#world without magic

[rosesareredandtheskyisthelimit]

[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.”

[lurkerdemon]

Random DP x DC Thought #9:

The fight was desperately going on against the villains near a newly located Lazarus Pit, but despite the heroes best efforts they couldn't prevent one of their own suffering a fatal injury.

Per usual desperation to avoid having to go through life with that loss, the dead person is placed into the Lazarus Pit for revival. (The cost of a bout of possible madness could be dealt with, and at the very least it would remove another one of the pits from the world).

Except this time when the revived person comes back out of the waters, the Lazarus Pit doesn't leave. Shrinks certainly, but still roils and churns before a large, glowing creature with white fur looms over all those gathered. Their blue cape flutters slightly as it floats up above the waters.

"Greetings, I am Frostbite of the Far Frozen. I have come to request-"

A head of white hair and glowing green eyes pops up from behind the being's shoulder.

"STOP THROWING SO MANY PATIENTS INTO PORTALS! YOU'RE STRESSING OUT THE YETIS!"

[rendevok]

step into the light

what do you see?

my sun,

my stars

shining on me

[shikariiin]

Lady Meredith Topham hatt.

The "Mother" and Savior of the Engine's race.

[mndvx]

BOY KILLS WORLD (2024) dir. Moritz Mohr ››› Bill Skarsgård as Boy

[a2remedy]

DPXDC Prompt# 5- War between Warlocks

-A dichotomy I love has always been hard worker vs natural talent, so let's take this running.

Constantine spent the day lying on his couch. A new pack of beer and smokes are beside him while he's watching one of Z's performances while she's off world. A usual partly cloudy in Liverpool.

It was nice....

-Or it would've been nice if he couldn't recall who he saw. Correction, who he thought he saw. Because there was no bloody way that magic-wielding bastard survived. ...

Shut up.

It wasn't real. It couldn't have been real.

But karma was a bitch and it was making itself known.

For once in his life, John's phone was still.

Nobody.

Nobody has reached out to him to exorcise anything for a week and he was slowly losing his shit. Looks like he has to go out and find out for himself. ---

Danny couldn't help but laugh.

That marks his 10th exorcism this week, and he could already see the con man pulling his hair out when he just chose to take a little weight off an old 'friend's' shoulders while he's on his vacation from ghost king business.

He must be pissed.

It couldn't be helped. Danny's natural disposition made magic a breeze. He's one of the most occult things there is, after all. If he can't dodge it all, he might as well embrace it. Who could've guessed it would come with the scruffiest blonde with a fun accent getting on his case? John Constantine. A delight to watch work and in bed. That's all in the past now, anyways. Sometimes, he just needed to take a minute to remind himself that he's human, too. What better way to do than to fuck with the one person he's felt most like that with?

He felt horrible thinking his last moment with John was going to be looking at the desperation and fear written all over his face. No need for that now. The spark of a locator spell flickered off his barrier on the rooftop. He cackled as he heard John's "I BLOODY KNEW IT!" through the streets. The phone in his pocket buzzed again. John really was such a busy man. He ensured the non-teleportation tattoo he made last time hadn't faded before hopping to the next roof and answering. "This is Hex speaking. I've stolen John's phone, but I can assure you I can get the job done ten times easier than he can." Making his way out of a portal on the roof he left, "I can hear you, cheeky bastard!" "That's the point, dipshit!" Danny stuck out his tongue and kept moving. Tsk. Barely 5 minutes to catch up. Looks like he's getting rusty. Oh well, nothing a little refresher and practice can't fix.

Thus began the reunion between a king and a con man.

[saltyowlets]

Alt text:

Vivienne is not pro-templar as many would think. She is just using the resources she has in hand in order to work with a system that would rather throw her and the rest of the mages into an inescapable pit. Vivienne's insistence of using the templars is indicative of her awareness of the dangers of magic but she has made it clear that as much as magic serves man, templars serves mages as protectors. She does not trust templars as much as the average mage but knows that there is no easy solution to the weak Veil and the lack of protection the mage rebellion has brought upon other Circle mages. Vivienne does not hate or look down upon other mages as her efforts are clearly to support the mages if she is made Divine. Additionally, her quest was initially supposed to be about collecting phylacteries in order to keep mages safe from templars and mage hunters. She cares about mages enough to chain the templars and if you have a good relationship with her, allow the College to exist.

[fisheito]

opinions on eiden taking a shower in a public bathroom with bare feet i couldn't even enjoy the scene because i was so horrified eiden where are your shower slippers Jesus

you bring it up and i realise i had my suspending-disbelief-yaoi-immunity goggles on thru the whole scene believing that essence naturally acts as some sorta full-body magical shield against germs and disease 😅😅 i mean. how else are these mens gonna hoe out that severely and NOT get taken down by the most mundane sexually-or-platonically-transmitted infections

[rileys-battlecats]

girl help I started writing down oc thoughts and have started contemplating the logistics of how a city carved into the walls of a ravine would have access to fresh water

[vaguely-concerned]

walking through lucanis' mind prison. the tam lin of it all

[menlove]

I hate when smth Bad happens in the states and there's immediately like 10 smug posts like "ugh the us isn't the whole world you know there's good things happening in other countries" as if a) the us isn't a world super power and this very much will have incredibly horrible consequences for many, many other countries like please tell that to mexicans rn especially but also b) you say that shit to literally anyone else on earth like 💀 don't worry about the country where you live that impacts you! when things are bad remember other people have it better! like okay man but unfortunately I do still live here like......

[greenerteacups]

random but - how do you think wandless magic works? I assume that at some point (soon?) hermione would want to learn or at least try, particularly if the teachers say some version of it is too difficult. thanks!

Oh, man. If you're talking in canon, I kind of have no idea! It's a real puzzler for me. We get a wealth of different incidents of wandless magic, but we never get a decisive statement for why you can use some wandless magic and when not.

All the examples of wandless magic we see in canon are either the intentional work of master wizards (cf. Dumbledore and Voldemort in the climax of Philosopher's Stone) or, conversely, children: Harry disappears the glass at the zoo, Tom Riddle is implied to torture other children at the orphanage, Lily makes flowers grow and makes herself float(?), all at various levels of intention. That suggests wandless magic is at some intersection of intuition and high-level magical theory. There is one exception, which is Harry's use of Lumos in Chapter 1 of Order of the Phoenix, where he lights his wand without touching it. I'm going to cautiously treat this case as an aberration, because Deathly Hallows effectively retcons the use of "wandless" wand-magic by basing several key plot points on whether or not someone wields, i.e. is physically touching, a wand. Potentially you could argue that Harry's ability to do this is an indication of him being an extremely powerful wizard on the order of Dumbledore or Voldemort, but the writing of the scene doesn't really support that interpretation, nor does the fact that it's never brought up again.

The number of children who perform wandless magic suggests a connection with emotional regulation or self-control, but at the same time, we see many points in the series where someone loses control and has no wandless magic. For instance, when Sirius dies, or when Hermione's being tortured at Malfoy Manor, we don't see Harry or Ron doing wandless magic. So you might then think the process of learning to use a wand "trains" your magic to operate through wandcraft, and you then have to "unlearn" your way back to wandless magic at very advanced stages. Or that the self-discipline you learn during a formal magical education decreases the outbursts of magic, and since wands are so useful and easy to acquire, most wizards just don't bother to learn to do magic without them.

How much Hermione would enjoy wandless magic, in my opinion, depends a lot on the tech level of the magic system. Wand-magic includes these neat little incantations and gestures that she can execute and reliably expect a result. When you get into the wishy-washy touchy-feely stuff, like Patronuses, she gets skittish and frustrated. If there was an established system for using wandless magic, she'd probably find it quite useful, but I'm not sure that such a system exists. (Perhaps that's on the transformative artist, however, to think of one.)

[witchofthesouls]

Look at these three:

It's from that TFP barbarians/city-dwellers twist on a really out there verse where Others from Earth managed to make Cybertron a home AU I was talking about.

D-16 here is doing his best to get these two acclimated to Neocybex, both the Common and Ilmentite (a dialect that's utilized by deep underground miners). He has treats hidden in his hands if they can get specific glyphs right. Scraplet/Orion is very much motivated by food. Juno is highly motivated to get the language down so she can wholly curse the mecha that stole her away and be understood by everyone.

Because D-16 no longer has companions his age, he latched onto the two little 'newcomers.' as they're the only ones that can venture out and do their part to help the cohort. He's happily 'mentoring' as he mimicking what the adults do for the fresh newbuilds. The adults around him think it's both cute and disheartening as no one has the spark to tell D-16 that there's a really high probability that those two won't make it (Spoilers: they do.) as sparklings that get sold to the mines typically have issues that surface-dwellers refuse to take.

Although Orion is the oldest of the three, D-16 had more consistent meals and the protection of an adult cohort to ensure he was able to develop normally. While Orion is shorter and less ornate due to delays, he has a far greater tolerance for different fuels, denta capable of crushing rocks, talons on agile hands, and very advanced sensory systems. Hence why his audials and antenna are detailed. Right now, he's pinging and listening around them in case anything (or one) tries to sneak behind them. That box is his best friend as Orion can't believe these mecha just try to throw away decent food! (It's a disposal crate meant that's currently meant for minerals. And yes, Orion sleeps curled up to it.)

Juno (a June Darby that descended from a Cybertron/Earth hybrid) is fretted upon by the adult miners around her. Because of her heritage, her armature is relatively weak, and those 'thin' robes are a part of it. Unlike a usual Cybertronian sparkling that can not remove their armature until a later stage in adolescence, her kind can due to their extended duration of frame development and constant manipulation due to a cross of Earth shapeshifters/humans and Cybertronians over the generations. (Their communities developed a strange relationship between wearable clothes and their natural-born armature.) The mask is part of her tribe's way of life. Less about hiding identity and more to help the young tap into latent abilities by drawing on the blank slate to invoke simple spells or transformations. That blank mask with those empty and dark optic holes creeped out many until she took it off. Nor does she have a 'proper' helm as she has an exposed mess of thin cabling that she can control. She has them tucked away in low buns whenever she needs to follow D-16 or his parent's cohort out of the Den. D-16 likes poking them since he never seen anything like that in his life. Despite her small stature and dainty appearance, she's a little menace that's currently full of rage and would absolutely bite the throats out of the mecha that stole her.

The harness she has isn't from her tribe but from the Snatchers. It's actually a specialized inhibitor and a tracker. The raiding caravan was hoping for the nearby Wilders to launch a rescue so they could track exactly where the main of the communities since young creatures, practitioners, and Seekerkin would fetch the highest credits and prizes from high rollers and the elite. Since her robes have sigils and runes carved inside to hide her and she lacks a T-cog, she was sold to the Tarn's mines as she seemingly had none of the 'exotic' and powerful abilities of the Wilders.

Some little extra details:

The boys are far more dirty since Juno has some sigils to keep herself clean for longer periods of time

D-16 is playing 'I spy'

Those blocky thick stripes on D-16 are harzard stripes and doubles as a unique identifier to his creators' cohort in case anything happens since D-16 doesn't count as a full person yet

The miners are trying to figure out how to keep it on Juno

Orion has it on his back

The box in Orion's hands has two Cybertronian scripts. The top is Common Neocybex (TFOne glyphs), which reads DISPO. Shorthand for disposal. It reads left to right. The other is the written version of Ilmentite (glyphs from Gen 1 comic and Transformers video games). It actually skips vowels and reads top-down. It's cut off, but it says MINERALS.

Orion's antenna and audials make subtly clicks and can move independently.

[solarkindred]

Did you know your soul, your life, is a borrowed one Arthur? Did you? Did you know that your very being is a direct copy of Ygraine? Your kindness, your heart, your bravery, you, Arthur, are an embodiment of the thing your father hates? Did you know that in the creation of you, your mother loved so much the gods deigned her to be the template you would be based on, given life by the magic of the land, skies and seas?

You are born of magic and love itself, Arthur. You are a gift of the gods, blessed and cursed, beloved and loathed. You, Arthur, Prince of Camelot, son of Uther Pendragon, Insurgent of Magic, are magic itself brought upon by the force of great strength and weakness.

[jhoneybees]

Sunshine cascading through the trees landing onto the cheek of the most beautifully sculpted❤️❤️❤️

My heart: EEEEEHEHHEEHEEEE