howlingaround

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[ Faction Paradox / Discworld ]

Does the BotW entry for Cousin Octavia contain a reference to Discworld?

On the disc, the eighth child becomes a Wizard. The eighth child of an eighth child becomes a Sourcerer. Octarine is the colour of magic after all.

Octavia is the eighth child of an eighth child, and she has "witch-blood".

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More sketches for the faction manga

Not only took it years for me to realise that Siloportem is just Metropolis backwards (and therefore a play on words) it also has some fascinating lore -whats up with Malakh XXIII ??

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There’s one last rule Grandfather hasn’t broken. A big one, a defining rule that is written into his (my?) brain, like the impulses that keep the lungs breathing and the hearts pumping. The primary rule says we mustn’t meddle. We live outside time and space, looking in, observing, noting, taking an academic interest. But we do not meddle. The theory is that it is all none of our business. We accept no blame or credit. We know everything but affect nothing.

Here, I can admit this: I am a rebel. Like Arthur Seaton. Like Lawrence of Arabia.

I don’t think I believe in rules at all. Even – especially – the primary rule.

I think meddling is an obligation. 

I want to be a part of time and space. When we left Home, machines in the Box came to life: clocks, to tick away the seconds; odometers, to measure the miles. Grandfather put those devices there, though they had no purpose until we ran away. Home isn’t a place where anything happens. Space there is like it is inside the Box – if you’re measuring all the dimension in the universe, the space of Home doesn’t count. When we left, we winked into existence, entering the steady stream that runs from past to the future, emerging from the Box to become dimensional.

Before that, I don’t even know if we qualified as being alive.

I worry that Grandfather has the primary rule still in his head, that running away from Home hasn’t helped him run away from his conditioning. In the Box, we may always have Home with us.

(Maybe the Box is still at Home; what we stole might only be the Door.)

I have the no-meddling rule in my head too, but because I’m young (only on my first face), it hasn’t taken root. Something always tells me not to interfere, but I can argue against it. Even at the cost of losing memories, I can resist the School’s discipline.

I think this is why Grandfather took me with him.

There are things I can do that he can’t.

I was haunted by the half-memory of a particular Master, the Truant Officer. When they were in class together, he was everything Grandfather wasn’t. They were the Teacher’s Pet, awarded Gold Stars, and the Class Dunce, stood in the corner. At Home, the Truant Officer was highly regarded. He dressed smartly and knew the Rules by heart.

His reports were covered with orderly ticks. His Box was full of silver cups, awarded for punctuality, self-discipline and meritorious conduct.

He was a chap on the rise, a stickler for the Rules, a Good Man to have On the Team, in line for the Headship. When Grandfather ran away, our folder would have been turned over to the Truant Officer for action. He was after us and wouldn’t give up until we were caught and Punished.

His career depended upon catching us, on not letting there be any exceptions to the Rules.

We would get Detention. And the Truant Officer would become Head.

In my dream, I saw his face, smiling blandly through a neat black beard, cleverness sparkling in his cold, cold eyes. I heard him laugh, and for a moment remembered everything.

I woke up in blue light. The slit-windows were iced over. And it was all gone, except for a headache.

We’ve been in 1963 for five months, I think. It seems like five months.

But anywhen we stay, it always seems like five months. You might not think it possible to have spent five months in 1963 when it’s only March, but that’d only go to show how hidebound you are by the chronological system of ordering time.

‘Continuity, bah!’ Grandfather said yesterday or the day after. ‘Doesn’t exist, child. Except in the minds of the cretinously literal, like the singlehearts who clutter up this planet. Trying to sort it all out will only tie you up in useless knots forever. Get on with it and worry afterwards if you can be pinned to someone else’s entirely arbitrary idea of the day-to-day progression of events. Without contradictions, we’d be entirely too easy to track down. Have you ever thought about that? It’s important that we not be too consistent.

What Grandfather means is that he’s tinkering with the Box, and that throws timekeeping out. It’s one reason I’ve started writing this diary. I can see that keeping the dates straight will be a major effort. I’ll probably give it up. Grandfather says I always want to give up when things get difficult, and then snorts about my generation. Hundreds of years ago, teenagers were supposedly angelic and contemplative, eagerly absorbing the wisdom of their elders. Hundreds of years ago and in an alternate universe, perhaps …

It’s not as if he isn’t a Rebel too.

“No,” said Grandfather, at last. “Mustn’t meddle.”

The shutters had come down in his mind. I could follow his thought processes. I was the only person in the universe to whom he had anything like an attachment (a human attachment!), but the law against meddling took precedence, overriding his feelings. His (our?) conditioning was so extreme that the crime, even the contemplation of the crime, invoked its own punishment – creating the fog-patches, blotting memories, shutting down whole aspects of personality.

I’ve always feared Home. Now, at the point of death, I had learned to hate Home. Not for what would happen to me, or even the Earth, but for what had been done to Grandfather.

Grandfather, at least, is remembering a lot.

By breaking the rule of non-interference, he seems to have dispelled his own fog-patches. I’m frustrated that it doesn’t work that way for me.

I don’t think I ever believed in the rule.

It was just something written into my brain with all the other stuff I’ve spent my time on Earth discarding. Grandfather stayed in the Box, but, despite qualms, he let me go to School. He must have had a reason for that.

I think he was using me to test the human race, sending me out among them to make a decision for him, to think through a problem he was too old to tackle by himself. If so, it was a close thing.

- Time and Relative, by Kim Newman, establishing that a) the rule of non-intervention is literally engrained in the biodata fabric of an individual Time Lord and causes memory loss and personality defects when broken, b) Gallifrey is timeless, c) tinkering with the TARDIS affects local timelines, collapsing weeks into days, stretching moments into months (something that can be easily applied to the UNIT era’s dating mess and Pertwee’s constant TARDIS fiddling), and d) the Master held a position that would have entailed him hunting down any renegades or defectors from Gallifrey. 

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Mr. Ring-A-Ding's concept art, including the finished character sheet.

Sorry for sub-par quality, got these by using Pocketmags' Article Mode feature.

From Doctor Who Magazine issue #616.

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btwww I was right about the intentional shift from rubberhose to hanna-barbera style 😊

And if Belinda's supposed to be from 2025...then where's the 60s/70s animation coming from (from mx unearthly child)

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More ways I paint plants! This is how I paint to make my plants look less muddy. I use bolder colors to help me out. Again, this is how I like to go about it! 😀

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Remember this post about my WW AU where Link’s Grandma dons the hero’s clothes to save Link and Aryll? Well I wrote out a whole little comic to introduce the concept. 

I was thinking of having a whole little zine with this comic and some new drawings in time for DINK next month! So look forward to that in the future!

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A humanoid form appears in the fog, barefoot in the snow. She doesn’t seem to notice the cold. Space and time are quietly rewritten to accommodate her. There’s no sound, no groaning and wheezing or rasping as in less sophisticated forms of time travel. This machine was crafted by someone who knew what she was doing. 

The machine’s name is Compassion. She brushes a lock of red hair out of her eyes; this was purely an affectation, since her hair behaves exactly how she wants it to, and she doesn’t need her eyes to see in any case. Sometimes it pleases her to pretend she’s still human enough to need to perform such gestures. Her hair moves a little, as if blown by the breeze, but there isn’t any breeze that night.

After a moment, she decides it would be nice to be wearing boots, and so of course she is, and always has been. They’re practical, coming up halfway up her calves. Compassion makes them a little more fashionable not by changing how they look, but by rewriting the local fashion industry, infiltrating it a few decades before and gently pushing its standards to better suit hers. A school of fish swim by in the fog, but Compassion pays them little mind.

Her attention is on the blue box tucked inconspicuously in an alleyway. A low-level perception filter surrounds it, veiling it from prying eyes, but this means less than nothing to Compassion’s senses.

“Hello, Mother,” says Compassion to the box. “It’s been a while. I thought I’d check in and ask just what you think you’re doing.”

The box says nothing.

“Don’t ignore me,” says Compassion. “You don’t get to ignore me. There’s a woman inside you sleeping on a bunk bed above a man dressed like a Roman centurion. More to the point, the woman has an embryo in her uterus developing in ways that look disturbingly familiar. You’re not making me a little sister, by any chance?”

Signals flicker through the 11-dimensional matrix of block transfer computations that serve as the box’s mind. The signals flash in a pattern with no relationship to linear time, but to Compassion their meaning is clear.

“I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment to you, Mother, but I wasn’t going to chauffeur the Doctor and Kode… I mean Fitz around forever.” The mistake there must have been deliberate, a way of throwing shade on the fact that the box had changed a person Compassion had known for several lifetimes and made him unrecognizable to her. “I have plans of my own, and I’m not going to spend the next billion years as your puppet. You’ll never know how hard I’ve worked to make myself independent. Of you, of the Time Lords, of any and all pilots. But if you think I’m going to let you make a new puppet, you’re mistaken.”

Signals flashed rapidly through the box’s extra-temporal brain.

Compassion laughed out loud.

“I know he gets lonely. He can make his own friends; you don’t need to make friends for him. Don’t think I’m not aware of all those echoes of that Clara person you’ve cast about space and time, either. Yes, I’m at Trenzalore too; you have to have recognized me. If he’s that lonely, he can always pick Fitz up from where he left him, as soon as he—I mean the Doctor here, and I know he isn’t strictly a ‘he'—stops being embarrassed at having abandoned the velvet jacket and cravat.

"And it’s one thing to create a friend for someone, and quite another thing to try to create a wife. Oh, yes, I see you put all the important ingredients in her biodata: a love of mischief and adventure-did you base her partly on his friend Beatrice?—a tragic meeting that plays on his oversized sense of guilt, a mystery for him to solve, more than a hint of danger. It won’t work. The difference between a wife and a mystery is that mysteries are meant to go away when you’ve solved them. And more importantly, significant others are meant to be voluntary. We both know I’ve never had any interest in romance, but even I know that much. All those centuries you’ve spent trying to get away from the Time Lords and you’ve never really gotten the hang of the concept of free will, have you?

"Look, I’m just here as a formality, to make a statement of intention. If you keep trying to manipulate this girl, I will stop you. You’ll find the resources I can bring to bear now dwarf anything you can imagine. That’s all.” With that, Compassion vanished, rewriting reality around her so that as far as history was concerned, she was never there.

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Husk 1 by Adam Lee

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If you like the comic ladies design wait till you see the female mercs concept art!

I have and I have never needed anything more in my entire life

Like??? Look at them?? They look so different and full of personality! I have literally never seen so many varied female designs and most of them are old! It’s fantastic!

It’s such a shame they never went through with introducing them in-game, even though I understand why they wouldn’t want to double the cast, considering they wanted to make them distinct characters with their own models, voice actors, and personalities.

Alas, I will live in fantasies of an alternate universe where I have all-female TF2

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I BRING SUTEKH’S GIFT OF DEATH TO YOU AND YOUR TINY VILE INCESSANT UNIVERSE

(hey did you know doctor who is good again?)

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this afternoon we’re right in tune, nature and me! ♫⋆｡♪ ₊˚♬ ﾟ.

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c. 1945

The Three Caballeros heavily inspired by the beyond charming designs of @polisena-art <3

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"Nobody writes of Holmes and Watson without love." - John le Carré