#her and pico are the only ones of my children that have a human form

[hellishgayliath]

Vera's human form with a cloaking broach gifted to her from Big Mama I'd imagine (but like most things after the breakup she also stores it away, but doesn't get rid of it at the chance she might use it again). And also my first good drawing of big mom she's so pretty but evil ( ˘ ³˘)❤

[tinycrowned]

The Science Behind a Psychic Scream; via my brain knowledge and some crash course videos compiled into a document that hopefully makes sense

Psychic Scream

Hypothesis: If the Psychic Scream can force a fight or flight response for a short, controlled amount of time, then the way in which it triggers the chemical response can be classified as a physical effect on both the caster and the victim as well as the environment around them. 

It’s Physical:

Fun Fact: The name of the spell, ‘Psychic Scream’, can be called an oxymoron because of the two words’ official definitions. Psychic, relating to something not physical [adjective;“relating to or denoting faculties or phenomena that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, especially involving telepathy or clairvoyance.|relating to the soul or mind.|noun;a person considered or claiming to have psychic powers; a medium.”] and Scream, something physical [verb;“give a long, loud, piercing cry or cries expressing excitement, great emotion, or pain.|noun;a long, loud, piercing cry expressing extreme emotion or pain.”].

Now, to project and permeate a scream far enough into someone’s mind seems a bit… outlandish and ridiculous, if you ask me. But, I think I can manage to explain it using aspects of physics, vibrations, and frequencies. 

To scream would mean a sound, a real sound that is carried by soundwaves and vibrations- so right off the bat, the word ‘scream’ has to be classified as physical because it’s something you can hear and react to. Reacting and sensing are physical. The initial action is physical- in game, the caster projects a shout, using their magic to trigger a fight or flight response within his enemies as an area of effect. 

And by shout I mean a literal shout. You’re not the dragonborn, calm down. Parthurnax isn’t about to bestow some wisdom of The Voice into your brain- that’s not how it works here.

Now we know that the Psychic Scream has to project a physical sound with a mental side effect because of the way it triggers the fight or flight response so easily. You can imagine a scream in your head, but would it really scare you that much? [bear with me, ‘fight or flight’ comes up a lot here because that’s exactly what we’re trying to tie the physicality into.]

Soundwaves are physical vibrational frequencies that are created by particles moving back and forth in the air so fast it creates a directional wave. For our case and for the regular shape and range for the spell, the Psychic Scream would be a Spherical Wave with intense oscillation (vibration) with its starting point being the caster themselves. From there the waves would fan outward- but there’s one problem.

Soundwaves usually get weaker as they travel outward and even slow when they pass through things- this could be a potential reason the Psychic Scream’s effects only last eight seconds. But at the same time, it has a max range of eight yards. So the scream would have to be super powerful and super loud to output the intended effect- make your enemy flee. 

So how can this sound from, for example, a normal human, be amplified to such a drastic effect? 

Magic. Obviously. 

I won’t get into the science of Azerothian magic, I don’t think I’m equipped enough to handle that right now- but what I can explain is the Doppler Effect and how it works in our favor here. 

The Doppler Effect is the difference between pitches by distance. [This can also be used for light and measuring the distance of stars, but we’re not talking about that right now.] For example; the town crier is yelling about something stupid going on in Stormwind’s cheese industry. The farther she is away from you the quieter the sound will be because the soundwaves aren’t as strong as opposed to her being directly in front of you, yelling in your face while her minty, breathy sound waves bounce off of your physical form and vibrate your eardrums so our brains can actually process the sound and hear what she’s saying at a pitch loud enough to irritate the hell us. 

So how does this tie in with the Psychic Scream? You ask, desperately wanting to be untied from the chair I’ve put you in so I have someone to ramble to about the science of a video game. 

Well, lucky stranger! It has to do with the pitch of the Psychic Scream being loud enough to trigger a neural response in your amygdala, the ‘fear circuit’ of your brain. The amygdala is triggered when a sound that scares you vibrates through your eardrum and your brain processes the sound as BadTM, which then triggers a neurological response.

You see, humans can comfortably hear things from one picowatt [one million millionth of a watt] per square meter to one watt [the SI unit of power, equivalent to one joule per second, corresponding to the power in an electric circuit in which the potential difference is one volt and the current one ampere.] per square meter. To use real life examples, this range of pico-to-watt is the equivalent of a rock concert. What’s very unsafe for humans to be subjected to is one-hundred watts per square meter, which is the sound of being thirty meters away from a jet plane. 

((You know, there’s a reason alarms wake us up. They’re loud enough [standard alarm clock is eighty decibels] to scare our body awake, but not loud enough to hurt us or trigger an active fear response such as… well… running away, like Psychic Screams do.))

So again- we know that Azerothian magic in priests and such can use minor wonders from their DND sets to amplify their voice as well as summon unspeakable horrors to the void, and maybe even pull screams from the Twisting Nether just to screw with you- but that won’t change the fact that the initial scream from the caster is a physical thing that happens in game to begin the process of the chain reaction that is the Psychic Scream spell. 

Let’s break down the physical process- 

We’ll use my priest man Anden.

For one, when you activate the spell Anden will shout, bend backwards a little and point his face upward. Up. The given point for the spherical sound wave to travel will start above his head and move outward to cover the maximum range of eight yards. This ensnares the victims in the sound and causes them to run away. Saying it again- I tell you, triggering the fight or flight response. 

From his hands there will be a little burst of shadow magic, which confirms our potential ‘amplification’ spell to enhance the original, physical shout/scream. 

That’s where we end our physical journey.

TLDR: Soundwaves exist in all noises- especially a scream where it involves physical vibration to even process a sound. And for a scream to affect a person enough to scare them and make them run it would have to be a spell-amplified scream above the normal yelling level to have victims be properly affected by the scream itself. 

Bill Nye Neurological Process Guy

So, now that we have the physics down, we can move onto how the scream actually affects the brain and why it makes the victims run. 

Imagine this- Anden has just released the Psychic Scream and you can somehow see the soundwaves heading right for you. The sound travels into your ears and vibrates super hard, because it is super loud, right against your eardrum- and you’re suddenly struck with heart-palpitating dread as well as the intense feeling to RUN. So you do that. But why? How can fight or flight be triggered by a scream, even if it is amplified? 

I’m a battle-hardened warrior, Tiny, you say very annoyed at me, screams don’t bother me. 

Well friend, this isn’t a normal scream. As evident from the spell, using the void alongside the scream can somehow push a neurological response onto you, forcing you to run away for the amount of time it takes for the full soundwave to pass through you. Eight yards, eight seconds. Once you’re out of the range, the spell should wear off even if the caster isn’t wailing anymore. 

Have I tacked on that Psychic Scream is also a defensive spell? Why are you attacking a priest anyways? Stress can kill, you know! 

So, anyways, back to the forced response. We all know what screams sound like- in movies and such, in real life. Our brain helps us distinguish between the screams of pure, agonizing horror or pain- or the shrieks and screams of playing children. A sudden noise, like a scream, is so surprising to hear and causes more shock than paralyzing fear because of the sudden increase in volume. A scream can go from soft to loud 150 times per second. Wild, innit? 

But if you hear this really loud scream coming at you and it suddenly triggers an immense amount of bad stress to be released from your amygdala- what I mentioned earlier- and not eustress, the type of stress that makes your nervous system go haywire and cut off blood from certain parts of your body to provide blood to others to get you out of some sort of life threatening situation even if it’s not life threatening. 

… stress can kill, kids.

[The Super Sciency Version That I Managed to Pull From Old Textbooks and Notes And Some Crash Course Videos]

To make you move on your own like this your brain has to send action potentials[the change in electrical potential associated with the passage of an impulse along the membrane of a muscle cell or nerve cell.] down your spinal cord and into the preganglionic neuronal axons. [at its most basic form, preganglionic fibers are fibers from your central nervous system.] The signals firing go all the way to their ganglia, which is a structure containing nerve cells linked by synapses. Once they reach their destination they release neurotransmitters called acetylcholine or ACh. Acetylcholine is a standard neurotransmitter used throughout your entire sympathetic nervous system. If enough ACh manages to send enough signals to stimulate action potentials in several neurons on the postganglionic fibers, the other end of the preganglionic fibers. 

The postganglionic neurons then carry the action potentials down to the appropriate muscles, in our case- your hip and leg muscles. The postganglionic releases another neurotransmitter called norepinephrine, which is always the one transmitter released from postganglionic fibers in your sympathetic nervous system. Norepinephrine is always the one to activate the certain muscles you need to move and open up blood vessels to- again, hip and leg muscles. 

Norepinephrine is the neurotransmitter that can open up blood flow for muscles like your hollow organs(stomach,bladder,liver) and limbs and the Norepinephrine hormone can halt the blood flow to smooth muscles like your hollow organs.

I know, this is a lot of science jargon. Trust me, I never used to understand it either. 

So basically, the priest throwing this Psychic Scream at you is forcing your Central and Sympathetic Nervous System to react to a threat that it created to scare your body enough to turn around and run.

The one good thing about running away is that you’ll be out of the Psychic Scream’s range, which means even if they keep screaming and you’re like, ten yards away from them, it’ll be loud- probably a bit of a concussive blast depending on the power of the amplification spell- but you won’t be forced to run. 

Now For The Big Question

Can a Psychic Scream affect the environment around you? 

Or more specifically, (the one I’m trying to answer here)

Can a Psychic Scream shatter glass? 

Let’s go back to the physics of a soundwave- and then talk about resonance frequencies including glass. 

Pitches can change depending on distance. Vibrations can get faster the closer you are to something. So hypothetically, physically, Yes! You can shatter windows with a Psychic Scream loud enough, powerful enough, and close enough to windows for even the slightest potential. 

If you flick a wine glass, for example, there will be a certain resonance/pitch that humans can actually match, and if you hover your mouth next to the glass and mirror that pitch for a while with your voice, the glass will break! 

The thing about Psychic Scream being able to break windows is one) it’s a spherical sound wave which travels outward- but needed to do so will include a concussive blast that fractures and vibrates against the glass, applying more and more pressure as soundwaves do. But to do this, the caster would need to emit a blast and pitch that’s ultrasonic, which humans can't hear, and hold that pitch and force until the window breaks. 

So that’s pretty much the only downside. You’ll have to be fighting some giant monster to produce a Scream that is damaging. You can’t really do it normally. Which brings me to the final question!

Can There Be A Physical Limitation? 

For our priest’s poor vocal cords, using an amplification to the scream could cause damage if used for more than a few seconds. Psychic Scream is a scream that can force a fight or flight response- and that in itself needs to be incredibly loud. Screaming or yelling in general isn’t good for your vocal cords, so we can assume that this poor priest’s voice is going to be hoarse no matter how long he uses it. 

Whilst using Psychic Scream, holding the noise for an extended amount of time could drain up your oxygen, and light-headedness to fainting is possible. Ten seconds max, people! Breathing is important!

Well… we don’t need to talk about the physical limitations of using the void for too long, I think that’s pretty evident. 

I don’t really like people whispering in my ears for a few hours just ‘cause I wanted to scream at someone for a few minutes. 

[theky2aqw-blog]

Goblin Slayer ep 1 review and its review from Anime Feminazis

Yay I am back from the dead for some laughs and giggles before I will send some scary Pilipino, Japanese, Melayu, Indo, and ancient Greco-Roman Stories that will either put you on the edge or make you laugh to death.

But for now let us go and either debunk or give a two cents from our famous misandrists from Anime Feminist - Yay my internal sarcasm will not let me laugh.

Because you know every rape depiction in fiction is to be banned even though there is parental guidance for shit like these

and we have a cute depiction of Goblin Slayer killing goblins.

Well before we start --

At the start of the episode we get to see what a fantasy anime can show, well at the very first start would be the shittiest hero introduction I can imagine. Maybe, just maybe if they were not simple dipshits who do not underestimate their opponents I will not probably tackle the bland first quarter of episode 1. Well they went off for an adventure to slay goblins, but the sad news is that their overconfidence caused them to be defeated and the party almost being wiped out by goblins - A common mistake by beginners that can kill you in the first move.

Well I can fill you in the two quarters of the episode, Goblins raped the Fighter girl, killed the dumbass fuckboy who thinks a sword longer than a spatha or as long as a Tai Chi can work well in cramped spaces(mind you they are beginners with a confidence level that can annoy you to the bone) in a very brutal fashion and manner, their mage was stabbed in the gut by a poisoned blade in a fast swing of events starting with mage, then fuckboy, and then fighter who got raped.

In these seemingly dark turn of events, our beloved Priestess tries to carry Female Mage and try to escape but was shot in the shoulder by a poisoned goblin arrow. All hope was lost until

Our Hero, Goblin Slayer came to save the day. He proceeded on granting Female Mage’s wish to die and giving Priestess the Antidote despite her protests. She then assisted him in slaying more goblins to save her last surviving friend. Of course when the killing of baby goblins was shown, she protested on thinking there are some good goblins, but Goblin Slayer just said:

Well soon, she became his one and only party member and the series will start from here.

Well of course you guys wanted me to go on Anime Feminists article? Ok I will

Ok now I have pretty much laughed on any article that contains their own buzz words and their supporters being too morally superior in the argument but it is better for me to dissect and if there are dubious claims I will debunk them Shall we(also I will not put the entire words of the article word by word just snippets of it as I point out the arguments the article will make.):

1.”Y’all, I’ve got something that’s gonna blow. Your. Mind. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.Okay so it’s like. An MMO—Okay that’s not the part I meant.So it’s like an MMO, right, but it’s like. What if when you got overwhelmed in a raid it was, like, REAL LIFE, and there was BLOOD—” - Yeah your Sarcasm is never straight to the point. No wonder why I added this snippet for fun, its pretty obvious its not an mmo in its genre just pointing that out.

2.  “ My point is that GOBLIN SLAYER, putting aside its repugnant content, is a brainless copycat loudly braying about its cleverness despite being incapable of a single original thought. It would be pathetic if it weren’t so nasty, like a parasitic worm only worth grinding under your heel. “

 - umm its a no on the copycat shit thing. - Also Brainless???? I cannot stop trying to laugh had it not been for my tooth extraction preventing me from doing so. - Single Original thought? Umm almost every fantasy genre in anime/manga/light novels have ever shown this level of savagery and brutality in its first episode, a few did like GATE:JSDF, and sorry to say this Shit, but it is Sword - -- oh wait my friend said it was just like Berserk - pathetic? well its opinionated grounds but I have seen more hentai far pathetic than this outside from

Please not this bullshit of a yaoi hentai....known as Boku no Pico.

ok....off track already...

4. “ It is laughably obvious that GOBLIN SLAYER longs to be Berserk, with its lone, implacable monster slayer and excessive focus on rape as an increasingly meaningless vehicle for cheap shock horror. Except that Berserk had a striking visual style, at least attempted to use assault in a meaningful way early on, and was a pioneer in its genre. Meanwhile, Goblin Slayer is limping in decades late with broken pacing and visuals so generic I look forward to people misattributing the GIFs of it on hentai blogs three seasons from now. ”

- umm article its not focusing on *Hears Boku no Pico Music* ahh fuck this I will just continue debunking....*internal death* Its not trying to be berserk in any shape or form...please stop this boku no pico music..... Also your sentences just implies it is going full Boku no Pico and Aki Sora on this. I am just cringing while listening to Boku no Pico since the pacing is pretty generic yes but not broken and you are just thinking about boku no pico

before I continue I just talked about Boku no Pico many times.....please I am dying internally.

5. “  It can’t even hit the basic watermark of the famous tentacle rape porno Legend of the Overfiend, which in addition to being very boring had genuinely impressive, fleshy-looking monster designs that turned the stomach to look at. Goblin Slayer has generic fantasy orcs and a boner for its own nonexistent cleverness. “ - I digress on the non....ok I will play with you because the song of Pico is killing me that I will just play along with your dubious claims. Well since its overly subjective. I will let you off for this dubious claims.

6.  “  The show’s treatment of women is upsetting, but not in any new or noteworthy ways. If I tell you that this Edgy Edgelord Show starts out with three untrained female characters getting in over their heads, I bet you can fill in the rest (you can even have “the one male adventurer dies offscreen while the women are tortured at length in full view of the camera” for free!). “

 - It just shows what goblins should be projected, a band of savages that is a threat to humanity. Also women in the older days are a profitable treasure that must be used to its fullest extent. I cannot say more since you are going to cherry pick me.

7. “  I bet you didn’t guess the deliberate close-up of our unnamed healer peeing her pants in terror, because this is nothing if not a fetish porn without the courage of its convictions, but two out of three ain’t bad. “ - What else do you want them to depict, them comforting her?! I cannot stop laughing while the cringy yaoi shit is playing in my ears, Won’t you pee in fear when your life is at its greatest edge writer? especially in her shoes that she cannot do anything...ok this is getting long...I need to contain myself from sarcasm and laughing.

8. “  Oh, and I’ll also throw in the end-episode reassurance that the kidnapped women are all broken for life with no hope of recovery, because these kinds of male-empowerment fantasies view women as a collection of holes dragging a punchline behind them. Because it can’t even bother with being a lazy “rape is the only trauma we can think of to have women grow strong from” story. “ 

- I cannot comprehend this feminazi anymore, I can easily debunk this by saying that once a woman who broken of rape and has PTSD because of her brutal experience from the beasts IDK like giants or what. What do you think, can you easily overcome such trauma? Oh wait you don’t because you are virtue signalling now.

- Also the last phrase is not lazy, its a simple pretext of how actual trauma and fear works. I cannot say more since I do not want to drag this on with Morals vs Logic arguments.

9.  “  And I’m just gosh-darned invested in the plucky and still-unnamed healer’s decision to go on more adventures with him so that the show can scar her in new and ever more masturbatory ways. “

- She called Priestess you dimwit. I cannot spoil the manga or anime for you kids, but soon she is the very person Goblin Slayer - Sama would care and protect 24/7 in his adventures killing goblins.(So No more Arguments I want to tackle, yay)

aaaaannnnd that is how “I can talk to you on this shitstorm

Well I wanted to add more but since the shit music of boku no pico has finally stopped I can now take more than 2 cents about this than before. Goblin Slayer is the anime where I can say its never gonna be shown to children obviously well they would still watch it because its an anime. I cannot talk in a straight face because my laughter on how they think this is a copycat and an edgelord anime/manga/light novel is legit stupid and deserves another level of insults from these real world goblins. 

Time to see you next time

[life-observed]

For Third Culture Kids, Travel Is Home

So much of how we see the world as adults is developed when we’re children—what we eat dictates what we like to eat as adults, what we hear molds into the languages we speak, the community in which we grow takes on a new name with new meaning: home. As we get older, travel can serve as a break from the comforts of home; experiences that are often so formative they become ingrained in our memory for decades to come. What happens, then, when you’re raised in a shifting environment in which travel is home? When “home,” as we know it, is but one of many, always temporary, stops on a rootless journey around the world?

Born in the U.S. to an Indian father and a Colombian mother, by the age of seven, I had already moved three times: from New Jersey to Hong Kong to Australia and onwards to India, where I’d spend five years before moving to Indonesia for high school. At seven, transience was normal, especially at an age when my thoughts didn’t go much further than the recess cricket game and I lacked much desire to look beyond the gates of my international school. I didn’t know there was a term for kids like me, members of a global ever-wandering tribe, until a speaker on the lucrative international school circuit stopped in Delhi to tell a theater full of children from all over the world who we were—and that we weren’t alone.

Former president Barack Obama is arguably the world’s most famous 'third culture kid.'

We were—are—“third culture kids,” a sociological term that I used as a self-prescribed label for the years that followed, as I navigated adolescence, when I returned to the U.S. for college, and beyond. But it wasn’t until recently, reconnecting with old friends from far-off corners at weddings after fifteen years of virtually no communication and settling into a career intricately linked to travel, that I’ve started wondering how that upbringing—where travel and change were the only constant—manifests itself on a day-to-day basis as an adult.

Coined in the 1950s by sociologist-anthropologist Dr. Ruth Hill Useem as a way to describe American children raised overseas, “third culture kids,” or TCKs, are, as she defined it, “the children who accompany their parents into another society.” (Useem developed the term after she lived in India with her husband and three children.) Specifically, Useem observed a formation of a “third culture”—apart from that of their parents and where they were living—between children who faced the same challenges of reconciling competing senses of community. It’s, for example, an American boy born to a Kenyan father and Kansan mother, who spent his formative years in Indonesia and Hawaii. Sound familiar? Former president Barack Obama is arguably the world’s most famous TCK.

The majority of family vacations for the author were spent in unfamiliar locations, like the Philippines, instead of trips "home."

Once limited to a tiny sliver of the global population—the children of missionaries, diplomats, and members of the military (the so-called “army brats”)—the subsection has expanded as global commerce has become the norm, to include kids brought up in countries that aren’t their own by multinational businesspeople, foreign correspondents, international school teachers, and more.Ruth Van Reken, co-author of Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, sees the organic development of a TCK subculture as part of an innate desire to build likeminded community. “Every human being has a need to belong. We have to have some place that we know and are known,” she tells me in a conversation bridging the gap between interview and therapy session. Relating to others who have lived an uprooted and mobile life helps put things in perspective: It’s a crucial reminder that others have had the same privilege, but that they too face many of the same challenges.

There is an immediate connection that’s made at bars, parties, coffee shops, and workspaces across the world when I meet someone who also lived between worlds: Even if the list of countries is different, the 'Where are you from?' anxiety is the same.

As Van Reken, who is a TCK herself, sees it, foremost among those challenges is the issue of “unresolved grief.” As a TCK grows up, moving from school to school, they tend to forge relationships as quickly as they are accustomed to losing them: “You dive in, but you’re ready to dive out,” Van Reken says. Additionally, thrown out of one environment into a markedly different one, there never really is time to fully say goodbye to a world you’ve only just come to know. “When a child is leaving a place they really love and they’re not given the time to process it, it can feel like your whole world died.”

Like so many TCKs, I bookmark my life by country. My first vivid memory is from pre-handover Hong Kong—greasy paper bags filled with freshly baked biscuit rolls on board the Star Ferry that crosses Victoria Harbour. I got into my first fight in Australia, had my first kiss in India, smoked a cigarette for the first time in Indonesia. When someone mentions a year to me, I first bring it back to where I was and use that as a temporary anchor for my thoughts, much as each city served as a transient mooring during my upbringing.

The place, as in-flux and isolated within expat third-culture enclaves as I may have been, is something I cling to, because it’s the way I know how to compartmentalize a life—and I know I’m not alone in that. The number of TCKs crisscrossing the globe at any one time is hard to nail down, precisely because it relies so much on self-identification. But in a TED Talk titled “Where Is Home?”, author Pico Iyer puts the population of people “living in countries not their own”—a group that includes, but not exclusively, many TCKs—at 220 million, about ten million more than that of Brazil. It's also a number that, as borders mean less and cultural barriers dissolve, will grow.

While I might not be able to debate where to find the best nasi goreng gila in South Jakarta with many people in New York City, there is an immediate connection that’s made at bars, parties, coffee shops, and workspaces across the world when I meet someone who also lived between worlds: Even if the list of countries is different, the “Where are you from?” anxiety is the same.

In light of that, I’ve also come to realize that perhaps even more important than place, is the people who occupied it in the years it resembled anything close to home. On a trip to Indonesia, years after graduating from an international school there, it quickly became clear that it wasn’t the same place I had known, now that all those who had made up my world—the Palestinian, Australian, Canadian, Trinidadian, and American that were part of my high school clique—were gone. Like so many TCKs, they were back on the move. Even though the streets were the same, and an auto-rickshaw driver who had once shuttled me through the alleys of South Jakarta recognized me and waved, the community I had created was no more. At our favorite mall’s movie theater, it was a different crop of TCKs lining up to buy tickets. It was a reminder that Indonesia, like other countries I passed through during my formative years, isn’t home.

For TCKs, like the author, travel can be the only constant in a perpetually shifting environment.

Dr. ClaireMarie Clark, a licensed clinical psychologist based in Washington state, sees the fact that she, too, is a TCK—a dual Scottish-American citizen, who grew up in, among other places, France, Thailand, Venezuela, and Malaysia—allows her to better empathize with her clients who are TCKs.

Beyond identity, Dr. Clark sees many of the same challenges faced by TCKs that Van Reken does, including a "rootlessness and restlessness" that makes staying still and building the concept of home more difficult.

“We’re used to moving every few years—it’s almost like our internal clocks get used to that,” Dr. Clark says. “Every few years I’ll have clients come in and tell me they’re feeling stuck, like the walls are closing in.”

In this way, TCKs are mobile to the point that space stretches differently. While many people grow up understanding that their town adjoins another, confined within a state or province of their country, for us, New York abuts London and Amsterdam; Cape Town and Addis Ababa can feel just across the river from each other. I run into old classmates—often in subway systems or on crowded streets in the world’s most global cities—so often, that I’ve had to stop believing in the distances in between.

Instead of “going home,” we take trips—incessantly. On those trips, we’re quick to observe and adapt to local cultures, used to blending in (as much as is possible) and respecting long-held cultural mores that we may never have known ourselves. But we don’t stay long enough to ever belong: In India, I’m immediately betrayed as not-fully-Indian by my inability to communicate in anything but English while there; in Colombia, it’s my Spanish class accent. Here in the U.S., it’s my lack of fluency with pop culture references, raised as I was on different morning cartoons and songs on rotation in my Walkman.

In many respects, the TCK is a test-case of a more connected, less nationally-focused world. As Van Reken says, even if there are more of us now than there were when Van Reken was taken to Nigeria as a child decades ago, we’re still “a petri dish experience for what is becoming very normal—a kind of prototype of globalization.” As such, Van Reken continues to find even more to understand in those who can’t place the concept of home in an easy-to-stow-away box. She’s started also looking into the unique challenges of a group she calls cross-cultural kids (CCKs) that includes others defined by uprootedness, mobility, and a lack of clarity when it comes to identity, such as immigrants and those of mixed heritage.

In all those cases, including my own, travel serves as an affirmation of sorts. It’s an acknowledgement that a TCK's roots, flimsy and widespread as they may be, cover large distances and bridge divergent cultures.

But when I look back and try and pinpoint what inspires me to travel somewhere new, something else emerges even more clearly. When home can’t be singled out on a map, I travel because the experience, no matter where I'm headed—the unfamiliar food, the sound of music never heard, and yes, even the jet-lag—feels like a memory of things past.

[laraehrlich-blog]

Original content owned & copyrighted by Green Global Travel.

I was a voracious reader when I was growing up, typically reading two books a week on average.

My lower-middle class family didn’t have the money to do much in the way of traveling, outside of the occasional camping trip in North Georgia. Both my parents worked, and my dad worked multiple jobs to support his family of five.

The furthest we ever traveled was a trip to visit my godparents in Treasure Island and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

It was through Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, John Muir’s Our National Parks, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s  that I developed a passion for the environment. Without them, who knows if I would’ve become the advocate for Jon Krakauer, Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux greatly influenced the way I did it.

But the first classic quote I remember having a significant impact on me came in the form of a Robert Frost poem: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.” This idea influenced many of my choices, setting me on the path to becoming a full-time READ MORE: The Best Travel Books to Inspire A Love of Adventure

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1. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” –Marcel Proust

2. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” –Pat Conroy

3. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” –Freya Stark

4. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” –Mark Twain

5. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights. It is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” –Miriam Beard

6.  “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” –Paul Theroux

7. “One of the gladdest moments of human life, me thinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.” –Sir Richard Burton

8.  “I travel around the world in a way that tries to open my mind and give me empathy and inspire me to come home and make this world a better place.” –READ MORE: Why Responsible Travel Matters (& Greenwashing Sucks)

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11.  “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” –Andre Gide

12.  “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” –Jawaharial Nehru

13. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” –H. Jackson Brown Jr.

14.  “To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give, To roam the roads of lands remote, To travel is to live.” –Hans Christian Andersen

15.  “In the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn

16.  “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.” –Paulo Coelho

17.  “Adventure isn’t hanging on a rope off the side of a READ MORE: Water Wonders (A Father-Daughter Story of Adventure)

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21.  “Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” –Anonymous

22.  “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” –Helen Keller

23.  “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” –Saint Augustine

24.  “Travel brings power and love back into your life.” –Rumi

25.  “Only one who wanders finds new paths.” –Norwegian Proverb

26.  “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” –Lao Tzu

27.  “Make voyages! Attempt them… there’s nothing else.” –Tennesee Williams

28.  “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” –Anais Nin

29.  “Your feet will take you where your heart is.” –Irish proverb

30.  “Until you step into the unknown, you don’t know what you’re made of.” –Roy T. Bennett

READ MORE: NatGeo’s Don George on Travel Writing & Blogging

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31.  “To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a

36. “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children” –Chief Seattle

37. “We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.” –John Hope Franklin

38. “Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings.” –Hodding Carter

39. “When you travel with children you are giving something that can never be taken away… experience, exposure, and a way of life.” –Pamela T. Chandler

40. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” –Tim Cahill

READ MORE: 7 Important Life Lessons I Learned in the Galapagos Islands

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41.  “The further I go, the closer to me I get.” –Roman Payne, The Wanderess

43 “I am convinced that the jealous, the angry, the bitter and the egotistical are the first to race to the top of mountains. A confident person enjoys the journey, the people they meet along the way and sees life not as a competition. They reach the summit last because they know God isn’t at the top waiting for them. He is down below helping his followers to understand that the view is glorious where ever you stand.” –Shannon L. Alder

44.  “A person susceptible to ‘wanderlust’ is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” — Pico Iyer

45. “How will I know who I can become if I don’t give myself the chance to try new things, to push myself beyond my normal boundaries? Who might I be if I am away from the things that I currently use to define myself?” ― Eileen Cook, With Malice

46.  “Two roads diverged in a wood and I– I took the one less traveled by… And that has made all the difference.” –Robert Frost

47. “To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.” – Charles Horton Cooley

48.  “Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.” – Eudora Welty

49.  “Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.” — The Dhammapada

50.  “All I wanted was to live a life where I could be me, and be okay with that. I had no need for material possessions, money, or even close friends with me on my journey. I never understood people very well anyway, and they never seemed to understand me very well either. All I wanted was my Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: In Search For The Great Perhaps

READ MORE: 45 Pieces of Advice I’d Include in a Letter to My Younger Self

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51. “As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was about to happen.”—A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

52.  “Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

53.  “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck

54.  “And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” — Pico Iyer

55.  “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” — Shirley MacLaine

56.  “Actually, the best gift you could have given her was a lifetime of adventures.”– Lewis Carroll

57.  “Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, “I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.” — Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

58. “What we find in a soulmate is not something wild to tame, but something wild to run with.” — Robert Brault

59.  “Love is the food of life, travel is dessert.” – Anonymous

60.  “To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” — Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

READ MORE: Bret & Mary, A Story About Love (& How GGT Was Born)

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61.  “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” -Alan Keightley

62.  “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a Ride!'” — Hunter S. Thompson (The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967)

63. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.” – James Michener

64.  “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do — especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you.  No yesterdays on the road.” -William Least Heat Moon

65.  “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all the familiar comforts of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things– air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky– all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

66.  “READ MORE: The Country of Jordan, the Middle East & Our Culture of Fear

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71.  “It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.” -Henry David Thoreau

72.  “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

73.  “Not all those who wander are lost.” –J.R.R. Tolkien

74.  “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” –Neale Donald Walsch

75.  “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footsteps on the moon.” – Paul Brandt

76.  “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw

77.  “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the Universe.” –Anatole France

78.  “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” –St. Augustine

79.  “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” —H. Jackson Brown, Jr. in P.S. I Love You

80.  “I find the great thing in this world is not so much about where we stand, as in what direction we are moving… We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, – but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes

READ MORE: The World’s Best Small Ship Cruises

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81.  “Stop creating a life that you need a vacation from. Instead, move to where you want to live, do what you want to do, start what you want to start, and create the life you want today. This isn’t rehearsal, people. This is YOUR life.” –Dale Partridge

82.  “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” –Bill Bryson

83. “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” ―Judith Thurman

84.  “Travel is the antidote to fear. It makes you see the similarities and differences that exist around the world, and it opens your eyes– and mind– to new and different approaches.” –Julia Cosgrove

85.  “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson

86.  “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

87. “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” —Christopher McCandless

88.  “Travel while you are young and able. Don’t worry about the money, just make it work. Experience is far more valuable than money will ever be.” — Anonymous

89. “If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.” –READ MORE: How to Start a Travel Blog (& Build a Successful Business)

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91. “Look deeper into John Muir, The Mountains of California

95.  “When the blood in your veins returns to the sea, and the earth in your bones returns to the ground, perhaps then you will remember that this land does not belong to you– it is YOU who belongs to this land.” –Native American proverb

96.  “Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.” –Cree Indian Proverb

97.   “I went to the

The post The 100 Best Travel to Spark Your Next Adventure appeared first on Green Global Travel.

[tumblunni]

Rune Factory Headcanons: Dolce And Pico

I’m gonna start rambling ideas and stuff because I LOVE THIS GAME! They’ll probably all be super long posts but its slightly less long if I split them up by character, at least. So.. woooo, lets go!!

* I’ve only played through the female protagonist route so far so I dont know everything about Dolce yet, apologies if I get anything wrong. * Does anyone else find it odd that she’s the only one who doesn’t really have any monster traits, out of the guardians? I mean, her monster form was humanoid but it still was a monster. I would have assumed she’d at least keep the blue skintone or something. So my headcanon is that she does still have some monster powers like everyone else, even if her design doesnt show it as much. I think maybe it’d be cool if she was still kinda marionettelike? Like her skin is abnormally cold and she doesnt have a heartbeat. Maybe she keeps her fangs? Gets mad when people mistake her for a vampire! And I dunno, maybe she can still levitate a little. Her and Pico have even more in common now! * or I dunno, maybe she wasn’t an elf before she became a guardian, and her long ears are meant to be her monster trait? * A thought: since its said that Pico ‘scans’ outfits she sees and can wear them even though she’s a ghost, maybe her current outfit is her cosplaying Marionetta? or maybe when Dolce became Marionetta she became a monster form similar to Pico because they’re BFFs? * I know the game doesn’t really focus on it, but I think it must have been especially sad for Pico to remain awake for the entire time Dolce was sleeping as Marionetta, waiting to find an Earthmate who could free her friend. Pico’s such a goofball that she probably wouldnt admit it, but I feel like she’s so over-the-top with her love for Dolce nowadays because she missed her so much. And it could have been an interesting Town Event to deal with, actually! Like, Dolce noticing Pico is acting weird because from her perspective she was just asleep for a moment but for Pico its been so long that its like she cant even remember how she used to act around her best friend. Maybe having to rebuild their relationship a little before Pico starts being her goofy prankster self again, instead of just starting off that way? * Also I like to headcanon that Marionetta’s marionette strings (called Handetta in the monster book) are actually a separate creature. I like the idea I came up with of that being Pico using her ghost powers to try and restrain her monsterified friend, but being dragged around cos she’s not strong enough. * A possible other idea for ‘what if pico got a bigger role and her own series of Town Events’, maybe Pico feeling guilty that some part of her is secretly happy that Dolce is a monster too now, and they’ve been able to stay together for centuries longer than she expected. No matter how much tragedy happened, its still good that she hasnt had to watch her friend die yet, and that she gets to see dolce find a new family. But still someday she WILL die, and maybe Pico is now worried she might make the same mistakes Dolce did when Ventuswill was dying. I think thats the only reason Pico could have possibly had for not being angry at Dolce for running off and becoming a guardian without her, she knows she would have become a guardian to save Dolce if it was her in danger. Well, that and its hard to be angry when you’re seeing someone for the first time after hundreds of years! * Possibly there could have been an event of Pico getting jealous of you getting romantically involved with Dolce? I mean, i know the game likes to be a buttface and have everyone acting incredibly gay yet nobody is allowed to be canonically gay, but am I allowed to just headcanon that Pico is? Well, mostly cos her being all pervy jokes to Dolce would be creepy pseudo-incest if theyre supposed to be ‘like sisters’. I totally headcanon that its a situation where like... childhood friend love, but unrequited. Alas Dolce doesnt feel the same way, and Pico respects that and tries to joke around to make things less awkward. So she’s totally a supportive shipper of you X Dolce after the lil jealousy plotline is resolved, she just wants Dolce to be happy. * This is why I really wish Pico was a marriage option!! Well, that and she’s a ‘really older than she looks’ character that doesnt actually ACT like a child. I always felt uncomfortable on amber and kiel’s romance routes cos they both look and act like theyre too young to date you. if the game had to have a weirdly youthful looking character of ambiguous age, it coulda at least been the funny ghost who acts like a pervy teen! Also i just feel bad that the player steals Dolce from her, even if she doesnt have a crush on Dolce its still stealing Dolce from her since Pico is haunting her and Dolce is the only person who can touch her. They’d be spending a lot less time together if you get married, Pico would have to be floating off in another room reading a book all the time while you’re on dates or doing the do. She doesnt even have the courtesy of being able to go particularly far away and find something else to distract her :P * Alternative solution that would have also been good: if you could have a romance bar for Pico and then be able to have a polyamorous marriage with both her and Dolce! * Alternative alternative solution: if you could choose to romance just Pico instead, and maybe she’s able to transfer over to haunting you instead once you fall in love, which also makes you able to kiss and stuff. ^_^ * Though it would probably be very sad for Dolce cos if she’s been living together with Pico since they were both children it would take a long time to get used to being alone. * Also! Some headcanons potentially for Pico’s aliveness and how they met and stuff! We only hear ingame that Pico was haunting the house Dolce’s family moved into, and they were together ‘since we were babies’. I dunno, I think I’m gonna try and pretend that’s a translation mistake because personally I’d feel it would be hard to imagine they WEREN’T raised as sisters if Pico was haunting the house since that early on. it would be rather more uncomfortable that Pico makes pervy jokes about dating someone who was literally raised as her sister. * Anyway, bunni’s undeveloped possible headcanon for alive-Pico! I was thinking possibly if she’s a ghost and she died at such a young age, she must have come back because she died super tragically, right?? Maybe her family was wiped out by the Sechs empire like Doug’s tribe was? Or maybe she somehow died in some way that gave her reason to hate Dolce’s family, which is why she started haunting their young daughter in particular. Like, her father’s dying breath was cursing this family’s unborn child, and his daughter’s ghost tried to follow that wish. So she started off pulling pranks on Dolce out of actual malice, but ended up becoming her closest childhood friend instead and growing to abandon that grudge. I’m thinking since Dolce (at least probably) is an elf and we cant see pico’s ears to tell what she was in life, maybe she was a human or a dwarf or some other race that had a conflict with elves at the time? or maybe just her family lived in the same town as dolce’s family and they were romeo and juliet style rival clans who would wish revenge upon each other’s descendants like that. Anyway I need to develop the idea but I like this as a fanfic plot, that maybe there’s some reason they werent friends at first and there’s a plotline of how Pico became so devoted to her that she’d wait centuries guarding Marionetta. (Seriously I am so emotional over that) * Also its never really expanded upon but its implied maybe Dolce became Pico’s haunting target because she had some latent spiritual power or something...? When they briefly describe how they were friends since Dolce was a kid, it says about how Dolce could see her and touch her even before anyone else could. Which is curious cos it implies some stuff about how the possession works! So Pico wasn’t always ‘attatched’ to Dolce like this? She wasn’t always able to be seen by other people? Maybe she started off ‘attatched’ to the mansion itself and like... ghosts work in a way that they have to possess a human because they have no power otherwise? Or maybe the only other way of gaining power is to go mad, and become one of the undead-category monsters that dont seem able to speak or take humanoid forms like pico. Its a bit confusing cos some of them are called ghosts and some are called spirits instead, and some are called both depending on which menu description you read... * I’m just very upset that they introduced ghosts as a race in the rune factory series and they never explained anything about them or gave the one ghost character a romance route :P Maybe thats why I’m weirdly more interested in Pico’s backstory than Dolce’s?

[darkgreiga]

Wishes, Dreams, and Memories Chapter 34

Fandom: Rune Factory 4 Rating: T (to be safe) Genre(s): Adventure, Hurt/Comfort Characters: Lest, Dolce, Pico, Amber, Dylas, Leon, Frey, Arthur, Margaret, Forte Summary:  She had a wish to see him again. He had a dream of her last moments. They had their memories of having only each other. The amnesiac Earthmate never knew that by bringing his best friend back wouldn’t make his daily life go back to normal. Nor did he know she was the key to his and his ancestors’ past. Chapters: list Navigation: <<prev   |   next>> Author’s notes: Not an update as late as yesterday, but it’s still over midnight here... Anyways, enjoy the final showdown!

Chapter 34 – The Final Struggle

“Eat this!” Frey swung her hammer around, knocking any types of monsters coming her way.

Lest managed to send the monsters surrounding him with his dual blades, but the number of monsters around the Earthmates hadn’t reduced much. The monsters more powerful than their regular counterpart as the dark aura surrounded them and the dark forest they were all in. The dragons launched their elemental breath along with the fairies attacking the Earthmates using their magic, pitting them to a corner.

“There are too many of them!” Lest said quickly as he raised his shield to block incoming fireballs from the red dragons, “And they’re just too strong!”

“You don’t,” Frey caught one of the fairies and threw it against the pack of silver wolves, “need to tell me that again!”

Lest blocked a rider orc’s club as it rode on a wolf, only to have more orc riders storming towards him with their own wolves. The male Earthmate could only block the orc riders and wolves by his shield, though a pair managed to find a way to hit and bite him in the end. Before more of the monster armies came to him, a wave of stone spikes came out from the ground and pushed them back to give Lest some space.

Frey, in her tired state, ran to Lest side, “Cure All!”

The healing spell managed to heal their wounds, but it couldn’t erase the fatigue they had after battling monsters over and over again. It hadn’t been long since the two of the arrived, but the monsters there had already been waiting for them since their arrival. The regular sight of white nothingness with colorful leaves flying around had already been replaced by the view of a forest filled with dead trees and monsters.

“The runes…” Frey looked around as the monsters slowly approached them once more, “It’s starting to corrupt everything… He is… corrupting everything…”

“Then we have to find him, and fast!” Lest replied as he stood ready with his short sword and shield, “We can’t beat all the monsters here at once, but we might be able to make a way through them, don’t you think?”

“It’s not going to be easy either way,” Frey curled her fist while holding her hammer on her left hand, “But making a way out of these guys is definitely a lot easier than beating them all.”

The twins switched places, with Lest on the left side to block the incoming attacks with his shield while Frey used her hammer to push the monster to the right and make a way. Little by little the strategy managed to lead them out of the monster crowd with little damage as they sped away from the rampaging monsters.

The maze-like forest managed to help their escape, but also make them lost their way as well. Lest and Frey looked at the trees around them, which looked completely identical in every direction. It was getting harder for them to tell where they had come from to reach the spacious clearing they were in.

“Not good,” Frey turned to Lest with serious look, “There’s no way out of this place. The corrupted runes are blocking my Escape magic.”

Lest closed his eyes for a moment, trying to activate the spell as well, “Yeah, I can’t use it either…”

“Oh, are you leaving so soon?” a voice echoed throughout the forest, surprising the two.

“I haven’t forgotten that voice…” Lest commented in a whisper as he held on to his sword and shield, “We’ve found who we’re looking for.”

“Yeah, I can sense those corrupted runes of his,” Frey replied as she held on to her hammer, “Ethelberd is here to greet us… from above!”

The two Earthmates quickly split as something hard had fallen on the ground they had been standing on. Once the dust had cleared, the figure revealed himself as the missing young emperor with his long hair a mix of the original teal color and light blue. His green eyes were glowing red as he turned to look at Lest and Frey with a wicked smile.

“Long time no see, my dear children,” the smile turned into a frown as he glared at them, “No, I refuse to acknowledge my great blood to run in your bodies with that cursed Earthmate’s blood!”

“You don’t have any right to talk bad about our mother!” Frey yelled in anger, “We don’t have a father like you! We never had any!”

“I don’t want to call you as my father too,” Lest spoke up as he glared at the emperor, “I don’t remember my own past, but I remember you and your empire trying to destroy Selphia! I remember you trying to take Venti away!”

“Huh? That sad excuse of a wind dragon?” Ethelberd looked at him in an amused look, “Well, at least that dragon still had some strength left that I could borrow…” Ethelberd’s form turned its color into pitch black before morphing into the familiar wind dragon, “Like this!”

Ethelberd flapped the strong wings he now had and a powerful gust managed to knock the Earthmates off the ground and towards the trees behind them. The emperor transformed back to his human form with dark aura around his body. The two Earthmates slowly got back to their feet, looking at Ethelberd in complete disbelief.

“That… that was Venti’s… power…” Lest spoke up as he winced from the pain on his back.

“H-How…?” Frey asked as she used her hammer for support, “You… you’re already a dead man!”

“Hah! Nonsense!” Ethelberd swung his arm to throw a dark ball towards Frey, pinning her against the tree, “I live on in that wretched place! I can fuse myself with any kinds of runes I want! I can be any god I want! I AM GREATER THAN ANY GOD!”

“You… greedy… monster… ugh…” the dark ball pinning her turned into wooden spikes coming from the dead tree, choking her.

“S-Stop it!” Lest cried out angrily, “I already beat you once, I can just easily beat you again!”

“Do you study about the Native Dragons, Earthmate?” Ethelberd turned his attention to Lest before he transformed into a big black dragon with burning wings, “Like the dragon god of destruction?!”

Lest quickly rolled out of the way as Ethelberd unleashed a big fireball at him, only to have the burning fireball curved in its path and hit Lest, “GAH!!!”

“I… I won’t let you… hurt him!” Frey pushed the spikes away before burning them with her fire magic to free herself.

“You cannot defeat me, Earthmates!” Ethelberd transformed into a big snake-like dragon, shooting water laser around the area to hit both Lest and Frey.

Frey fell on her stomach, barely conscious from all the strain and damage she had taken. As if her pain wasn’t enough, Ethelberd approached her as Lest laid helplessly to watch the emperor stomped his foot on his twin’s head. Her face was battered, but not a single drop of blood was spilled as Ethelberd stomped and kicked her around on the face.

“Huh, I guess there’s another like me in this world after all,” Ethelberd stopped his act as he looked at Frey’s motionless body in disgust, “An Earthmate version of myself… what a disgusting-”

A ball of light hit Ethelberd square in the face, but not with enough force to knock him away far enough. Frey slowly stood with her wounds slowly healing from the use of another healing spell, before she turned around to look at him with a cold stare. As Ethelberd was about to transform once more, Lest had come from behind him to strike him with a long slash on his back, stopping his transformation process.

“You…!” Ethelberd sent out a barrage of fireballs at Lest, slightly knocking him back, before he followed up with a small ball of light thrown at him.

“Get back!” Frey pushed Lest out of the way before escaping herself as the ball of light grew larger in size, creating a crater of blue light in the middle of the area.

With the huge crater dividing the area between the two Earthmates and Ethelberd, the three of them were only left with magic attacks which brought a disadvantage to Lest and Frey. Ethelberd soon transformed into Aquaticus and used his long body to reach and knock the Earthmates towards the trees helplessly.

The barrage of fireballs Lest and Frey had sent out to counterattack was absorbed as Ethelberd transformed into Fiersome, who then pulled them closer along with the burning branches around them. Just as they were getting closer to him, the transformed emperor spun around to knock them back once more.

Frey was thrown towards the tree once more, but the stinging pain all over her body had prevented her from getting up. Lest was thrown to the ground, but the fatigue from the battles against the monsters had caught up to him once more to prevent him from using any healing spell on the two of them. Frey let out a desperate and pained sigh as she reached out for her pocket, taking the rune sphere shard in her hand.

‘Please… make it work…’ Frey thought as she forced herself to crawl towards Lest, who noticed her coming, “Lest… It’s time…”

“The purification… huh…” Lest reached for his own pocket, taking out the white-fish like charm, “Our last… resort…”

“Resist all you can, but it won’t matter anymore,” Ethelberd spoke up as the twins slowly rose to their feet while leaning on each other for support, “Today… today will be the day I can annihilate all Earthmates left in this world! I will finally have my revenge!”

“Lest, listen to me,” Frey spoke up as she and Lest held the charm together, “You can just focus on giving me your purification energy. I’ll handle the rest.”

“I’ll try…” Lest’s hesitance in his voice got Frey’s attention, “But I don’t know how I can do it…”

“Just focus the way you usually do when you’re casting magic,” Frey replied, “That purification spell is also a type of magic.”

Lest nodded in understanding, “Got it.”

The two Earthmates closed their eyes as a ball of light formed around the charm, quickly swallowing anything in the area. Ethelberd looked at the Earthmates swallowed by the light before it soon covered the crater he had created as well. He tried running in panic, but the light grew faster before he could escape his fate. All of the dead trees, monsters, and the corrupted runes quickly disappeared into the light, restoring the forest into its original state.

Sensing the familiar surroundings, Lest opened his eyes to see that he was back into the empty space of the forest, but without the flying leaves. He was on his own as Frey was nowhere to be seen, but he found something unexpected as he looked around for her. It was something he never dreamed of actually seeing.

The black soul of Ethelberd, slowly being eaten by the light, was floating in the middle of the white space. The parts which had been eaten slowly turned into smaller leaves, flying towards a vortex of other colorful leaves behind Ethelberd. It was the same place Lest saw Frey, who looked at him with a sad smile as she approached him.

“The process is going to take a lot of time here, but not if I take him into the Forest of Beginnings through this gate,” Frey said as she looked at Ethelberd, “He did what he shouldn’t and his punishment will be having his soul perish in the forest.”

“Then let’s take him there,” Lest suggested, but was confused when Frey shook her head, “Why? You said that it’ll be faster-”

“I did,” Frey cut in, “But that’s not the reason why we shouldn’t take him there. Or to be exact, that’s not the reason why you shouldn’t take him to the Forest of Beginnings.”

“If it’s because the forest isn’t a place for living beings, doesn’t that apply to you too?” Lest asked in response.

Frey looked at him for a moment before she closed her eyes and smiled once more, “I see that those two their promises after all, if you know nothing about my condition.”

“Your… condition…?” Lest looked at her in confusion.

“Lest,” Frey opened her eyes and looked at him, “I… am no longer alive…”

“W… What…?”