#so the meat of the story lmao

[princekirijo]

I really wanna sit down and make a proper timeline of events for Captain AU, it would def make it easier to talk about stuff then

[rebouks]

Previous // Next

Courtney: Take a right here. Oscar: Absolutely not. Courtney: C’mon! I have an idea. Oscar: Getting arrested for kidnapping is a terrible idea. [Oscar rolled his eyes as Courtney grinned and raised her hand threateningly; snorting, he threw the indicator on and pulled over with acquiescence, lest she get any ideas and grab the steering wheel herself] … Courtney: Is Levi ready? Nadia: For? Courtney: Camping. Nadia: He’s not going. Courtney: Oh-.. we’ve already booked a spot for him. Nadia: Hm. Courtney: It’d be easier if he were out of your hair for a week though-.. right? [Nadia squinted at the slightly unkempt woman before her; she was clearly mistaken in her previous assumptions that Courtney was a simple, feebleminded housewife] Nadia: Don’t take me for a fool. Courtney: Alright, what’s it gonna be then? Nadia: LEVI! Nadia: Do you want to go camping with these.. people? Levi: I thought you said-… Nadia: Do. You. Want. To. Go? … Nadia: That was quick-.. you won’t bring any bad habits back, will you? Levi: I’ll try not to. Nadia: I’ll miss you, sweetheart. [Levi clenched his bag tightly and ignored his mother’s outstretched arms, knowing full well they’d remain firmly plastered to her waist were there not a car full of Finch’s right next to them] Levi: Hey-.. scootch over, losers. Ava: Hi, Levi’s mommy! [Levi shut the door before Nadia could respond, catching naught but a glimpse of her upturned nose as Oscar sped off]

[shinhatisgirlfriend]

After 44k, I finally got their asses to Coruscant 😭😭😭

[cryptids]

ok sorry to rant out of nowhere but why is tender is the flesh on every book youtuber's top 10 (or whatever) best horror books ever list 😭 it was so bad, I couldn't even finish it bc it was so uninteresting... like I would get it if a few people loved it bc people's tastes are always gonna vary, but the fact that its SO popular just baffles me like am I missing something or am I crazy or what lmao??? and one of the best books EVER?????

[syrupyyyart]

Its exciting to finally actually be working on Motley, but it's also astronomically frustrating because I wanna Get Into The Good Stuff so BAD

[feluka]

i love the care that went into this game. i like that anise is the only one in the party who isn’t a picky eater because she grew up poor. i love tear’s practical cooking and anise’s favourite ingredients being based on what she didn’t get to have. why the fuck does jade put potatoes on pizza. is this the pineapple on pizza discourse in auldrant

[vacantgodling]

revamping some ocs, call it help anzhel get laid

[j-esbian]

frustrating how so many craft books have a section about "how to sell what you've made"

like on one hand i get it because the person writing the book has obviously made their craft a full-time job. and they might have some tips and tricks that might be useful, and there are people out there who might be trying to start a small business out of it

but on the other hand it's just exhausting and feels like another voice saying "what's the point of having a hobby if you're not going to monetize it"

[moons-rising]

ITHGULEOIR

now with stunning adopts made by stardog #158127!

ithguleoir is an ancient sea leviathan who hails from the appropriately named leviathan trench but now likes to roam the shallows just off the coast of the clan's territory~ though he occasionally becomes a problem because he often reshapes the shallows by tunneling through the sand, creating hidden hazards to ships passing through, he is mostly accepted as a friend of the clan and he'll sometimes swim with and even protect the local fishers and other water dragons when they venture into the sea! 🌊

[heedra]

monster's actually a series i started but never fully finished, despite my fondness for urasawa's work in general and man...its been a while since ive enjoyed seeing where something's going this much

[yourenotacat]

vol 9

i do love the opening conversation about theo no longer being able to pilot. but man this line from marcel, which seems like a throwaway, stands out now given vol 13 spoilers

they sure fucking do 🥴 it's so crazy that when the federacy took in the spearhead five, they wondered if they were bio-weapons for the legion. yeahhh about that...

shiden & shana - my tragic lesbians 😢 if the anime ever adapts this far, i hope shana gets more fleshed out like daiya did, and their relationship is more overt. please asato, you've said there's gay ppl. show them to me

lena & the priest talking about shin, esp when he was just a little bean 🥰

it's kurena's turn to be the focus. poor thing...

god theo & shin. tearing up at this section again despite having read it multiple times. it absolutely breaks me

and lena's confession. running her hands over shin's scar and kissing the tears from his lips??? makes me sooo ill

i'll be honest, i never really paid attention to the overarching politics in the federacy (rich ppl rivalries bore me and none of them should be in power frankly), but i'll at least try. shin being a mixed descendant of the two most powerful with the biggest rivalry has to have story implications and lead somewhere, so i'll start paying attention ig 🙄 lmao

[hauntingblue]

There is almost no recap in wano so far.... well 4 minutes.... it's like a 2 min reduction

[ben-drabbles]

Meat Magic

The magic of life is well understood. Walking, independent creatures that feel, think, breathe, and live - these are impossibilities in a world devoid of the unexplainable. That is not to say, however, that people have not tried.

The lowest magic is that of bones. That is not to say it is the weakest - it is simply concerned with first principles, the baselines of reality. By bending, snapping, and changing the bones of the world around us, bone magicians are capable of terrifying feats of power. But, they must always be careful, lest they break something beyond repair, or cause a fracture deeper than they realize. Some call this the element of metal, but it goes deeper than that - it is better to say it is the element of rules, of structure, of physics and the very nature of the world we inhabit.

Meat magic is much more commonly used. It is the magic of support, protection, arrangement, and the earth. If a bone magician might slam puzzle pieces together, a meat mage would arrange them tastefully - well, depending on the mage, of course. While they never bend bones, they may rearrange them, find new ways for them to be structured, and coax the world into a new, more pleasing shape. While some meat mages clamor for a distinction between skin and meat magic, we simply must draw the line somewhere, else this explanation turn into a ramble.

Blood magic is the magic of connection, binding, sensing, and water. It is by blood that energy reaches our bodies, and it is by blood that we are family all. Without blood, we are forms without power, or power without forms. It is by the blood that we are granted the total union of life - that we live at all. Blood mages may bind great breaths to great works of meat; they might see into the bones and soul of the world around them, flow like water through it all. As with so-called skin mages, some purists think of blood not as a distinct school, but a synthesis of other disciplines. Either way, we have blood, and our blood is wonderous.

Breath magic is the magic of energy, purpose, direction, power, and air. It is the intake and outtake, it is the ebb and flow. Through breath we move - through breath the world moves. Breath mages might give life to inanimate objects, impart power to machinery, direct their energy in a calm focus. They are often light and ethereal, but driven - they move and change like the wind itself.

Soul magic is, like Bone magic, poorly understood - it is at the fringes of our current understanding. Those who study it claim it as the magic of fire, to the chagrin of feisty breath mages who see it as part of their purview. To bend the Soul is to bend the immortal essence of life itself - to bend identity, to bend the very nature of a person, to reach past the boundaries of the physical and tap into something grander than any may know. Suffice to say, those who steer into this field are thought to be quite mad at best, and quite dangerous at worst. Still, what is to say what they will find, at the fringes of our reality?

[ikyw-t]

> matched with someone on hinge

> she starts the conversation by saying wow I agree with all of your prompts on here! are we the same person haha

> I reply and ask her what she's been reading lately

> she says I read exclusively romance, mostly fluffy romance

> we are not the same person

[room-surprise]

hi! i was wondering if in dunmeshi, before falin was eaten by the dragon and before present events, laios and his party were earning money for k*lling monsters in the dungeon? i don't understand if someone was paying them, how they were making money and how it worked

I want to write a proper, thorough reply to this with citations to specific references and mentions in the story, but uh, a tree fell on my house so I've been a bit too busy to do that lmao.

BUT, to give an incomplete answer:

Yes, adventurers get paid for work they do inside of the dungeon, or, they just harvest monsters/plants/treasure that they find. The dungeons are a kind of boom town, similar to a gold or silver rush, which means that the entire local economy is based on people trying to extract wealth from the dungeon, since it's dangerous but easy work, anyone can try to do it with very little resources, and the potential for profit is huge.

Someone with almost no money could, potentially, go into the dungeon and walk away with enough money to start a business, or buy a house or a boat. If they don't die. If they're lucky. Desperate people cling to the hope that they will be one of the lucky ones who become insanely wealthy.

Based on things Kui's told us in the manga and the extra materials, we know:

You pay a fee or a toll to be allowed to go into the dungeon. Access is controlled by the local government. Some people avoid this, like Senshi and the orcs since they just live in the dungeon and avoid leaving.

Many people die, give up, or fail to accomplish anything useful in the dungeon. These people probably generate a good, steady income for the island, since they pay fees but don't have to be rewarded. The lure of trying to strike it rich keeps huge hoards of people flowing in steadily. Most money in boom towns is generated by all the people who are trying and failing to get rich buying things from local people (food, supplies, lodging).

When a dungeon first appears, it is full of easy to harvest gold and treasure. "Gold peeling" is how Laios and Falin started out, and it's literally going into the dungeon and peeling gold off of the walls and statues, and taking any easy to transport treasure with you.

Various tasks need to be done in the dungeon to keep it safe, clean and accessible, and all of these result in a person either being paid by the lord of the island, or the person who they have saved. Killing dangerous monsters, finding people who have died and taking their corpses to the resurrection office, reporting changes to the dungeon, discovering new paths, etc.

When gold and treasure that is easy to find starts to run out, people turn primarily to harvesting monsters. They are probably paid a bounty for every monster they can prove they killed (bring back some body part that a monster only has one of, like a tail), and then they can also sell anything else they harvested from the monster in the market (meat, the rest of the hide, horns, teeth, claws.)

You want the dungeon to stay safe with a well-managed monster population to prevent something like Utaya from happening.

But if you kill too many monsters, now that the treasure is gone, there won't be any profit reason for people to go into the dungeon anymore, and your economy will collapse.

So you need to manage the dungeon and keep the monster population high, but not too high. This is what the Shadow Lord was complaining about. He thinks that if they evacuate the dungeon the expensive monsters they are currently harvesting may stop manifesting/spawning/being born, and all that will be left to harvest is mushrooms and slimes, which are not worth a lot of money.

Laios' group had an assignment from the island lord to try and find the giant doors on the 6th floor that nobody had been able to get past. That was what they were trying to do when they ran into the red dragon and Falin got eaten!

Despite everything, at that time Laios' party was the number one team on the island, capable of going the deepest into the dungeon.

Kabru's team is also considered pretty good, despite how often we see them dying - this should tell you how bad many of the teams that go in are! Most of them don't accomplish much or anything... Just like a boom town, where most miners go into debt trying to find gold, and only a few strike it rich.

This is what Rin is talking about in her first appearance, when she scolds Kabru for being too modest around other adventurers. She wants those other people to know that they are not going into the dungeon for profit and that they're not like the rest of them, dream-chasing fools hoping to make a payday.

She's offended anyone would mistake them for people like that, meanwhile Kabru would rather keep their motivations obscure and not advertise that they're in the dungeon on a moral crusade, not a financial one.

It should also be noted that the dungeon has a lot of criminal activity going on inside of it, because it's not well monitored and it's easy to conceal your activities. There's also a population of people who can "no longer live on the surface" for various reasons, such as being wanted criminals, exiles hiding to avoid vigilante justice, people too poor to leave because they wasted all their money trying to get rich and now they can't afford to live on the surface, or leave the island.

Essentially there is a population of homeless people living in the dungeon, eating anything they can scavenge, begging and stealing to stay alive. This could even be part of the taboo on eating monsters in the dungeon - that's something poor and desperate people do, and doing it is seen as a sign of how low Laios' party has fallen.

This is also why Kabru is so worried about the Touden party: their financials are a mess, but they keep going into the dungeon. Why? People think they are good, but maybe they're secretly criminals? Are they on the run from the law? Kabru has no idea, since "they just really love monsters and this is fun" is not a motivation ANYONE ELSE ON EARTH HAS.

The Toudens can't even say "we're monster researchers trying to write a book on monsters." They're just hobbyists, they just like them a lot. Kui tells us that Laios was encouraged to become a monster researcher but the studying was too intense for him.

It would be like finding out someone who works in a coal mine that kills 80% of the miners doesn't actually care about being paid, they just loooove coal and want to be around coal all the time.