off ai scraping on every site that you can, enable all privacy features on social media apps. our info still can be protected, we have to keep fighting for control

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Absolutely agree, but I just thought I should share that I initially misread this as someone named "Ice Cold" was taking something from a trans woman, and I was absolutely ready to be angry at Ice Cold for a moment.

Ice cold takes from a Transgender Woman:

Not all Men are evil

Everyone has the capacity for evil

Transgender Men are men

Transgender Women are women

Excluding Cisgender Men from your spaces requires Transgender Men to out themselves if they want to engage (Same for Women)

Anyone can be Non-Binary, there is no "look" or requirement

Non-binary masculine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces, many are just treated as men and predators

Non-binary feminine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces without being seen as "Woman-Lite"

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shaming and stirring away trans people for wanting to do hormones or having surgery (especially bottom surgery: orchi, vaginal and phallopalsty, null etc) is very much a shitty thing to do and you shouldn't control someone's elses expression with gender especially if you parrot fearomongering rhetoric towards medical transitioning that conservatives share.

likewise: i think only defining transness and trans culture as taking hormones and surgery + representing eurocentric beauty standards is also extremely damaging especially to trans people who are non white, disabled/has medical issues, fat, and are gender non conforming and don't care for passing.

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"I want to be a dragon."