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"Do you ever dream of land?" The whale asks the tuna.

"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"

"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."

"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."

"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.

"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."

"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."

"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.

"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.

"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."

"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."

"You forget," says the salmon, "That the oceans were once their home."

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forever grateful i was simply too lazy to let the makeup industrial complex get its hooks in me. I was just like im not doing all of that. in fact. im doing none of that

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Deeply appreciate mom with the Dark Souls boss health bar.

Mom says stfu or we’re not going to Dairy Queen

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Anthem, Leonard Cohen

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he's like a patron saint to me

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And here we find a rare instance of a Humans Are Space Orcs post from Tiktok that isn't an AI voice reading a reddit post over a minecraft video.

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I've been playing Stellaris for 8 years and this is absolutely the wildest fucking galaxy I've ever seen

I'll try to explain this so people who don't know the game will understand it.

my empire, the Fen, spawned in a totally isolated part of the galaxy, sandwiched between, on one side, an ancient empire with technology centuries ahead of mine and no interest in letting me through their borders, and on the other, a "devouring swarm" species that kept trying to eat me. so I basically hunkered down behind a whole bunch of defense platforms and didn't meet anyone else until halfway through the game.

that situation lured me into a false sense of calm.

about an hour into the game, another ancient empire from the other side of the galaxy "awakened", slaughtered the devouring swarm in less than five minutes, and started closing in on my borders right around the time a violent warlord popped into the middle of my territory through a wormhole.

shortly after this I accidentally imploded my home planet into a black hole.

then, because apparently I had accidentally set the "crisis" option to "ALL", the galaxy was attacked by:

ghost invaders from the dimension where telepathy happens

a rogue AI that made half the robots in the galaxy turn evil

a "scourge" from outside the galaxy intent on consuming everything, including my ships

another rogue AI that wants to erase all consciousness from the universe

in response to this I leaned hard on my bioengineering technology and created a sort of space Godzilla the size of a planet. the entire galactic community then decided that makes me the real problem, and every single civilisation declared war on me.

I evolved my space Godzilla until it got big enough to eat planets, at which point a sort of space Cthulhu emerged and started rampaging through the galaxy trying to challenge it for dominance.

so now, I'm just running around eating planet after planet trying to make my space Godzilla strong enough to fight space Cthulhu, basically doing ranked competitive genocide with the other remaining crisis factions. the galactic population has dropped by like 70%. a dozen empires have fallen. my economy is crashing because apparently this situation is bad for trade and general citizen morale. somewhere there's a planet that keeps sending me notifications because the indigenous species is about to achieve FTL travel and I'm just like. oh buddy. pal. you do not want to be out here.

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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.”

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TUMBLR IS SO BORING WITH ALL YOU NERDS AT DASHCON

♥

((you all better come back with some amazing tales))

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Oh, how terrible. To whom should I send marshmallows?

And the best reply:

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*Thunderbolts fighting a random enemy*

Enemy: *takes off Bucky’s arm again*

Thunderbolts:….

Yelena: that is so uncool

Ava: I swear to god the next person to take off that fucking arm is gonna-

Enemy: ??

John: yeah how would you like it if I just took off your leg in return?

Alexei: in what world is it okay for us to take off each other’s limbs?

Ava: apologise.

Enemy: what….

Alexei: fight will not resume without an apology for the disrespect

Enemy: *awkwardly handing the arm over* sorry….

Bucky: ….yeah no it’s cool

*Fight resumes*