#magic point

[phonographica]

Magic Point - Cyber Heat (2021)

[thestuffedalligator]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I have so many questions,” she said.

“I figured.”

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

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

“But the quest is just — done?”

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

“My parents?”

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

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

“I’m aware.”

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

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

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

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

The knight frowned. “What do you do?”

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

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

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

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

“We aren’t?”

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

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

The stewards of the old world are always keen to give you a glimpse of their might... According to legend, the ancients built specialized chambers to seal away false prophets.

The Arcane is waking up.

[palarien]

sketched this out at jury duty actually

[nickydraws]

Yeah, I'm normal about him

[meltesh28]

nezha spear form animation!! had a toonnn of fun with this one but my hands are numb now 😭

[egophiliac]

Final manifestations for Book 7?

I'm trying REALLY hard not to build up any solid expectations, because I wanna go in ~fresh~! they're already so far away from anything I thought would happen (not in a bad way, I'm just accepting that I'm on Miss Yana's Wild Ride at this point and we're seeing this thing through 'til the end, by gum). so it's nothing too major, but:

they've been handing new crying expressions out like candy lately, I want to see some delicious Malleus tears.

honestly I want everyone to cry buckets. their tears sustain me. the more Silver angst specifically I get the happier I am.

SILVER!!!! 👏 VANROUGE!!!! 👏

just let him have this. the poor boy's been through so much. let him have his big "I'm proud of you, son" moment with Lilia.

I'm 100% expecting Grim's arc (and probably whatever's going on with Crowley) to be its own episode, but a nice hook to leave us hanging on would be good!

a nice hook though, please, I don't think I can take another "Grim is attacking us! now wait eight months to find out what happens :)" cliffhanger...

some Meleanor? as a treat? just a little bit, a tiny quick flashback or something, please Twst I just, I just want to see her again. let her have a little ghost cameo like Dawnathan Knight got. Lilia and his kids are all having their big group hug or whatever and she can gently fade in to be all like

(turning asks off until I'm done playing, SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE Y'ALL)

[elodieunderglass]

And one amang, an Iyrysch man,

Uppone his hoby swyftly ran…

WAIT HANG ON - slamming the brakes on drawing this stupid picture - do you nerds even KNOW the etymology of the word “hobby”? The thing you do for pleasure? The thing you have too many of? The thing you spend too much money on and share with your friends? The thing tumblr probably is to you? Those hobbies?

It comes from a now-kind-of-extinct breed of Irish pony-horse. It was called the Irish Hobby. Supposedly the hobby got its name from the Gaelic word obann, or swift. They definitely were. They’d obann your pants clean off.

Fast tough little bastards, built for rough terrain and renowned for their speed and stamina, hobby horses belonged to the Celts, and their highly annoying style of mounted warfare. but their conquerors liked hobby horses a lot, kept them, used them for themselves, and found them useful enough, despite the fact that they also had famously useful things like mounted knights or horse archers. A lightweight Irish warrior, mounted on a hobby horse, was called a hobelar.

Reportedly and in depictions, hobelars rode without stirrups. Or saddles. Or bridles. Or - well - this is all sounding very improbable, because the hobelars COULDNT have just been charging around basically bare-assed on naked ponies, screaming, and somehow in the process undoing the composure of actual mounted armoured knights. Knights who, I remind you, had stirrups. Stirrups are useful! It’s quite likely the hobelars had some gear. And clothes. and weapons. And the ponies probably had some tack - I am picturing a bellyband that you could at least hang a saddlebag on, and a neck rope for catching the bloody thing, even if not a saddle. But the overall impression, somehow created by people on darling little ponies, was apparently quite striking and fearful.

I mean. God Forbid People Have Hobbies.

Anyway after a while, whatever people became the British had eventually conquered all of the rough terrain that hobbies were best at, and horse archers just got sexier, and mounted knights became aristos, and all the bog and forest people had been subdued, so it was time to sunset the hobelars. but WAIT! Hobby horses are still tremendously fun and appealing! They’re so fast! and you can ride them without a saddle! Sure, they’re not up to the weight of a mounted knight, or indeed a lot of guys… but surely we can still find a use for a hobby or two? In the back garden? Somewhere?

At which point an English king decided to keep hobby horses just for fun. No military application. No further development of the technology. Not for fun. Just as expensive, pleasurable, pets. Just for the joy of the thing.

And that is how hobby (activity done purely for pleasure) comes from hobby horse (small horse) possibly from obann (swift.) they’re very interesting and you should look all this up for yourself! because it sure sounds like Elodie doing a bit, doesn’t it?

Today, Irish Hobbies are functionally nonexistent. References for drawing include the Kerry Bog Pony, the Connemara, and (I personally think) Dartmoors and Exmoors. They’re said to have lent their speed to the Irish Hunter/Sport Horse and from there to the Thoroughbred, but every damn horse in the world claims relation to the Thoroughbred, and they can’t be THAT thoroughly bred.

At any rate - you can never have enough hobbies. Just be glad that yours aren’t expensive beasts with minds of their own, eating their heads off in the pasture! …Unless they are. In which case, you’re part of a proud tradition.

[technically-human]

Those souls from Lust grabbed him for a reason

[thegoddamnhat]

there's nothing quite like a random piece of media you consumed ages ago and loved at the time but kinda forgot about after coming back to you years later absolutely out of nowhere like "you thought you could forget about me? don't worry! i'm here to be the only thing you care about yet again" and then the cycle repeats

it's fun but also painful because the intensity of the obsession revived makes it hard to focus on anything else like someone get these fictional people out of my head please

[cepheusgalaxy]

*has a thought at 1am* magical girl anime is to yuri what sports anime is to yaoi

[cosmicredcadet]

"Why is all aspec representation in media AROACE rep?" and is the aroace rep in the room with us right now?

[mimi-0007]

Emily Jazmin Tatum Perez (19 February 1983 – 12 September 2006) was an African-American military officer. After graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point, Second Lieutenant Perez was serving in the Iraq War when she was killed in action by an improvised explosive device. She became the first black female officer in U.S. military history to die in combat and the first female graduate of West Point to die in Iraq.

[tritoch]

this will forever be the funniest moment in final fantasy xiv to me. you are a bright young officer of the globe-spanning evil empire. over the last few months you've watched the entire empire crumble from the edges inward after the former crown prince killed his father and seized the throne so he could redirect the state toward his own occult ends. you have witnessed unbelievable horrors. you had to kill your own family. finally, you get a chance to stand across from the man who caused all this and ask: why? what was it all for?

and he goes, uh, because i wanted to, dipshit? that's literally the only reason anyone does anything? fuck, you're stupid. if you don't believe me ask literally anyone else. or even like an alien. they'll tell you they do whatever they want for the specific reasons they made up. and like that's literally fine we're all just doing what we want for the cool made-up reasons we each picked.

then a teenager roasts him and he vanishes from history forever. you were probably the last of your countrymen to ever see or speak to him, the man who burned down everything you knew and loved for nothing at all. and like the second to last thing he ever said to you, right between imparting his existentialist philosophy and threatening to kill you, was that aliens are real. he didn't even pause, just said "go ask an alien" and went on with his speech like aliens existing was a baseline assumption everyone could agree on.

[teratomatica]

you always land on all fours

[ladystoneboobs]

so, one aspect of catelyn which i think is underrated (certainly the biggest adaptation loss which nobody talks about) is her, let's say superstitiousness, or better yet, let's call it genre-savviness, being one of the few adult characters open to magic and the supernatural in this fantasy world. we first meet her in the godswood, home of gods which are not truly hers, yet she is still very aware of their power. when she and ned talk of the deserter he killed, he hopes he won't have to go with the nw to deal with mance rayder, but she has even more fear of that idea bc there are worse things beyond the wall than just wildlings. ned scoffs and says she's been listening to old nan too much, but she's right. we already know from the prologue that she's right! and here she is, understanding the genre of their world better than her husband, who was actually born and spent his earliest years in this northern land of deep magic, listening to old nan's stories. same with the direwolves, where she was uncomfortable with them at first, but later believed in them as guardians from the old gods even after robb had lost his own faith. and once again, we know she's right even if she doesn't know the evidence to back up her instincts, bc summer and shaggydog did not fail bran and rickon and robb was almost certainly a warg like his brothers. (perhaps making it more fitting that she's the one brought back as a fantasy vengeance monster, not ned and robb, the most unbelieving dead starks.) and in her 2nd agot chapter, everyone focuses on her ambition in wanting ned to agree to the hand job (pun intended) and sansa's betrothal, and while she does recognize the value of their daughter being a future queen more than ned does, that's only her stated argument bc she thinks it's rational enough for ned to listen to. (if ambitious matchmaking were as important to her as to her father she never would have made those frey betrothals fandom loves to blame her for.) in her own head there's a deeper urge driving her. she keeps thinking of the dead direwolf with antlers in its throat, an omen which filled her with dread from the first she heard of it, before robert's arrival, and thinking of it again is what makes her desperate to convince ned not to refuse robert. she had to make him see. and really, she's not wrong, as jon snow would say. the dead direwolf was an omen of ned and robert getting each other killed. it's just one of those misread portents, with no way of knowing the danger to ned was in his loyalty to robert, not conflict with him. BUT the next time she's dealing with baratheons, she knows exactly what she's talking about. it's catelyn, not brienne, who sees the shadow slaying renly, and explains that it was stannis who did that through some dark magic. with no way of knowing how it was achieved and no prior expectation that such a thing were ever possible, she realizes with no hestitation that stannis was guilty and that his red witch was capable of pulling this off somehow. really, the only instinct of the supernatural she's wholly wrong about is her insistence that varys gathered his knowledge through some dark enchantment. however, though that might offend varys, given his own personal experience with a sorcerer, i'd say it's a reasonable assumption without knowing the dude had children moving through walls everywhere like oversized rodents. and imo it just shows she had a healthy respect and awe for varys's power which most other characters lack.

oh, oh, and let's not forget that she also believed in the curse of harrenhal, from her own childhood and the stories old nan told her kids. "and every house that held Harrenhal since had come to misfortune. Strong it might be, but it was a dark place, and cursed. 'I would not have Robb fight a battle in the shadow of that keep,' Catelyn admitted." sure, that wasn't enough to save robb, but he did not die from the curse of harrenhal. that doom was meant for his enemies from tywin lannister to roose bolton.