DPXDC Idea: Mother of Monsters Dan(yal)
Specifically Fem!Dan because I made this in mind with my Fem Danyal Au bUT. The best part about Dan is that I get to play dress up with her, and Fem Dark Dany is gonna go by Layal (pronounced lae-el) because it means "the nights" and it sounds similar to Danyal, and I think she'd choose that name to mock Dany. ANYWAYS
Mother of Monsters Danyal. She may be evil but she's an Al Ghul at her core (even with vlad's soul merged with hers - however, considering that Layal looks and sounds like Dany, she considers that soul to be the more dominant one.) and loves animals. And she might be heartless, but she adores the monsters of the infinite realms.
Mother of Monsters Layal who hates everyone but utterly dotes and adores on every manner of beast she comes across. Stealing the eggs and infant young beasts of the Infinite Realms to raise as her own because she wanted them. Her own island full of monsters, a monstrous menagerie of her own. She steals most often from poachers or exotic pet keepers and other menageries -- the full grown beasties can keep their young.
And with every monster she raises, she can shapeshift their features onto herself, allowing her to change her shape from humanish to any matter of monster or hybrid creature. She calls herself their mother, and them her children. Her precious little babies, capable of incredible mass destruction and mayhem.
From little griffins the size of kittens, to stymphalian vulture chicks, and leviathan young hatching from eggs the size of her pinkie, to creatures native of the ghost zone that didn't even have names in the living realm. There really wasn't a limit to what or who she would take in and she didn't limit herself to any form of mythology. If they were beasts and they were unwanted, she wanted them. And as such, amassed her own mini army of "children" willing to listen to her any command.
Earth doesn't know what hit it when she attacks them.
There are many monstrous forms she could take on, the first one I've thought of is a combination of various serpentine/reptilian features. The body of a naga -- her lower half long and serpentine, her upper still human -- with spiked fins connecting from the bottom of her arms to her sides, ever seen Sinbad where Eris goes "you might have seen my likeness on the temple walls" and her arms do that fin thingy? Same concept. Her hands are webbed and taloned, perfect for slicing through the skin of the living, and her teeth are needle-sharp and shark like. Her hair can either be spiny and feathery-like like the spines of a lionfish, or frilled like a frilled-neck lizard. It's perfect for dealing and doting on her reptilian and amphibian-inclined darlings.
I'm more of a fan of aus where Dan is a sibling of Danny's rather than their kid, so Layal's redemption(..?? probation?) proceeds with her legally becoming Danyal's "twin" sister, who had been lost to the foster system before the Fentons adopted Dany, and was only recently reunited with her. The two of them look so alike that the lie is easy to take root and spread.
Layal is very indignant to the fact that she's now ten years in the past and has to restart her menagerie all over again. Do you know how much blood and sweat went into raising those children? How dare you separate them from their mummy. Although she'll admit she does miss their juvenile years, so she won't mind (too much) needing to raising them again. Dany is helping her retrieve all of them though, dammit.
long story short: epic the musical's "Scylla" has a CHOKEHOLD on me and this is the result of it
Unlike her Dan counterpart, Layal's voice is dancing and sirenic. It's purposely alluring and motherly, in order to lure people into a false sense of security until she feeds them to her "children." Echidna doesn't have shit on her. She almost seems friendly and reasonable, until you get too close and realize it was all an act and she drops it to metaphorically swallow you whole. She's like an anglerfish that way. She and Dany both sound like Scylla from Epic.
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Oh! I nearly forgot, but can I ask the significance of this panel?
It comes directly after Dee explains that he can’t come and see her from the future whenever he wants. (Which is one of my favorite moments where Dee’s true eldritch horror leaks in to the story), so I assume it’s… sort of a metaphor? How Emily finds herself at the foot of something she realizes is much, much bigger than she contemplated before?
(Also, I just wanted to compliment you for this panel)
(The first time I saw it, I imagined Dee was showing her this on purpose, time traveling from sometime the same day to really show her what it would be like. An object lesson.
The second time I saw it, I started to wonder
Because Dee himself doesn’t really look aware of what is going on behind him.
And maybe, just maybe, this one moment in time has become the only moment that Dee allows himself to come back to to see Emily, the one moment where he can get lost in the crowd with every other time he came back to look. The one moment where he’s explaining why he can’t come back.
Just… Makes me sad, and I wanted to say thank you for that too, because I love these characters and the story they tell, the sweet and bitter.)
Oh!!!
(Quick test of my ability to find which chapter stuff happens in)
I love your reading of that Uluru panel!! I think I probably didn’t intend anything that deep with it; these time skip montage style chapters are pretty choppy and I’m usually trying to figure out a way to touch on all these brief scenes or moments that I don’t want to spend a whole chapter on for whatever reason, and arrange them in a way where the cuts aren’t too hideously abrupt. For visual reasons I try to contrast different locations and not put 2 dialogue heavy moments directly next to each other. Mood wise, I don’t really want to cut from something serious and angsty to something that’s a complete backflip on that. I also sometimes just feel like drawing a nice landscape and hope it achieves my aims on these fronts haha.
I think also here I was trying to move from that final sentence, “The present is more than enough”, to demonstrating them appreciating having that present together - being able to go do cool and enriching stuff, something not completely mundane but not completely fantastical either. (I mean... sightseeing within your own country is extremely normal, but going to Uluru from Melbourne... not a convenient day trip, since it’s 2000km; 25 hour solid driving, or you can fly in a few hours but I think you have to go via Sydney, so that makes it take at least twice as long I guess. Not that it's specified how long they're there for. I haven’t been myself but I’d love to one day...)
So, yeah!! More of a mechanical/compositional rationale than an intentional metaphor, but I think your reading makes complete sense and actually improves the page! (Sometimes I do intend visual metaphors... but sometimes they’re just happy accidents.)
And thanks for the compliment re the crowd of Dees!! I also love the moments I can lean into his eldritch qualities... they’re sadly few and far between but maybe that helps them be more surprising?? Definitely your first reading was what I intended, that he zigzagged back pretty quickly, probably even from within the conversation, but there is an inherent ambiguity to Dee’s time travelling where unless I take pains to spell it out, there really is no way to know when he’s come from. Even if he can be assumed to be taking every interaction chronologically, there’s no knowing how much time has passed for him between each visit. I don’t even know how to estimate how long his experience of time is, when he’s zigzagging back so densely all the time; even the number of living things on Earth any moment is an incomprehensibly mind-boggling number. That eldritch horror again!
Truth be told I hadn’t thought of him coming back to this moment and blending in with the crowd for the rest of the future ;_; but that’s so real... he could well be, the sad sack...
I had a different sillier thought from slightly misreading your question on first pass, which is that maybe he doesn’t originally know what’s going on behind him, but then later on as he’s just going about his business he goes “oh I know exactly how to punctuate that thing I said earlier!!!” and then does it as an afterthought. Oh to have the ability to add the things you wish you’d said to an earlier conversation 😂
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my notifs recently got me thinking about the very random concept of "what if there is a second, secret CHB. directly below normal CHB." and i ended up brainstorming it in the discord.
context for how this originated: one was just a random notif on my post talking about the tunnels under the Hephaestus cabin, and the other was some tags from @drksanctuary on my fake readriordan article mentioning the idea of a chthonic demigod camp.
so. my brilliant (read: "smashing my 2 brain cells together") idea: the elaborate and seemingly infinite tunnels under cabin 9 are remnants of an abandoned underground CHB that exists directly underneath camp. It's basically just normal CHB except in a big cave system, probably connected to the labyrinth somewhere and has the separate tunnels, and instead of the Olympian cabins it has chthonic cabins. there's probably also some infernal nymphs and etc down there too. since all chthonic demigods can learn to shadow-travel they probably used that to get down there, and a lot of chthonic demigods probably have geokinesis just by nature, ergo the tunnels (for when they don't want to shadow-travel, or can't).
in brainstorming with the discord we decided it could be cool if some of the cabins lined up with the above-ground cabins, either for thematic purposes or associations or whatever. Like there's maybe a Hermes and maybe Poseidon cabin in the chthonic CHB too that just link to the above-ground ones, but also like Persephone cabin lines up to Demeter cabin because of course it does. and maybe Hecate cabin lines up to Cabin 8 cause Artemis is sometimes 1/3rd of Hecate. Maybe Angelos cabin is beneath Cabin 1, and Zagreus cabin is beneath Cabin 12. Things like that.
The other ones i thought of were either Hypnos or Thanatos cabin lines up with Apollo, because twins, and the other is just right beside it (because twins). And Charon's cabin is beneath Cabin 9, ergo why the tunnel system connects to it (because Charon. Ferryman. Surface access. It makes sense in my brain).
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