nicholas-the-paleomancer

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

please tell me other people will get this

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

I’m the anon, freed from word count limits! Personally, I think the second option both the funniest and most interesting. The rebellion is big enough that the left and right hand, while knowing what the other is doing, can still get surprised.

That, and I love it when competent characters get blindsided by the shear audacity of reality to not make sense. I’d love to see the look on Ahsoka’s face, flip flopping between rage, grief, euphoria, and utter confusion.

Long time reader and lurker of your Star Wars work, here. I just finished an Andor-Rogue One-Star Wars binge it really is the Lenin quote about "weeks where decades happen." So, I have to ask: what your characters thinking and doing when the news hits that a rebel network was wiped out, rebels found out about the death star, they attacked bases to get plans, they lost those plans, then some randos infiltrated the Death Star with the plans, rescued Leia, got tracked to Yavin, exploded Death Star?

I have thought about that a lot, and though I haven't settled on an exact reason, they were occupied with something else they thought was important. It’s like how I wrote in Bail attempting to contact Ahsoka during the Kenobi show but couldn’t reach her. Which I think is a plausible explanation. Given how important the Death Star was, and Ahsoka and Barriss being the heaviest hitters the Rebellion has, if they were near what happened, they would've gotten involved.

It is very funny to imagine, though.

Ask me questions!

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

The thing was a mound of flesh and mottled skin, as big as a barn and the shape of a pumpkin. Four tentacles as thick as trees hung limp at its sides; teeth ringed the gaping mouth at the top of its head like a crown.

A huge, sad whale eye the colour of wine stared at the knight. She could see her reflection in the jelly surface.

“We don’t know what it is,” she heard. “Some kind of monster that makes a perfect copy of whatever it eats. They think that was how the Dark Lord made his armies, feeding his minions to it so that it would make hundreds of copies of them. Do you recognize it?”

The knight opened her mouth. She hesitated. “Yeah,” she murmured, drawing out the word. “We found it in the Dark Lord’s tower, right?”

“That’s right. That’s where it ate you.”

The knight turned around and looked at her other reflection. This one appeared to be about ten years older, and had doffed her armor for a loose blue tunic and breeches.

She was holding a cup of tea. She had pressed another cup into the knight’s hand when she woke up here. It had been a shock finding herself suddenly out the obsidian dungeons of the Dark Lord’s tower and into this tall room of stone and straw. The warmth of it in her hands steadied her a bit.

“Everyone else in the party was worried, but then it started making copies of you,” the copy went on, staring up at the tentacled thing. “And all of the copies helped fight against the Dark Lord, and we won, and peace was restored across the land, but then nobody could figure out how to kill the damn thing or just to make it stop. Dozens of copies of us in a day, hundreds in a week, and then someone decided that the only thing we could do is just bring the thing here, seal it off and hope it starved to death.”

She sipped her tea. “Anyways, that was two-hundred years ago and it’s slowed down a bit. It can only make a new copy of us every few weeks now.”

The knight looked down into her tea. The copy had also draped a blanket over her shoulders.

“I have so many questions,” she said.

“I figured.”

“How can it be two-hundred years? I can still remember breaking into the tower. That feels like it was just minutes ago.”

“It was, basically. Your brain is a perfect copy of the original you’s brain at the exact moment she was eaten.”

“But the quest is just — done?”

“Yep. You missed some of the things that needed tying up afterward. There was a war, and a dragon, and some business about a ring.” She waved a hand. “It was before my time. Things are pretty settled now.”

“My parents?”

“Passed away about a hundred-and-fifty years ago. I’ve been told that they were very proud.”

The knight nodded. “Um. I don’t know if you know — we had an elf in our party—”

“I’m aware.”

“I — right. Obviously. Um. It’s just, after everything was done, I was going to ask her—”

“One of us did. She said yes. She outlived her. A couple of us have tried to reach out since then, but she wants to be left alone for a while.”

The knight considered this. “Uh — right,” she said eventually. Her fingers tightened around the tea cup. “Um. What do I do now?”

Her older copy shrugged. She had let her hair grow out again, the knight noticed. There were a few strands of grey against the black. “That’s up to you, I’m afraid,” she said. “A lot of us are finding work as soldiers and sellswords. We’ve done it for so long that most armies know we’re reliable and don’t tend to turn one of us away. Most of us are just sort of spreading out, wandering the world. Some of us keep in touch.”

The knight frowned. “What do you do?”

Her copy paused, tea cup half raised to her lips. “Sorry?”

“You said it only makes a new copy every few weeks now. So you just stay here and wait for a new one to show up?”

She lowered the cup. “Well,” she said. “I guess I just — I know what it can be like, waking up here in the dark, and it — it can be horrible trying to figure all of this out on your own.

“So I thought that what I’d do is just stay here with a pot of tea, and whenever I see myself again, I tell her that — that she’s not alone.”

“We aren’t?”

“Of course not. We’re all in this together, you know.”

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

The distinctive pinhole eyes, leathery hood, and numerous tentacles of modern nautiluses were traditionally thought to represent the "primitive" ancestral state of early shelled cephalopods – but genetic studies have found that that nautiluses actually secondarily lost the genes for building lensed eyes, and their embryological development shows the initial formation of ten arm buds (similar to those of coeloids) with their hood appearing to be created via fusing some of the many tentacles that form later.

There's a Cretaceous nautilidan fossil that preserves soft tissue impressions of what appear to be pinhole eyes and possibly a remnant of a hood, so we know these modern-style nautilus features were well-established by the late Mesozoic. But for much more ancient Paleozoic members of the lineage… we can potentially get more speculative.

So, here's an example reconstructed with un-nautilus-like soft parts.

Solenochilus springeri was a nautilidan that lived during the Late Carboniferous, around 320 million years ago, in shallow tropical marine waters covering what is now Arkansas, USA.

Up to about 20cm in diameter, (~8"), its shell featured long sideways spines which may have served as a defense against predators – or possibly as a display feature since they only developed upon reaching maturity.

———

NixIllustration.com | Tumblr | Patreon

References:

Anthony, Franz. "500 million years of cephalopod fossils" Earth Archives, 19 Feb. 2018, https://eartharchives.org/articles/500-million-years-of-cephalopod-fossils/index.html

Klug, Christian, et al. "Preservation of nautilid soft parts inside and outside the conch interpreted as central nervous system, eyes, and renal concrements from the Lebanese Cenomanian." Swiss Journal of Palaeontology 140 (2021): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13358-021-00229-9

Korn, Dieter, and Christian Klug. "Early Carboniferous coiled nautiloids from the Anti-Atlas (Morocco)." European Journal of Taxonomy 885 (2023): 156-194. https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2023.885.2199

Kröger, Björn, Jakob Vinther, and Dirk Fuchs. "Cephalopod origin and evolution: a congruent picture emerging from fossils, development and molecules: extant cephalopods are younger than previously realised and were under major selection to become agile, shell‐less predators." BioEssays 33.8 (2011): 602-613. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201100001

Mikesh, David L., and Brian F. Glenister. "Solenochilus Springeri (White & St. John, 1868) from the Pennsylvanian of Southern Iowa." Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science. Vol. 73. No. 1. 1966. https://scholarworks.uni.edu/pias/vol73/iss1/39/

Shchedukhin, A. Yu. "New Species of the Genus Acanthonautilus (Solenochilidae, Nautilida) from the Early Permian Shakhtau Reef (Cis-Urals)." Paleontological Journal 58.5 (2024): 506-515. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384922837_New_Species_of_the_Genus_Acanthonautilus_Solenochilidae_Nautilida_from_the_Early_Permian_Shakhtau_Reef_Cis-Urals

Wikipedia contributors. “Nautilida” Wikipedia, 26 Nov. 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilida

Wikipedia contributors. “Solenochilus” Wikipedia, 28 Apr. 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solenochilus

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

Paul Lewin Acrylic paintings

more at:

paullewinart.com

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

Photo by

Hal Hefner on

behance｜

Putin from the CONSUME series

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

My mom accidentally joined a grieving support group (long story, she's not grieving tho) and she's missing it this week while visiting me and she's VERY concerned that Lorraine, who very kindly offered to bring a baked good like mom usually would, will NOT bring the correct kind of dessert, she says citrus tarts aren't "griefy" enough

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

#throwbackthursday to this very tall skinny piece of the great necromancer himself, Nagash. This was a fun piece to do. I was focusing a lot on atmosphere and lighting.

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

D[O]OMWHEEL

I posted this guy a while back but I cleaned him up a little and took some better pictures!

What an insane [M]odel. I'm finally almost done with skaventide! Just a few more clanrats 😭

Probably back to my [C]haos marines once I'm done with these guys!

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

really enjoying all the videos Muslims have been posting of their cats looking like this

when the humans are up at 4 am for suhoor

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

for some reason when i listen to american idiot i picture the lucky star dance, so i bring you faggot america friday

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

"Funny you should say that, Mr. Frog, but those coffee grounds we found at the murder... Well, they were Wilkins Coffee. Now see, the thing that bothers me, is that the victim... Well, he didn't drink Wilkins."

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

"There's no way in hell there was a supervillain who called themselves-"

"No, no, not officially - we came up with the name when we were assigned to find them, and we were kind of taking the piss, but it's still a good name. It was before your time - they had the power to-"

"I don't want to know what their power was."

"No, listen - their power was that they could summon a pie and throw it at someone."

"Oh. Oh, well, okay - that's the greatest supervillain you've ever fought? Doesn't sound like much."

"But that was the thing. They could throw a pie at someone and it would never miss. So long as they could see their target they'd hit them. We eventually found out they could throw a pie at someone who was on live broadcast, miles away."

"Jesus. Okay, I think I see the issue. But it was still, like. Pies, right?"

"Oh, for sure, it was never poison pies, and they could only summon a pie every 15 seconds so they couldn't drown someone in meringue. But - do you remember Murgatroyd Bentley?"

"Sort of, he was president when I was a little kid - something, something superhuman rights, and he was the guy who nuked Saskatchewan, right?"

"That's the guy. We found out about this guy after the Humboldt Crisis, because after that, whenever there was a live broadcast with the president - the state of the union, addressing congress, the Christmas tree lighting - a pie would splatter across his face every fifteen seconds."

"…Is that it?"

"Hon, it was everything. You haven't lived until you've seen the president try to talk about dignity while being smacked in the face with a banana cream. By the end of term, he refused to show his face in public, and he resigned in quiet disgrace. There were a few other pieings for a few years, but nowhere near the amount that took place when Bentley was president, and eventually they stopped. We never found out who or even where this person was.

"And that - more than anything - makes them the greatest supervillain I've ever had to deal with. Because they didn't do much, but they did it loudly, they did it consistently, and we never caught them."

"...How hard were you trying to catch them?"

"Not very."

"...And you decided to call them Dr. Creampie?"

"We were young. The president had just bombed Saskatchewan. It was a weird time. Honestly we took what we could get for laughs."

[nicholas-the-paleomancer]

My nation has made me a traitor. This is fact.

Traitor nation.