#weird story time

[welcometololaland]

It’s Beas nice ask day!

So my question for you my dearest rat is What is your craziest “truth is stranger than fiction” moment you have experienced in real life?

I've thought long and hard about this Beas and I've finally come to an answer. By the way, I love the idea of a personal nice ask day. That's really sweet! I'm gonna do it one day if you don't mind me co-opting the idea 💜 when I can think of some real unhinged shit to ask.

Now, to the story.

This is kinda hard without saying people's real names, but for context, my partner has a very specific and uncommon spelling of their last name that apparently (and this is according to multiple people) means there is only a very limited number of people in Australia with that surname.

Rewind 9 years. I'm scrolling Tinder and I match with a person who has (I shit you not) the EXACT SAME FIRST AND LAST NAME as my partner. We get talking. They're nice. We joke about silly things, we get along, we talk about meeting up but it never goes any further (tldr; Tinder was a flop for me). I reckon we spoke on and off for about a month. Lovely person.

ANYWAY. I subsequently re-meet (we had met much earlier in life) my now partner. During the course of our relationship, my partner's mother brings up my partner's SECOND COUSIN, WHO HAS THE EXACT SAME NAME. IT'S THE SAME PERSON FROM TINDER. turns out, my partner's ex also studied with the Tinder match and the Tinder match and my partner are friendly acquaintances. It still is insane to me that this person is the only other person in the country with the exact same name as my partner, and I somehow managed to find them on Tinder completely by accident.

ANYWAY! VOILA!!! I HOPE YOU ENJOYED!!!

[silvanoir]

A bedtime story my mother told me, that I'm now telling you. There are no happy endings. The only original story she ever made up for me. And what an odd one. Maybe a curse. Maybe she's laughing at me even now from her grave.

Trying to edit it down for time somehow made the file size too large, so this is the full unedited unpolished version.

Goodnight.

[yeepof]

I understand that tall men are our POV characters, but surely being like a foot taller than everyone around them would have some occasional consequences

[baristabomb]

...weird amount of dunmeshi fans have been saying being a caretaker in a relationship is the worst thing ever..marcille must want to killl everyone soo bad because doing things for people suuuucks sooo muchh

it's an act of love, not just a job i promise. we all want someone who's willing to take care of us in some way, just like how senshi shows care for others by cooking for them :'|

[beanghostprincess]

On Luffy's birthday, I wanna remind all of you that one of the things that makes him one of the most influential and ground-breaking shonen protagonists is that he makes things happen. No fate or prophecy or destiny leads his path. He's the one choosing, freely, what he wants to do and he will do it. And in consequence, he makes things happen in the manga that affect everybody around him. The story doesn't tell him what to do and instead, he is the one telling how the story should go. That and the fact that his whole character is meant to spread the message of following your dreams and living with laughter and joy are the reasons why celebrating his existence is so important to so many.

[egophiliac]

swipes everything else off of the table to yell about diasomnia flower bookmarks

(I gave Silver one too :D)

[gatoburr0]

[remxedmoon]

“the eternal wanderer. even death cannot release it from its plight.”

tribeless

1 power - 1 health - 7 bones

unkillable - when a card bearing this sigil perishes, a copy of it is created in your hand.

corpse eater - if a creature that you own perishes by combat, a card bearing this sigil in your hand is automatically played in its place.

brittle - after attacking, a card bearing this sigil perishes.

hidden trait - cursebearer

this card cannot be sacrificed at the sigil stones event.

finally posting my isatscryption stuff here!!! yipee!!! here’s a writeup about the card design because frankly i put wayy too much thought into all of these cards. sorry if these are a bit hard to parse!

unkillable and corpse eater effectively make sif immortal, since every time he dies, he’ll be placed back on the board! and i thought that was fitting for. y’know. timeloop reasons. brittle is only there to emphasize the whole constantly dying thing. because is it really isat without siffrin torment

also didn’t notice this until after i designed this card, but the brittle sigil art has a star on it??? not intentional in the slightest but it is Fitting

sif is a fox here! i know that that would technically put them in the canine tribe, but i felt it’d be more fitting for them to be tribeless? and base game inscryption already kinda bends the rules when it comes to tribes (such as the bullfrog being a reptile and the rabbit being treated internally as a rodent) so i think it still works

i’m well aware that card traits don’t actually have cool names or anything but i still want to give them cool names because it’s fun. anyways! cursebearer! i gave them this trait both because these sigils are extremely overpowered, and for lore reasons. sif sees their sigils as a curse! they don’t want to force them on anyone else!! it’s their burden to bear!!!

tangentially related to that last point, but sif is a talking card in this au! because it’s fun :3. and because i think it’d be really interesting to see how he’d react to the cabin

sif’s scar is covered by the hat a bit but it’s Star Shaped. and so is the eye shine teehee

this was the first card i made and Boy Does It Show. i had the WORST time trying to get the card generators to work for this because oops! both of the card generators are inaccurate in different ways! plus theres a few mistakes in the card art that i didn’t notice until after i finished most of the others... i promise the others are a little more polished

also, since i didn’t mention it above the cut, the sigil patch is for the bone king sigil! which makes the card award 4 bones instead of 1 upon death. this is less for lore reasons and more for the synergy with his sigils. since he’s constantly dying and coming back, he can basically give you infinite bones for Zero Cost. fun!

aaand i think that’s all the notes for this card! thanks for reading this absurdly long post. here’s his alt card art without the patch for your troubles 🫡

[tsykku]

All stories must come to an end,

But what a wonderful story it was.

Thank you <3.

[freaky-flawless]

The De Nile sisters!

[folkpunkfishercat]

[greywoe]

"The she-wolf laid into the squires with a tourney sword, scattering them all. The crannogman was bruised and bloodied, so she took him back to her lair to clean his cuts and bind them up with linen."

[marlynnofmany]

Arboreal Species

We had plenty of options for ways to keep occupied while waiting for the client to show up and collect his delivery. Several of the crew were playing card games with the captain, using a delivery crate as a table, and she was beating the pants off all of them. (Though none of these particular aliens wore pants. You know what I mean.) Some of the others waited inside the ship, declaring boredom with this particular patch of exotic wilderness.

The rest chatted with crew from the ship that had arrived after us, which was also delivering cargo for the same late-to-arrive local. They had plenty to complain about. They also had food to share, and a decent chance that it would be edible by those they shared it with.

While Alien Food Roulette was always exciting, I’d found a much better option.

“Hey, they tell me your species climbs things,” the stranger from the other ship had said, long snout curling into a smile. She looked like a mix of 3/4 baboon and 1/4 crocodile.

“They’re right!” I replied easily. There weren’t many climbing opportunities on our little courier ship, and I was curious where this was going.

The alien pointed at a huge tree on the edge of the landing pad, which boasted smooth orange bark with branches every couple feet. “I’m gonna go climb that. Care to join me?”

“Would I ever!” I said, already heading toward it. I called back over my shoulder, “If you guys need me, I’ll be up a tree!”

Captain Sunlight didn’t even look away from the game, just waving distractedly, her scaly face intent on whatever play Mur had just made. He was chuckling about it and rubbing his tentacles together in a way that was probably a bluff. As soon as I looked away, he made a noise that said the good captain had just wrecked his clever plan. Trrili hissed with laughter.

None of them cared that I was about to climb to a dangerous height. None thought this was out of character in the slightest, and all of them were missing out on an excellent climbing experience.

It was a great tree. The bark was smooth but not slippery, reminding me of a madrone tree from back home, just without the flaky outer layer. And it didn’t feel as cold. If anything, it was warm as we scampered skyward, almost as if the tree welcomed a good climb by people who’d appreciate it.

The alien stopped, picking a branch to sit on and leaning back against another. “Now that is a nice view.”

I had to agree. “It is!” I found my own convenient pair of branches, draping my arms over the top one and finding a nice footrest on a third. “Everybody down there doesn’t know what they’re missing.” The forest around the landing pad was bright with oranges and yellows, the kind of vivid colors that I associated with autumn, but which could have been year-round here. Rolling hills lined the horizon, with a river sparkling merrily in the distance. The only straight line was the road. It made a nice counterpoint to all the gentler natural shapes.

My new friend cupped a hand to her snout unnecessarily. “Hey, everybody down there! You should come see this view!”

To no one’s surprise, she got a chorus of “no thanks.”

I shook my head. “Such a shame. They’re missing out on all the knowledge that comes from above, too. Hey, Paint!” I yelled down to the crewmate who had just dropped a box of round things. “One rolled under the ramp, and two are over in the grass!” I pointed them out.

A distant “Thank you!” reached my ears.

The alien nodded. “Wisdom of the heights indeed. What else can we see, that those on the ground can’t?”

We spent a good few minutes pointing things out to each other and swapping stories. Apparently her people were called the Farsights, for exactly this reason.

“Oh, motion on the road!” she declared, squinting into the distance. “Looks like somebody’s in a rush to be a little less late.”

“Well that ship has launched,” I said, following her eyes. “Nice thought, though. Say, is that one car or two?”

The Farsight didn’t answer immediately, which made me worry a little. Then she said “Uh oh,” which made me worry a lot.

“Uh oh what?”

She stood up on the branch and bellowed, “INCOMING! Client’s being chased by hostile fauna!”

“Oh jeez.” Now I could see it too: something large and antlered galloping after the little surface skimmer. Both were headed straight toward our landing pad.

Chaos erupted down below as we slid off our perches and scrambled downward. The bark was still friendly-smooth.

“I think that creature eats these!” my friend said, bounding out toward the end of a branch to shake loose a bundle of round seedpod things. “I’ve seen them before!”

“Will that matter?” I asked, slowing. “It looks pretty mad!”

“Can’t hurt!”

I couldn’t argue that. There were more than a few seedpods waiting on my path down, all of which came loose with a little judicious bouncing of the branches. When I hit the ground, it was in a sea of baseball-shaped plant bits.

The rest of the crew was scrambling to move crates and dash into the ships for anything weaponlike. A handful of beefy individuals from the other crew lined up to stare the thing down as it approached, and my ship’s biggest and scariest hurried to join them. Trrili claimed a place in front with her black-and-red carapace gleaming in the sun, pincher arms spread wide. She left space for the skimmer to zip past, but only just.

I grabbed seedpods, making a basket with my shirt. “Will we need these? Is it going to stop?”

“Beats me!” said my new friend. She grabbed an armload and ran. “Let’s find out!”

I raced after. We joined the lineup just before the gigantic whatever-it-was skidded to a halt, rearing to paw the air and roar thunderously. The guy in the skimmer was trying to park behind our ship. The various scary aliens yelled back at the huge moose-rhino.

“How well can you throw?” asked my friend, not waiting for an answer. She dumped her armload and started chucking seedpods.

“Pretty well!” I didn’t bother dropping mine, just grabbing them one by one from my shirt basket and aiming for the head.

I didn’t count how many of those direct shots were me, but I’m going to say most of them. The pods burst into squishy fruit with a solid core, doing a great job of annoying the creature as well as coating it with presumably-tasty purple goo.

Its forefeet hit the ground with a teeth-rattling thud. It roared some more, but half-heartedly, like it was just trying to save face at this point.

My friend the Farsight had run out of seedpods, so I gave her some of mine. While our crewmates did their best threat displays, we pelted the dangerous beastie with fruit until it turned to lope in the other direction. I made sure to throw a few on the road near it, in case it felt like picking up a bite to eat on the way. It didn’t, but I did see a tongue lick out as it turned its back on us.

Belatedly, Kavlae and Eggskin skidded out of our ship with stun guns at the same time as a couple people from the other — was that a rocket launcher or a flare gun? — none of which turned out to be necessary.

“Take that and eat it!” crowed the Farsight.

“Yeah!” I agreed. “It’s probably delicious!”

“It probably is, actually,” she said as the congratulations started to pour in.

I picked up a seedpod I’d dropped and sniffed it. “Smells a bit like kumquat.”

Captain Sunlight, busy trying to coax the client out of his vehicle, yelled across the landing pad, “Don’t eat that until Eggskin runs it through the medscanner!”

“Aw, really?” I complained, perfectly in synch with my new friend.

“Yes really!” She shook her lizardy head. I couldn’t make out her muttering from here, but I could guess it was about omnivorous habits, self-preservation instincts, absurd treeclimbing species, or all of the above.

The Farsight said, “If these are safe, I’m taking some back with me.”

“Even if they’re not, the seeds would make good souvenirs,” I pointed out, pulling at the pod where it had separated. “Look how perfectly round they are.”

“Oh yeah, those are nice.”

Trrili stalked past with a haughty tilt to her antennae. “You two get along far too well.”

“Like two seeds in a pod!” the Farsight quipped.

That made me smile. “Hey, my people say that too!”

We had plenty to talk about while everybody else handled the actual delivery we were there for. Eventually Eggskin did check the thing with a medscanner. It tasted like sour kumquat. The seeds cleaned up nicely.

And most importantly, my new friend had family with a whole enclave at the next space station my ship was planning to visit. And they had a climbing structure three stories high. I couldn’t wait.

The rest of the crew thought that sounded pointless and dangerous, of course, but none of them had ancestors who danced through the tree branches, so clearly they have no taste.

~~~

The ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book. More to come! And I am currently drafting a sequel!

[blossoms-phan]

many people are afraid to be real lovers. dan and phil are not

[kedreeva]

#we spoke of this a LOT at work after that one tech was murdered and hidden in a wall

hi!👋 hello! kedreeva! i’m going to need to ask you to explain this!!!!

So back in 2009, a lab student named Annie Le was murdered at Yale university. Cameras saw her going on into a building, but not out again and it was like, the eve of her wedding (or close to? I don't remember) so clearly she had places to be and people waiting for her so they immediately started looking and the next day (or so? Anyway on the day of her wedding) they found her body in a recess in a wall, down in the areas where the research animals were kept. It turns out, a tech had killed her, but since there were cameras like EVERYWHERE, he just, I guess, left her there. Well, hid the body where it was. I don't remember how they caught him, but they did. It was a horrifying story. It still is.

And it was a huge news story among the folks at my workplace because, at the time, I was working at a different university, as an animal husbandry technician. As you can imagine this was a kind of intense time to be in that situation. They started offering, like, I'm not gonna say counseling but it was "if you need to talk we would prefer you talk to us about something wrong rather than kill anyone about it" and as techs (even if we were not even the same kind of tech, the killer was a lab tech and we were husbandry techs but I think a lot of people assumed it had been a husbandry tech since she was in an animal area), we were kind of getting the side eye from lab people for weeks afterwards. Like they thought we were gonna go "wow that's a fantastic idea, you're next!" or something, idk. And I mean like, people would freeze when you were alone in a hallway, or turn and walk the other way, or duck into the nearest room and watch you walk past, and they were all being super nice/civil to us when they did have to interact. It was very atypical behavior for lab people. Like not all of them, some of them had always been nice and weren't worried, but some of the people who had been unbelievable dicks previously were walking on eggshells. And the people who had friends in other universities reported this was happening at their jobs, too.

And instead of talking to The Man (because all the higher ups were garbage at the time), we just. talked among ourselves. It was a lot of "I may say I feel like strangling lab people sometimes when they do things that drive me up a wall but I don't MEAN it you know that right" and it also led to group discussions of what would be a theoretical *better* solution to hiding a body than what happened, with clear disdain for doing things like hiding bodies in walls, which is a terrible idea and one we would never do (looking at the people who think we might have decided this was a great idea actually).

Which consequently led to a lot of supervisors and/or managers that happened to overhear us bringing us donuts or arranging pizza for lunch in like, some kind of bid to help us feel appreciated, I guess, so that we wouldn't murder anyone, even though none of us were going to do that anyway. But also none of us were in a position to turn down free donuts or pizza or whatever.

And then after a few weeks, maybe a month or so, people just kind of forgot and moved on and things went back to normal like fifty people hadn't spent every lunch hour for weeks talking quietly among themselves about how human bodies would definitely fit into a carcass disposal barrel or that you'd have to crush hip bones and/or skulls before incineration. Hypothetically.

Like I said, it was a VERY weird time to be at my job, and every time I remember it happening feels like a fever dream. I can't even imagine what it was like at Yale.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

cosplay of main character li huowang 李火旺 from next big chinese IP 道诡异仙dao gui yi xian/Dao of the Bizarre Immortal (chinese fantacy-thriller-suspense fiction based on dao culture) and the last part is the trailer of anime unreleased yet