#macawk

[ironychan]

It seems we're getting the lander back sooner than we thought.  The gigaducks' eggs hatched a couple of days ago, and once the ducklings dried out and fluffed up, they climbed right out and dropped ten metres to the ground.  Reynolds says this is normal duck behaviour.  It didn't seem to hurt most of them.  They just got up and followed the adults to the river.

This makes me wonder where they normally nest.  It can't be out here on the flat if plummeting headlong from the nest is how their lives are supposed to begin.  Do they normally choose trees or cliffs?  Are these ones only hanging around because the lander is here?  Did we bring the ducks on ourselves?

I said the fall didn't hurt most of them.  There were a couple that didn't make it.  One bounced off the side of the lander, which either killed or stunned it, and a saber-toothed shiba that had been waiting underneath dashed out to snatch it up.  This did not sit well with mama duck.  A fight ensued in which the shiba, incredibly, lost.

After the ducks departed, we went to take a look at the shiba and found that it was actually dead - the duck had broken its neck.  It's belly was moving, however, and to everybody's surprise, two puppies squirmed out.  It's a good thing we had an Australian along because the rest of us honestly couldn't figure out if they'd chewed their way out or what, until Ireland said, "oh, hey, it's a marsupial."

The shibas aren't dogs at all, it's just an insane convergent evolution thing.  Either the'yre descended from somebody's pet kangaroo or else they're opossums, and we're not sure which is worse.  Now we're questioning every dog-like thing we've seen.  The weaselschnitzel?  The lykopard?  All those watchdogs?

Boonmee took the joeys back to her tent with her, but we're not sure they're gonna live very long when she's got nothing to feed them.  This led to today's second surprise, when a macawk came and perched on the EHM's roof, as if just waiting for her to turn her back so it could nab one.  She waved at it and shouted, "fuck off!"

The macawk spread its wings and showed her its eyespots, and shouted "fuck off!" right back.

It wasn't very good at it - it couldn't make the f sound so it was more of an "ock-aww!" but it was definitely intended to be an imitation of her.  This shocked everybody else, but I realized: of course they can do that!  The ones at the triceracow carcass imitated the night screamers and shibas to try to drive them off.  I guess that's their thing.  When they get threatened, they use their eyespots and voices to say, "I'm you but bigger!"

[fluffypotatey]

Lol forgot to post about ch2 so here ya go!

Summary:

Operation: manipulate Monkey King's protege is a go! Red string or not, nothing's going to get in the way of Macaque's revenge plan. Or, Macaroon’s revenge plan of “Taking Down/Possibly Getting a Good Hit on Sun Wukong” finds itself being met with certain things he was blatantly ignoring and is mad about it

Summary:

Macaque, the Six Eared Macaque (which is his full name), has a problem. No, it's not the deal he made with LBD (he can figure that one out later), and no, it is not the fact that he's alive again. Rather, his issue is a simple one. It's the fact that he can't stop himself from seeing the red strings tied to the beings of both the mortal and celestial realms. So far, trying to burn them has failed, but he's open to other options. ~ AKA: Fluffy doing her best to articulate her love for shadowpeach

[mickemz01]

Pirates SMP is going well!

—Transcript—

Oli: The goose is a Kestral, I've given it the initiation.

Sausage: Ohhh, kiss, Kestral Kiss! *Mwah!* Kestral kiss.

Oli: I've got one egg, I've thrown it now--

Sausage: The Kestral Kiss. Oh listen, I got-- I got a special egg, this is a Macaw egg, it's exotic

Oli, excitedly: You found a Macawk!

Sausage: Yes.

Martyn: Oh, woah,

Sausage: No, no that's not how you say it.

Oli: Macawk.

Sausage: *Macaw.*

Martyn: Ma--Macawk.

Sausage: *Macaw.*

Martyn: Is the last k silent?

Sausage: Macawww!

Oli: Oh no, the macaw is a parrot, I just--

Martyn: Macaw-- Macaw my balls.

Sausage: HEY EXCUSE ME?

Martyn: Sorry, hold on.

Oli: Try again.

Sausage: Excuse me?

Martyn: Macaw my-- Macaw-- Macaw my balls.

Oli: Macaw my balls. Yeah!

[twinklephoenix]

my character Wilson wearing his kralove costume alongside his Tofu mount and macawker pet. #Wakfu #doodle https://www.instagram.com/p/B73sr97g8fB/?igshid=1d7l42i37xj6k

[kingofemo]

plot twist: he’s really colorful

Macawks

[kingofemo]

MALE BIRDS ARE SUPER BRIGHT AND OBNOXIOUS

So I’m just gonna lay this out here

Sensei I know you want to show that your characters have ambition, but ya got stop putting red where it don’t belong.

My color coordinating artist ass is gonna fly to Japan and shove a color wheel down your throat, Jesus Crust.

[mickemz01]

Pirates SMP is going GREAT so far

—Transcript—

Oli: The goose is a Kestral, I've given it the initiation.

Sausage: Ohhh, kiss, Kestral Kiss! *Mwah!* Kestral kiss.

Oli: I've got one egg, I've thrown it now--

Sausage: The Kestral Kiss. Oh listen, I got-- I got a special egg, this is a Macaw egg, it's exotic

Oli, excitedly: You found a Macawk!

Sausage: Yes.

Martyn: Oh, woah,

Sausage: No, no that's not how you say it.

Oli: Macawk.

Sausage: *Macaw.*

Martyn: Ma--Macawk.

Sausage: *Macaw.*

Martyn: Is the last k silent?

Sausage: Macawww!

Oli: Oh no, the macaw is a parrot, I just--

Martyn: Macaw-- Macaw my balls.

Sausage: HEY EXCUSE ME?

Martyn: Sorry, hold on.

Oli: Try again.

Sausage: Excuse me?

Martyn: Macaw my-- Macaw-- Macaw my balls.

Oli: Macaw my balls. Yeah!

[ironychan]

We expected the dead triceracow would attract scavengers and it did.  There was us, of course, but by the end of the day macawks were already picking at it, along with these smaller predatory birds, and the flies had arrived.  The real action, however, happened after dark.

This involved me sitting in a tree half the night again... I guess that's just a thing I do now.  From that vantage point I watched a night screamer bound over to tear at the carcass.  It hissed at the macawks, which hissed back and showed off their eyespots, and the night screamer eventually retreated.  The next visitors were these rather charming little fanged fox-dogs, which got in their own argument with the macawks.  The dogs made coyote-like yipping sounds, and to my surprise the macawks imitated those, too.  This time the dogs won, and they used their saber teeth to tear the belly open and go straight for the organs.

After eating for a while, they all pricked up their ears and ran.  What seemed like a very long time passed, though it was probably only seconds, and this big heavy-footed thing came along that I first thought was a jaguar.  Then I realized it was not a cat but a huge, powerful dog.  It settled in to gnaw on the meat.  At one point it looked right at me, and I know it saw me, but like most creatures here it wasn't impressed.  After eating its fill, it curled up and went to sleep right there on top of the carcass.

I decided to climb down and head back, but as soon as I moved the dog heard me.  I saw its ears twitch and it raised its head and growled at me.  I therefore stayed put, waiting for it to fall asleep again... but it didn't.  I don't think it considered me a potential meal, but it did think I was a potential thief, and it kept its glowing eyes open and fixed on me for what felt like ages.  Eventually I figured I was probably there until morning.  Somebody would come looking for me and the dog wouldn't want to tangle with a crowd, right?

Suddenly the dog sat up.  It turned to face away from me and began barking up a storm.  I considered siezing the moment and fleeing, but I'm glad I didn't, because this goddamn prehistoric monster emerged from the bushes and charged.  The dog ran, and then this creature that has no right to be anything but vegan tore a leg off the dead cow and started crunching on it.  I could hear the bones crack.  I nearly threw up.

I was afraid this one was now going to settle down for the night, but it wandered off after that.  I waited until I couldn't hear the crackling anymore, then dropped to the ground and ran like a son of a bitch.  No more sitting in trees all night for me.

The little dogs we're calling saber-tooth shibas, while Vandebeek named the big one.  He said a spotted lion (leon in Greek) is a leopard, so obviously a spotted wolf (lykos) is a Lykopard.  Nobody can argue with that.  Wang stepped up to give the big beast the name Swinoceros, which we have all agreed is one of his finest.  We expect nothing less from a man whose seminal paper on the physics of SagA*'s Innermost Stable Circular Orbit was called Panic! At The ISCO.

[ironychan]

With the Weaselschnitzel and the aquatic hamsters, it was us investigating them.  Today for the first time an animal came to investigate us.

This was one of the carnivorous birds we've been noticing.  Up close it is dusty brown in colour with black tips to most of its feathers, a white belly, a big hooked black beak, pale eyes, and a naked white face like a parrot.  Wang named it the Macawk.  It perched on one of our tents and watched us intently, until Reynolds tried to get closer.  Then it spread its wings and hissed at him.  The feathers under the wings have a weird property like those old lenticular posters, where when tilted just right they show great big eyespots.  Reynolds backed off, then pointed out to us that the first and fourth toes on the birds' feet face backwards, which he said is called 'zygodactyly' and tells us that the macawk is taxonomically either a woodpecker, a cuckoo, or a parrot.

Apparently when Reynolds was growing up his whole family were birdwatching nerds.  This is unfortunate, since it means future generations of humans will have to deal with the word 'zygodactyly'.

Macawks are fairly big birds, around the size of the parrots we named them for, with nasty beaks and talons, so we don't like the implication that it has predators it needs to intimidate with those eyespots.  Even worse, it looks like the spots are not always effective.  Later in the day we saw a macawk dive into the grass not too far away, then we heard a squawk and a nails-on-chalkboard screech, followed by silence.  Kibwana and I investigated, and found the macawk lying there with its neck nearly bitten right through, and the grass bent and broken.  Of the killer there was no sign, but there was some rustling in the grass around us that made us not want to linger.

We did take the dead macawk with us.  So in addition to the other scant information we have gleaned as yet, we can say definitively that they do not taste good.

[ironychan]

Boonmee was very excited to see the techalotl again.  Unfortunately, we arrived at the copse to find a macawk sitting in the crook of some broccotree branches eating it.  We had to convince her not to chase the bird away, and even if she had, there was nothing we could have done for the poor squirrel.  I guess that's just nature.  We're planning on eating what we catch, so the animals are allowed to do the same.

That put a big crimp in today's exploration plans, but I did take a closer look at one of the yellow flowers growing out of the broccotree trunk.  Its roots do seem to go right into the wood, so I tried to pull it out but all I did was snap the stem off.  In the process I disturbed a big brown beetle (Rock n Roll Crab) with a colourful geometric pattern on its back, which crawled out of the crack and buzzed off.  I'm going to call it a Moccasin Beetle because it reminds me of a beaded slipper I once saw in a museum.  Moments after it left, the ants arrived.  They marched into the crack and came out again carrying tiny, semi-transparent white objects, like grains of rice but smaller.  Took me a minute, but I realized these were beetle eggs.

That's not the only interesting bug we found today, either.  There are spiders (Octocrabs) hiding among the broccotree florets that look almost exactly like the buds.  They aren't interested in the ants much, but when bigger insects like flies land to taste the sticky juice, the spiders reach out with a pair of long legs and grab them.  We couldn't come up with a name for it besides Bud Spider, but Wang wanted to call it a Broctopus so Bud Spider it is.

It's interesting to see how all these organisms fit together: the tree's sticky sap attracts the ants and flies to feed on it.  The spiders eat the flies.  The parasitic flowers grow in the cracks in the bark, which also attract the beetles to lay eggs there so their grubs can eat the wood.  The ants remove the beetle eggs to protect the tree.  The tree buds and the ants are food for the techalotl, and the techalotl are food for the macawks.

That's not a complete ecosystem obviously, but it's the beginning of a food web and it's pretty cool to have seen it in action.  We still don't know what killed the other macawk in the grass, or what keeps screaming in the middle of the night, but I'm getting a feel for this future.

We also found a plant which was cause for celebration:

It's rhubarb!  We had rhubarb in the garden when I was a kid.  Mom used to make pies out of it but could never use it as fast as it grew and ended up giving it away to the neighbours.  My friends and I would break stalks off, wash them, and eat them raw like celery.  The point was to see who could stand the sour taste the longest.

So this is something we can almost definitely eat, but there's another reason we were incredibly happy to see it.  Rhubarb is an old world plant with no business growing wild in what used to be Canada.  It is here because humans brought its distant ancestors across the ocean millions of years ago.  I guess that makes it an invasive species, but after so much time I doubt that matters anymore.  The point is, the rhubarb is proof that we were here.  By now the pyramids have crumbled and the nuclear waste has decayed and even the lunar bases have been buried by regolith, but the rhubarb remains.

And that, o hypothetical reader, is worth celebrating.

[ironychan]

We have finally identified one of our mystery animals!  We still don't know what the Large Herbivore is, or what killed the macawk in the grass, but we have a face for the Night Screamer.

Having made an uneasy peace with our fowl neighbours, we resumed poking around cataloging the local flora.  In the process we discovered our second ungulate, a cute little fellow only about thirty centimetres tall at the shoulder.  Like the hookhorns it appears to be some kind of goat, though its horns are very short and rounded, kind of like a giraffe's.  There turned out to be four of them - and a dog.

Yes, these things have their own watchdog. Like the ones that accompanied the hookhorns, they are very similar to the goats in build and colouration.  All five animals were under the cover of low plants and appeared to be sleeping until we discovered them.  That woke them up, and the watchdog took up a defensive position between us and its charges and began to bark and snarl furiously.  Not wanting our toes to be savagely gnawed, we retreated.

Wang wants to call the ungulates Cabruahuas, like a cross between Cabra (goat) and Chihuahua (chihuahua). There's still no sign of any other humans here, so the dogs probably aren't trained... but if they just do this, then why?  They don't seem to be getting anything out of it.

This has been bugging me ever since Kibwana and I first saw the hookhorns, so I did what any sensible person would clearly do. Figuring these must be nocturnal, I sat up in a nearby broccotree half the night to watch what they did - and I still don't believe what I saw.  After dark the cabruahuas came out to start nibbling on low foliage, while the watchdog caught mice and birds that the herbivores disturbed.  Then when the goats settled down to do some cud-chewing, the dog went to two different ones and nursed.

I'm pretty sure the dog is an adult, so why is it drinking milk?  Most adult mammals can't digest milk, humans are actually weird that way.  Fresh milk doesn't seem like a good enough reason for the dogs and the ungulates to stick together like this, so there must be something else going on.  We're just not seeing it yet.

After a short rest the little herd and their companion wandered off further into the woods and I decided to head back.  I didn't want to nod off and fall out of the tree.  I had just touched the ground when the Night Screamer started its yowling, sounding like it was right next to me.

I don't even remember climbing back up the tree.  I clung to the trunk as it got louder and louder, and closer and closer.  I thought I was about to be killed by Bigfoot or something.  Then it emerged from the rhubarb and revealed itself to be this bizarre koala-cat thing, no bigger than the goats, that proceeded to howl like a tortured soul six or seven more times.  It swiveled its huge ears listening to a reply that came from somewhere out across the grassland, and then seemed satisfied and started climbing the tree.  For a moment it was startled to find me there, but I was evidently not threatening, because the little tree gremlin just gave me a contemptuous look and continued on up.

The noise may be a way of establishing territory or something.  I really don't care.  I'm just glad it wasn't big enough to eat me.  This one doesn't need a new name, it's been a Night Screamer since day one, and a Night Screamer it may stay.

[ironychan]

Finally something we can eat!  We're calling this one the Gigaduck.  Seven of them flew in this morning, honking up a storm, and landed in the boggy area to look for food.  The small animals we've seen scurrying about are very wary of us, and even the quite large macawk didn't want us getting too close, as if they can sense we don’t belong in this world.  These things, on the other hand, gave no fucks whatsoever, so we were able to get a really good look.

Gigaducks are around a metre and a half tall if they stretch, and nearly seven kilograms, hence the 'giga'.  They've got a long neck and long legs for wading, but something about them is still very definitely duck-shaped.  Plumage is mostly dark brown but with a white patch on each cheek, the feet and beak are powder blue, and the neck and back have some purplish iridescence.  The beak is very wide, so when they face directly towards you their beady little eyes are way too far apart.  The eyes are blood red and filled with the malevolence of all their dinosaur ancestors.

They seem willing to eat basically anything, just dipping their beaks in the water and nibbling around until something comes too close.  Ireland (who despite her name is actually Australian) suggested they might have electroreceptors in their beaks to help them hunt, like platypus.  We saw them eating water plants, a few crabby-looking things, small fish, and even one of the aquatic hamsters.  The image of a giant duck swallowing a live hamster whole is probably going to haunt my nightmares for a while.

But since they are evidently ducks, the next logical question was whether we could eat them.  To this end we lured one in with rations and then strangled it with wire.  This did not go as smoothly as we might have hoped.  The rest of the flock flew away honking like foghorns, but we triumphantly plucked, weighed, carved, and barbecued our victim.  The meat was very lean and red, tasting like a cross between beef and dark meat of poultry.  Needed seasoning, but I guess we'll work on that.

[fluffypotatey]

Summary:

Looking down, he spied those ugly strings still attached to him. One bright and resembled more of a maroon color than red. The other tattered and unkept. Seeing them did nothing to quell the upset turmoil spreading within him. Honestly, it just made everything worse. The reminders of their possible meanings, the annoying way MK’s string would pull and straighten whenever the kiddo entered the theater.  aka, shadow play time :3

CHAPTER 3 IS OUT 😎

Summary:

Macaque, the Six Eared Macaque (which is his full name), has a problem. No, it's not the deal he made with LBD (he can figure that one out later), and no, it is not the fact that he's alive again. Rather, his issue is a simple one. It's the fact that he can't stop himself from seeing the red strings tied to the beings of both the mortal and celestial realms. So far, trying to burn them has failed, but he's open to other options. ~ AKA: Fluffy doing her best to articulate her love for shadowpeach

[bokunoherokomikuko]

FUCK

U RITE

BUT IT STILL DOESN'T EXCUSE HIS CLASHING COLOR PALLET

So I’m just gonna lay this out here

Sensei I know you want to show that your characters have ambition, but ya got stop putting red where it don’t belong.

My color coordinating artist ass is gonna fly to Japan and shove a color wheel down your throat, Jesus Crust.