I'm working on a finals SQL database project with 13 tables with 5+ rows of data I have to make up and it's due in 20-23 ish hours? Let's see how tragic this goes 🫠
C!George encounters c!Dream alone again one day after his prison escape and confronts him. George asks Dream why he’s doing this, why he won’t stop. Dream shuts George down, saying he doesn’t have time for this. He tries to move around George, but George steps into his way. Exasperated, Dream sighs, “George, come on.”
“No, Dream!” George replies firmly. “I want answers. You at least owe me that.”
Dream pulls out his sword. “Get out of my way, George. I won’t ask again,” he says.
“Seriously, Dream?” George scoffs. His trident materializes in the palm of his hand. The wind whistles through the trees as he presses the blunt end into the mossy ground. “For fuck’s sake. I don’t know why you’re doing this, and to be completely honest, I really don’t care! But you know what I do know?” He lifts his chin to stare into that notoriously familiar mask, where he knows Dream’s own eyes are staring back at him. “You love me, and you are not going to kill me.”
This is when Punz shows up behind George with a sword. “But I will,” he says, pressing the tip of the sword to George’s back.
George just continues to stand there, staring Dream in the eyes, unafraid. After a moment, without breaking eye contact with George, Dream says, “Let him go.”
Punz is a bit confused about what just happened, but he lowers his sword anyway. “That’s what I thought,” says George. He moves to leave, but before he goes, his eyes flick down to Dream’s neck, where a leather cord is just barely visible beneath the collar of his shirt. He looks back up at Dream, then pulls his goggles down over his eyes. He smirks, then turns and begins to walk away. “I’ll see you in a few months,” he says, raising his left hand to wave over his shoulder. As he walks away, a gold ring on his fourth finger glints in the sunlight.
Dream raises his hand to brush over the matching ring resting against his chest. He catches Punz’s furrowed eyebrows as he turns his back to George. “Yeah, see you,” Dream murmurs, beginning to walk away as well. He doesn’t elaborate further. If his and George’s anniversary is in a few months, well, that’s nobody’s business but theirs.
A kestrel seeks revenge on a European Starling after it kills and eats her chicks. In the U.S, European starlings have a devastating impact on our native ecosystems in the entire United States. This species is known for their aggression towards other cavity nesting birds, outcompeting native species for nesting spots and food sources. They’ve been known to kill many native species from bluebirds, to woodpeckers, to kestrels. They are violent towards competing species, destroying their nests, and pecking holes in eggs laid by other birds. Not to mention, they also destroy crops and devour multitudes of grain each year.
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I wanted to portray something intense to kind of grab people’s attention to this problem. Most people don’t know how horribly invasive they are. While they’re pretty birds, they’re not meant to live in the United States. I wanted to use colors like red (to represent anger, sadness, revenge, betrayal) to portray what native species have to endure every year towards a bird that was never supposed to even come in contact with them. And colors like yellow (to represent wrongfully perceived innocence and guilt).
The spills of blood can be represented as the successful revenge the kestrel has, or, the multitudes of blood spilled from native species by European Starlings.
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Did you know? All the European Starlings in North America descended from 100 birds set loose in New York’s Central Park in the early 1890s. The birds were intentionally released by a group who wanted America to have all the birds that Shakespeare ever mentioned. It took several tries, but eventually the population took off. Today, more than 200 million European Starlings range from Alaska to Mexico.