winterpinetrees

[winterpinetrees]

I’m back at it again.

go attack @lokiwaffles while you’re at it

[winterpinetrees]

everything is very bad in this modern age but i truly think Merlin Bird ID App is a wonder so astonishing that it almost makes everything else worth it. like you can just sit somewhere and listen to birds and 4 minutes later you will know stuff you didn't know before. not only that but you might even retain that knowledge. this morning i sat with my coffee and let Merlin record my surroundings for 4 minutes and now i know 1) what a northern parula sounds like 2) that i have been listening to northern parulas for years without being aware that they even existed. this cheerful little gold-and-gray guy has been trilling at me my whole life and i've never known his name and now i do! you can sit there and hear something and think "that sounds familiar, i'd like to know what that is" and then look down and see the little bird ID light up LIVE. ohhh of course, a red-eyed vireo, how could i have forgotten. AI good actually.

[winterpinetrees]

Triangles and Third Wheels (The Gap Years 2x13)

October 21st

Brian is the driver, but except for evasive maneuvers, he rarely picks where they go. Instead, Sierra tracks a mysterious signal and Marin tries to reach his friends. He’s being pulled in at least two directions, and something is bound to be lost along the way. Hopefully it’s not his mind. He’s not brainwashed anymore. Probably. Brian couldn’t tell last time, could he?

Previous

Navigation Guide

…………………

Whenever they really pause at a crossroads, which isn’t too often, Brian thinks of a poem he doesn’t even like. It’s Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Travelled”, which isn’t as profound as everyone pretends. The man had other poems that could’ve been in Dead Poet’s Society. Like “Birches” with it’s long block of blank verse, or “A Question”, which fits so well with the themes of what it costs to have art and love.

For his part, Brian is also wondering “if all those soul-and-body scars” are worth the magic of the past four months. His eye color wavers in the rear view mirror. They’re supposed to be sky blue, but the sky isn’t always blue, is it? The horizon goes orange just before it gets dark. Brian doesn’t like to drive at sunset anymore.

Where was he? Yes, the road less travelled. Two paths diverge in a yellow wood and the poet cannot travel both. His paths diverge in a harvested field that might have been yellow last week. Brian has no way of knowing which of their paths is the road less taken. Neither one is even clear. Marin pours over the message the Adusts have sent, slowly decoding the location of his friends. It’s definitely south! The other road is made of calculations with too many variables. At about 9pm after they set up the receiver, Sierra’s newest gadget recorded a series of pulses. Clay and Marin scrambled off across the city, uprooting the receiver, carrying it to the Audacity, and racing south to set it back up before the transmission stopped. They caught the very end. It didn’t give them the information they were hoping for.

Sierra designed the receiver to be more sensitive in one direction than all the others, which gave her an angle for the incoming pulses. She’d danced around explaining the math, almost like she forgot he’d learned it too? Sure, he’s going to the same Ivy League university as his father (and grandfather, and he doesn’t want to think about anyone else), but it’s not the 80s anymore! He still needed damn good grades for it! Besides, the math is simple trigonometry. Two angles plus a known distance between makes for a calculable third point. Anyone can do it, what with online maps for the distance and online calculators to manage the equations.

Even better, he has a hope that those advantages are limited to humans! The elves don't have GPS anymore; their satellites are all out of service after too many centuries without a space program. Magic makes computers go weird as well. Marin’s more powerful than most, but he keeps his new cell phone in a radiation-shielded pouch, so maybe personal calculators aren’t part of the elven experience? However, he’s overheard Marin mentioning his ability to do calculations so advanced that even Sierra is outmatched, so maybe spending decades with the mind of a. teenager instead of six years makes calculators less necessary.

Marin’s skill with arithmetic wasn’t enough. They could still only tell that the pulses were coming from the southeast. The problem was with the precision of their data. Her gadget can tell the angle of a broadcast to within about a degree, and she’s getting the exact same heading from both locations. Sierra claims that’s not so bad, though she sounded distressed. It just means they’re too far from the target, right? They did first pick up the signal in Missouri - Missouri!- five hundred miles south, and the distance between readings was only a mile and a half. The tracker will work correctly if they get closer.

“How close do we need to be?” Clay asks, hunched over his folded hands.

“About seventy-five miles to start properly triangulating things, assuming we keep the base of the triangle that big,” Sierra replies, then seems to wait for something.

“We drive seventy-five miles an hour half the time”.

Brian scoffs. “Only when we’re running from someone. I’m a very safe driver”.

Marin consults the map she’s pulled up onto the computer. A line runs southeast from their location, skimming the bottom of Lake Michigan on its way down to West Virginia.

“The signal is coming from that direction?”’

Sierra nods. “Somewhere along that line”.

“It’s a completely different direction from where the Adusts are”.

“We could set up the radio again to the south,” Brian proposes, pointing at the rolling fields of Iowa that they just left. “That would tell us more, and help you get back to your friends”.

Somewhere down south, Zerada and Jezero have teamed up with Marin’s older cousin. The prince is shocked by the open ambition, but not Brian. He already knows that Zerada likes to take from others.

Sierra shakes her head and twists her bracelets. “It’s not that simple. We can only triangulate if the signals are all coming from the same location. That’s why we had to take both measurements at the same time, so we could be sure”.

“Well, we don’t have anything to lose”.

So they’re back! They’re back in the cornfields, which Marin mentions is the plot of a Twilight Zone episode. Sierra keeps muttering about experimental conditions and Clay keeps asking if he wants to switch drivers. He’s fine right here, hands on the wheel in the nowhere just north of Des Moines. It’s taken five hours to get there and the sun is high in the sky. The most direct path south would’ve taken only about three and a half hours, but staying on a single highway for that long would be hubris. Maybe they’d all have gone insane without some variety as well. Instead he wove east and west, watching the horizon outside their windows gradually become an unbroken line between blue sky above and brownish farmland below. They tracked time by contrasting song choices and distance by weird billboards. Near the state border, Marin intruded into his domain and slid open the sunroof. He stood precariously, like Sierra once did before getting shot by Councillor Kebero, and made comments about their surroundings. For an eighty-six year old elf living a life defined by ancient dynasties, he sure is confused by people with bumper stickers from the last election. They saw fifteen states of license plates, a hot pink Toyota, and a billboard for the Iowa Zoo.

“Life and death, can we go to the zoo?” Marin said, bracing against the high winds over the top of the car.

“Why? They’re not gonna have a sabertooth tiger,” Sierra snaps.

His expression is a mix of things, and Brian looks away from the road to stare up at him. The elf seems confused, and disappointed. “Obviously? What?” Then his ears tilt down. “They’re not even my favorite animal”.

Brian barks a very quick laugh, then catches himself. Marin sounds nothing if not sincere.

“Um. What is your favorite animal?”

“Not quite sure. I think seeing a few will help me decide”.

And now they’re at the zoo! He hasn’t been to one in years. They read the informational plaques and make bad jokes (He points at a monkey and says “look, it’s Clay”). Marin’s references are more fantastical. The symbols of the two noble families that pass the throne back and forth are both extinct: Genus Sondaica has a sabertooth and Genus Mercuralis has the aurochs, which is a fancy bull. However, he points out a few of the rest. A wild boar (though not the right species) for Genus Eburos, old enemies led by an eccentric old man who loves creating terrible plagues as much as he loves curing them. A wolf for Gens Marolak, sworn allies of Marin’s family until Devana turned traitor. He remembers her well, both for her appearance, which was more like a Tolkien dwarf than an elf, and for the black eye she gave him back in Maze. Brian felt a bone in her chest break though, so they’re even. A raptor represents the neon-blue Tiercels, but none of them can put a real person’s face to the name. One was part of the very first ambush against them, but Brian broke his ribcage with a crowbar and Clay shot him in the back. Marin thinks he’s still alive, but only because no one’s come for revenge.

“What’s wrong with sabertooth tigers?” Clay asks by the enclosure of a not-yet extinct variety of cat.

Marin hooks his fingers through the loops of the fence. A tiger splashes in the water thirty feet away, separated from them by a deep ravine and a tall fence. How difficult would it be for an elf like Marin to leap across both?

“I like tigers just fine, but sabertooths aren’t the same. They’re not closely related at all”.

Brian leans against the fence, not thinking of biology or taxonomy at all. “Which one’s better?”

“No animal is better than any other. They’re all perfectly fit for different environments. That’s the whole point of adaptation”.

“Yeah, but which one is cooler”.

“Listen, if your fathers had mascots, I bet they wouldn’t be your favorite animal either”.

They all stare across the moat. Sierra adds that her dad does have a mascot, but it’s a dude from Greek myth and not even one of the heroic ones. Her father may only be stealing Daedalus’s image (he’s a businessman who likes sci-fi, not an inventor), but it can’t shake the truth that nothing good happened to Daedalus’s favorite child. “Can’t drive a car too close to the sun, at least”.

With four nervous teens and a car radio, Brian doesn’t hear silence often. He breaks it. “Fair point. Which one would you rather fight?”.

Marin’s reply is instant. “Sabertooth”. They give a chorus of complaints. What about the teeth?

“They’re slower, and usually hunt in packs. If tigers are like elves, then sabertooths are humans with swords. I’d still rather fight the human”.

Clay actually laughs at that. “I’m sorry. Did you just compare humans, the overpopulated losers you’re plotting to conquer, to tigers?”

“I was specifically comparing hunting style. Sabertooths are more robust. Elves are delicate. Except for Ishtar Mercuralis, but that’s different”.

The Siberian tiger in the enclosure is four hundred pounds and could comfortably rest its paws on his shoulders. The informational sign says that they fight bears in their natural habitat. In what world does that qualify as delicate?

They feed the birds and decide to leave. The zoo closes soon, and Sierra must want to be back on the road in case new signals occur. There’s no way out except through the gift shop, but unlike at the carnival months before, Marin doesn’t pause to look at the stuffed animals. There’s certainly gift-giving in politics, but Brian’s father deals in trade agreements and shortened prison sentences rather than teddy bears. Besides, Zerada is clearly more interested in toying with humans than with anything Marin can provide.

He doesn’t know her sibling as well. Jezero Adust struck him as a bolder version of Zerada during the few days he spent in the Audacity. He had sharp teeth, less ambiguous features, and lopsided grin that only seemed more crooked after he escaped the glacier prison without Sierra, or his best friend. It was as though being the firstborn made them a rough draft and Zerada, despite her dangers, was the polished final result. Maybe elves can do just that. Marin has spoken about genetic engineering, like how his hazel eyes and the texture of his hair mean that his and Zerada’s future children should be “reset” a bit to look like proper Sondaicas.

His personality was similar. While Zerada didn’t take long to make advances after they first met, nothing was ever as shameless as Jezero flirting ten seconds after they’d been broken out of prison. Well, except for the mind control. Some of my best work, if you can appreciate it. He doesn’t have any appreciation to spare for gerrymandered voting districts or healthcare profit margins either. Brian knows what it’s like to fight, but he wants to be a player, not a pawn. No one man can drag a baseball team to victory, but he steps up to bat and tries his best. Zerada didn’t even let him know he was brainwashed. No fighting from the inside for him! Just a weird dream one night in her arms and she’s driving off within the hour. She said nothing would be different, that she would never abandon her oldest friend and first lover just because one human got wise. What will she say about that once they show up and see her working with Marin’s main competitor for the throne?

Back in the car, they drive to a motel while Sierra quietly considers her gadget. The pulses of activity haven’t yielded a way to predict the next batch. However, they appear most days in the evening, sometimes stretching long into the night. She hooks a digital compass up to the receiver and buckles it into the backseat. These Iowa roads are desolate. Once they get a ping, the four of them will drive east as fast as they can until it stops. Marin might even vault out a window to get to the parking lot quicker. Their emissary thought it would be better to drive north or south for the direction. Her hunch is that the signal is coming from a radio dead zone in West Virginia, and that going east might not give useful data. She might be a hacker, but Sierra knows best with hardware. She’s calling her own shots.

Wherever the signals are from, they begin earlier that night, at about 7:30pm. Clay swings his rifle over one shoulder and whacks the receiver on his way into the backseat. Sierra yells at him from the passenger seat like he’d just hit a child. They race down the two-lane highway, probably too fast in the deepening darkness, but they have magic, and who else would be driving now? She watches her laptop while Marin looks out at the stars above them. They get a signal every few minutes, and Brian keeps driving after the last one because they just don’t realize it’s over. Once they’re sure, Sierra turns off her cell reception and he drives the car back to their motel. He isn’t sure how far they’ve gone as the crow flies, but he’d guess around thirty miles. A useful side effect of all of this is that it probably looks like they’re headed east.

She crunches the numbers while they circle back around.

“Finally. Something good today,” Sierra says, and that’s when Brian (who has existed more or less outside of time and without technology on this quest) realizes the date. October 21st.

“What happened? Did you get a location?” Marin replies unawares. Elves probably don’t care about birthdays. They have so many.

“I think so. Check this math for me”.

Marin delicately removes his phone from its pouch, and Brian imagines a tiger poking the calculator app with a single claw.

“I’m not familiar with human units, but I’m getting the same thing. The signal is coming from a little over two hundred miles away ”. He returns the notebook over the back of the seat. Despite his age, Marin’s hands are about as calloused than her’s.

Sierra mutters about angles and distances. Then she starts muttering about him. “You were right about getting more data from the south. 240 miles away at the calculated angle puts us almost exactly on the line from last time. The signal is coming from the same place. Marin, can you do the math using results from today and yesterday? The distance in between both cities is 253 miles”.

“I barely know what a mile is, why can’t you do it?”

Brian stares him down through the mirror. “Because her birthday was today. Uh. Happy birthday Sierra!”. Clay swears out loud and Marin resumes the math.

She closes her eyes. “Our mysterious emissary wished me a happy birthday this morning. Saw the text right when I woke up”.

Clay turned 19 during their break back home in San Francisco. He’s technically a few days too old for their grade, but people pull strings. They got him a cake and everything, even if he slipped away to go do some light trespassing after.

“How about instead of you boys apologizing, you give me the best birthday present you can and we go see what’s been causing this signal?”

“What about Zerada? Do we really want to leave her waiting?”

Sierra tenses in the seat beside him, and Brian works out, but her judgement is a weight he can’t carry.

“She’s gotten everything she wants for long enough. Put your friends first”.

…………

Clay’s birthday is August 26th, Sierra’s is October 21st, and Brian’s is February 4th. Marin’s is in March, close enough to the holiday celebrating Lazarus’s conquests (their national holiday) that it’s usually been subsumed by it. Elves don’t really celebrate annual birthdays anyway. Every 9 years is a milestone for the nobility (Voyagers celebrate every 8), but Marin’s next birthday is his 87th, and that’s just another year of his gap years that no elf cares about. It’s like turning 19. You don’t get any new rights, so who cares?

@lokiwaffles @reggie246

[winterpinetrees]

Relistening to the Hadestown soundtrack a lot recently and you know what. I think one of the biggest things that ultimately doomed Orpheus is he changed the shape of his song and his resistance to please Hades. He's "working on a song" that "isn't finished yet", but when he DOES finish it, who is the audience for that song? Not the people he's trying to free, but the God he's trying to take his lover back from.

Epic I is mostly about setting the scene if like, any audience members happened to NOT know the story of Orpheus/Euridyce, but it's still directly critical of Hades. Hades saw her, he wanted her, he fell in love with her because of how she moved in the sun, and the shape of his wanting necessities someone else's deprivation. So he took her where "the sun never shone on anyone", and the world was worse off until she won her 6 months of freedom.

Epic II is the most directly critical of Hades. He is "king of silver, king of gold", king of "everything glithering under the earth", and his capitalist hunger means that will never be enough. Epic II emphasizes Hades' jealousy that someone he wants could ever want to be somewhere else, even temporarily, his exploitation of workers, how the riches that he violently guards only exist because of "a million hands that are not his own".

But Epic III? Epic III is the story defanged. Hades fell in love. It takes away his agency and his responsibility in his own cruelty. It pays deference to him as king put quickly pivots to framing him as just "a poor boy", "afraid", versus a God. but he was always a God! Orpheus tries to reach him by appealing to Hades' view of himself -- a hard worker, laboring thanklessly for the woman he adores, the woman he fights for. He tries to reach him by helping Hades remember love. And it... doesn't work. It can't work.

Hades will never let him go. He will "let them try", but he rigs the game and lays the stakes, and more importantly by capitulating to Hades' rules and agreeing to play the game on Hades' terms and reshaping his song to please the very God he is trying to outsmart, Orpheus loses himself, and he loses the strength and resiliance needed to take Euridyce (and the other Workers!) home.

Something something about how art can be people power and resistance and revolution, but it is also so easy for that resistance to be taken and twisted away from us. It's so easy for that power to be freely given, by us, in some hopeful-hopeless attempt to win over people who will never, ever simply allow us to leave. And how that process systematically removes any real power our art and voices once had because when you play by their rules, you lose. "It's an old tale, it's a tragedy".

And I say all of this knowing that Hadestown itself is has now become a comercial product. Sure we sing it again and again and again, but can we take it back? Once we give it away. Can we take it back?

[winterpinetrees]

it’s you or me

[winterpinetrees]

Being an elfling in third-age middle earth must be so annoying. You mention that it's a little chilly out only for one of those first-age elves to pop up and say you think this is cold? back in my day we spent thirty years of torment crossing the Grinding Ice with naught but Varda's stars to provide light in the evil darkness. i lost 3 toes.

Or you mention that your arms are sore and a guy that is more scar than elf screams across the training ground that Maedhros The Tall was hung by his wrist from the peak of Thangorodrim for thirty long years and you never heard HIM complaining.

[winterpinetrees]

Finished raven with shinies on a backpack

(inspired by some similar patches that have been going around)

[image id: embroidery and applique patch of a raven; a variety of shiny silver objects are sewn on below it]

[winterpinetrees]

What a fascinating selection of questions with mildly deranged answers. Chassm, you are single-handedly earning this website its reputation.

Animal: Perhaps I am not tumblr’s target audience but being any non-human animal seems less enjoyable than being human. I like having opposable thumbs.

what would you choose when you're in a hurry and have nothing to wear?: T-shirt and pants? I always have tshirt and pants.

Are you a witch, vampire, fairy, dryad, siren or a mermaid and why do you think so?: I don't think I can say "witch" with any sort of dignity. I can't stand astrology and crystal healing is worse. (don't poach endangered plants either)

what is your style?: I can embroider and have a growing collection of jumpsuits.

regular milk or plant based milk?: regular milk is better for baking, dairy products, etc. I don't drink either.

which one do you put first milk or cereal?: Dry cereal only.

fav way to kill someone?: look, i barely even kill off characters. With symbolism, i guess.

@lokiwaffles

yk what I'll also do this get to know your mutuals cuz I thought bout it for a bit and I think I have to or I'll explode

get to know your mutuals♡

if you could be any animal which one would you choose to be? (can be fictional) (and you can explain why if you want to)

what would you choose when you're in a hurry and have nothing to wear?

are you a witch, vampire, fairy, dryad, siren or a mermaid and why do you think so?

what is your style?

regular milk or plant based milk?

which one do you put first milk or cereal?

fav way to kill someone? (idgaf if you never thought of it now you have to think of something and make it at least a bit cool I'm begging)

and I'll go first cuz I can

girl I wrote kinda a lot in these answers but I just had to brag about my fav way of killing people🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️ and okay maybe it's kinda stupid that I'm also doing this game even tho I made it for others but who cares?

I can't choose but either a phoenix or a wolf cuz the allegory of both of these animals absolutely stole my heart

anything in my wardrobe that looks good (and it's almost always not adequate for the cold weather, I literally can wear a mini skirt when it's like 2°C outside and there are times when I am wearing a mini skirt and a crop top when it is 0°C and even when it was -3°C I don't care)

something in between vampire and a dryad cuz I feel like I would be a good vampire I don't know how to describe it but I just know and that's it and also a dryad cuz when I think of them they give me rather a messy and chaotic vibe which is def how I act and overall express myself so I'd say that I'm sometimes both sometimes one and sometimes the other

I'm goth so my style is overall gothic and / or cunty

regular but only 1,5% fat

CEREAL

sooo this is my fav way, first - pepper spray in the face so they can't see and therefore they can't run away, second - start scratching their legs with a pocket knife as hard as possible and try to find an aorta and cut there (making it even harder to run away), third - stick the same knife into all of their fingers (why not), fourth - knock out their teeth with a knuckle duster and finally - when they open their mouth trying to catch a breath from the blood and saliva running into their throat pour fluoroantimonic acid into their mouth and it's done! and I'll add that fluoroantimonic acid is called the most corrosive acid in the world ans if it touches the skin it causes huge damage and if poured into someones throat it'll burn the insides and kill. I think I'm really creative cuz I came up with this when I was writing one of my books and now I'm obsessed

tags: @n1eprzytomnadesperacja @niketas-s @r4tkisses @dawkacynizmu @gothicm0rph @slowacki006

and with question 7 rn I'm mostly thinking about one bbg ( @dawkacynizmu I'm looking at you ) cuz a bit after I came up with this question I thought that you might have an interesting answer

[winterpinetrees]

Marvel released it’s Pride anthology today (I’m not qualified to review it. It was Fine? Shorter than usual?). However, a character did say “I’ve been here the whole time”.

[winterpinetrees]

“remember Peeta can camouflage himself because he’s a baker” said with a mocking tone makes me so mad because they completely misunderstand why he’s able to camouflage and why decorating cakes is mentioned in that context. Peeta was poor, a different kind of poor from the seam, but poor nonetheless. he didn’t have money for paints nor canvases. he is an artist, he creates, he uses his paintings after the first hunger games as his therapy. he loves painting, so he used whatever was available to him to show his artist soul. he was able to decorate cakes and pastries as if they were canvases because they were going to gain a profit from it, but I’m certain that in his free time he probably used the elements to draw and paint, these being water and mud and flowers and whatever he could find. plus he received official training the days before the games.

please learn how to read, stop skimming through pages to fulfil your yearly quota of books read.

[winterpinetrees]

[winterpinetrees]

So, let's talk about Emperor Palpatine's last week leading up to the conclusion of Episode IV. Just for a moment, let's consider the position this horrible old space warlock was in, shall we?

Military Intelligence Director Orson Krennic colludes with ISB to commit ethnic cleansing on Ghorman. In typical Krennic fashion, this plan goes neither as smoothly nor as quickly as it was pitched to you as being.

Grand Imperial Admiral Thrawn disappears. Your single best military commander just disappears. Reports indicate space whales are involved??? What???

In response to Krennic/Partagaz's actions on Ghorman, Mon Mothma declares open rebellion on the Senare floor. Her speech is broadcast across the entire galaxy due to what is the first in an absolutely CASCADING series of failures by the ISB. Mothma successfully evades arrest, and escapes Coruscant to Force only knows where.

Darth Vader has taken this increasingly dire moment in Imperial politics to apparently take some sort of Sith PTO at his personal residence on Mustafar. Just about as far out of reach as he can possibly for anyone.

There is a catastrophic data security breach at ISB. It turns out an overly ambitious field agent has been invited to several Signal groupchats about the Death Star that she wasn't supposed to be in, and her collecting of all this vital data in one place has led to a Rebel mole piecing together that you're building the Genocider 5000 instead of a super cool renewable energy program.

Said Rebel infiltrator is then immediately killed by his contact, Luthen Rael, formerly known as Axis. Luthen spreads word of the Death Star to his allies, and then kills himself when confronted by ISB. Maybe your two most important links for piecing together the Rebel Alliance have been lost.

The Rebellion begins spreading propaganda publicly. Their manifesto is playing on just about every available radio frequency.

The ISB collapses. Supervisor Partagaz takes his own life. Colonel Yularen is left with an agency staffed by effectively no one. Your entire intelligence gathering apparatus that was working just fine last week now functionally no longer exists.

NOTE: the following events occur within the span of only 48 hours.

Due to the leak at ISB, the Rebels have discovered the existence of the Death Star, and in very short order manage to steal its schematics. Your special projects divisions on both Eadu and Scarif are destroyed. Director Orson Krennic is KIA.

Darth Vader is recalled from vacation early, and boy is he being awfully himself about it.

You disolve the Imperial Senate. Much as you had anticipated, this is making a lot of people very angry and is being regarded as a bad move.

Darth Vader has lost the Death Star plans. Nobody knows where they are now.

Grand Moff Tarkin blows up the planet Aldaran, a not insiginificant player in the Galactic economy.

Obi Wan Kenobi infiltrates the Death Star, and then quite literally vanishes. Vader is not taking this development well.

LESS THAN 24 HOURS AFTER BECOMING FULLY OPERATIONAL, THE DEATH STAR IS DESTROYED. Grand Moff Tarkin is KIA. Admiral Motti is KIA. General Tagge is KIA. General Bast is KIA. General Molock is KIA. General Romodi is KIA. Colonel Yularin is KIA. Darth Vader is MIA. Millions of soldiers and skilled military professionals are killed. Quanities of money so vast they cannot be comprehended by the mortal mind have gone up in a flash of smoke and light.

The culprit of this unfathomable trespass is soon revealed to be a 19 year-old boy. His name is Luke Skywalker. You now have not one but two of these freaks of nature to contend with. And you don't know where either of them are at the moment.

What the Hell is an Alluminum Falcon?

Honestly, I kinda feel bad for the guy. Just a little bit. If I were his age (ancient) and his condition (rotting from the inside out, filled with cosmic evil) I might just have had a stroke and died. It is amazing he made it all the way to be thrown down that reactor shaft in Return of The Jedi.

[winterpinetrees]

New Targets (The Gap Years 2x12)

October 20th 

Minneapolis, MN

navigation guide

previous

Marin and company get back to their feet, hot on the trail of something inexplicable. Noble politics catch up to them instead. Marin isn’t very good at that part.

.............

The human world changes too quickly. Old movies like to describe things in terms of the Mississippi. Except the old movies are less than half his mother’s age, and administrative borders in the elven world have run there since… When was that river formed? For as long as there have been Sondaicas, at least. Yet when something went wrong with the Audacity’s back left wheel and Sierra said it was the worst car this side of the Mississippi, she said it with a fake accent and a glance back toward the Pacific instead of the river. After the malfunction, Marin spent the rest of the day camped out on the side of the highway keeping an illusion over the car while she and Brian ran off to find cell service. He had to beat back tumbleweeds with his quarterstaff. She later apologized to the car while finishing the repair. The old is quaint and the new is invasive. He isn’t sure of much anymore. 

That’s really the most notable thing of the past few weeks. Since the attack in Maze, they’ve stayed in the plains. Their travels have been punctuated by brief missions. Either their emissary or a contact told them about Mercurali soldiers in the human world, and they cautiously stepped in to defend Marin’s future subjects. His cousin Lir is off doing the same heroics elsewhere in the world. Has she brought the huge toy sabertooth along with her? The older noblewoman didn’t have a bigger-on-the-inside bag the last time he checked, and she’s certainly been on the move.  The cat was a side effect of outplaying Brian at the carnival a few months ago, but he passed it along hoping Lir’s daughter might end up with it. Of course, the little girl is still in captivity. 

Freeing the youngest members of their faction would be the sort of action that could give Lir the advantage. Right now, Marin’s in the lead in terms of reputation. He keeps an ear out for gossip though. Brian and Clay have been debating the two party system lately. They’ve tried to explain why third parties don’t work in America, but the one concept that stuck in his mind is political fracturing. If Lir gets too much power, then Genus Sondaica and their followers will split the same way. It’s the same in the elven world. 

“Alright everybody, welcome to the twin cities!” Brian announces at an arbitrary point along a highway. With everything here being so in love with cars, the cities seep outwards. Still, plant life remains. Everything that was once green is now gold and crackling orange. Adust colors. Zerada and her brother are gone, and she has the same never-captured prestige that Marin does. 

“Do you think we will find the physicists here?” Marin calls.  

Sierra shrugs from the passenger seat,“There’s some nuclear history here, so the university’s probably a bunker. Nothing shows up online though, and they weren’t attacked in September”.

“What about your radio thing?”

“It’s not a radio. It doesn’t detect radio waves. By that logic, it’s called “ a magic”. But yeah, I'll find somewhere high up to place the receiver. I can’t imagine how it would help us find humans though”. 

Marin shrugs. What if Sierra isn’t the only artificer around? After Maze, she scratched out some code to continually record the measurements of their magic detector gadget. She meant to try and catch if anyone was spying on them, but got far weirder results, specifically patterns of spikes at odd hours. They didn’t correspond to Marin using his magic, or to target practice with the guns, or anything else they could find. Sierra told a story about false positives and cosmic rays, but still put her headphones on and tinkered with the “radio” in the back seat for twelve hours straight. 

“Is there some sort of elf Morse code we should be looking out for?” Clay asks. 

Marin taps his fingers nervously on the armrest. “I don’t know any of them. Are we sure it isn’t a wild human code? What if it’s shaken up somehow?”

Sierra “Marin, I’m a builder, not a codebreaker. If it’s encrypted, we have no way of finding out what it says”. 

He wants to ask why they’re even doing this then, but the conversation shifts away and soon Brian has parked the car and they’re hiking through the city. To place the receiver, they need a high-up location by the river that is also close to the hotel they’re crashing in. High-up and near the river to have the widest range, and near the hotel so they can grab it before they leave. Additionally, they need to be able to set up a suspicious contraption without it being removed. That doesn’t leave many options. They settle on a parking garage by the riverside. 

Sierra hands the backpack over to Brian after four flights of stairs, and he carries it the last three floors to the roof. She unwinds an extension cord while they look east. 

Brian leans over the railing “The river really isn’t that impressive”. 

“I think we’re comparing it to San Francisco Bay,” Clay wisely replies. He’s swapped his armored leather jacket for a fleece-lined one that can handle colder weather. Brian is still wearing shorts. 

“Hm. It doesn’t feel worth all the literature”. 

Marin looks upriver and then down. “It would feel different without cars and planes. We’re pretty high up right now”. 

The boys nod. He can feel every foot of that architecture when the wind blows.  It hasn’t been this cold since they climbed a glacier in the Montana mountains. Would he prefer to be back in Southern California where his hands got burned if he brushed against a black car? Such things are only known to the void. 

“High latitude, maybe,” Sierra mutters. “I do not want to be out here doing this at midnight”. 

Brian turns around “...can you remind me why you’d do that?” 

“To triangulate the source of the broadcast? That’s what most of the thingies on the “radio” are.  They tell me the direction of the source. Once the pattern starts, we’ll grab this and set it up somewhere else” She mimes moving the gadget from one place to another with two outstretched arms, then points both hands at Brian. “Trigonometry”. 

Marin follows perfectly, assuming that this “trigonometry” is the English name for ancient triangle math. Brian runs a hand through his blond hair and mutters four unintelligible syllables. “I remember that”. 

“You better after the math test prep I helped you with”. 

Wild humans have come up with the strangest ways to display their own fitness. This mysterious “SAT” seems about as reliable as a bunch of birds dancing with bottle caps in the woods, and less fun. They test the connection and take the elevator back down to ground level. Then, at the hotel, with yet another Western film playing on the TV, Marin hears a ding from his pocket. Sierra digs out her battered Android. 

“It’s not me. Nothing from the gadget”. Strange. He’d have assumed the sound was too quiet for humans to hear. He keeps his phone in a lead-lined pouch after all. 

“I know. It’s an email from Zerada. Can you show this on your computer?”

Carefully, he forwards the email. Sierra brushes a stray hair aside and scowls at the screen, then looks over her shoulder at Brian. “Zerada sent us an email with the subject line ‘meeting up?’”

He stares, then yells through the bathroom door that Clay’s shower can wait because they have lore. 

Dear Mari and company,  I hope this email finds you well, and isn’t found by anyone else. If it has been, tell your Apex’s husband that he’s first on our list. We’ve met up with some friends south of you, and found a few things Lazarus might recognize (not his hand though). Further information attached below. With love,  Zera and Zero ;)

Beneath that is an image of a piece of paper that has been covered with writing in old Lazarin, or more accurately, old Lazarin letters. It looks normal at a glance, but the words are all nonsense. With powerful illusions and no burden of the crown, Adusts have always loved tricks and secrets. And along the edges of the image…

“What does his hand have to do with anything?” Brian asks, as if to cut off any other discussion.

For an elf, the reference is so clear it defies explanation. Marin is not among elves. “Oh, that’s a joke. When Lazarus Sondaica finished unifying the world-”

“Conquering,” Clay interjects, hair soaking wet. 

“Conquering the world four thousand years ago, he commissioned two statues for the capital. They’re huge. One was of himself, and one was of his wife, Leda. She was a lot of things, but the important one is that she held everything together during the wars. Then Lazarus designed the statues to be side by side, so it looked like he was supporting her”. He and Zerada would climb up and sit on his weathered shoulders to get away. Are the little Mercuralis children doing the same now? “He died about twenty years after the wars ended. Leda inherited the throne, stabilized the empire, and demanded that their statues be placed further apart. They had to hack off Lazarus’s left hand to do it”. 

Sierra covers her mouth with her hand. “Good for her!”

“It was a suicide,” Marin adds in his long-dead ancestor’s defense. “Lazarus was purposeless after he conquered the world. He came forth from the void with a single goal, and once he was done, his soul returned. There were no signs of violence or anything”.

Brian smirks, but there’s something harsh in it. “There’s ways to kill a husband that don’t leave marks”. 

“None of them apply to the strongest elf to ever live. He had one foot in the void, Brian. Nothing happened unless he wanted it”. 

Again, he thinks of what Lir said. Family lore tells that becoming part of the void completes a cycle. Through the scepter, they draw more from the nothingness than anyone else can manage. Then, in death, their minds and magic fuel the connection in the same way that their physical bodies will become soil. 

But his cousin claims none of it is true. The scepter isn’t just a conduit to strengthen the living, it is an anchor to preserve consciousness out in a realm without time or space. Lazarus made himself immortal. It’s a story for heirs alone. What would the Mercurali do if they knew immortality was as easy as picking up their enemy’s weapon? Or the common folk? The promise is certainly motivating his cousin to act. There’s an orangy-brown fabric paw at the border of the photograph. That paw is nearly the size of the head of the toy fox curled along the corner. He recognizes both from the carnival where he defeated Brian at a strange rigged games. 

The boy stalls for a moment by confirming that the words of the image aren’t just unfamiliar, but not words at all. Then he speaks.  “So we’re going to go find her?”

Ask directly and he’ll say that his weeks spent charmed, in love with Zerada even after his conscious mind decided he wanted out, were nothing worse than the danger they face every day. So they don’t ask.

“Not if she’s saying she wants you back,” Clay replies, but considering his tone, he’s probably joking around.

“I doubt that’s the message. The Adusts have found someone new,”

Sierra zooms into the image. “Is that the damn cat plushie?” 

Clay’s eyes narrow behind his glasses. “You didn’t give that to Zerada though. It was for your cousin, I forget her name. The widow”. He rocks back on his heels, making the connection. 

“Her name was Lir. She was the presumptive heir, right? Oh god”. The strained smile was unsettling enough, but now Brian is laughing. He’s laughing like when Sierra was captured. But they got her back, and now she slams the laptop shut. 

She’s telling him it’s not his fault. He shouldn’t blame himself for the actions of a princess who’s clearly far more greedy than they knew. Marin says all of the same things, but the humans weren’t there for their last conversation. Out in the parking lot, her things in the back of a bright-red car that wasn’t stolen, but the money to buy it certainly was. He hasn’t seen the siblings in a month, but that isn’t so long for elves, is it?  You don’t have to love your betrothed, but you have to be able to trust them. Of course, everyone wants to have both, but Marin would settle for just the latter. 

……….

The four unintelligible syllables that Brian mutters are the mnemonic device I learned for the basic trig ratios: SOH CAH TOA. pronounced as spelled. 

Clay is farsighted. I’m not sure if I’d mentioned that. He takes off his glasses to shoot.

@lokiwaffles @reggie246 @wishndreamer

[winterpinetrees]

He’s not even surprised

[winterpinetrees]

I understand that the partings are a crucial part of Lord of the Rings, but the Shire is basically a romanticized version of the English countryside. They could make telegraphs in a few decades if they set their minds to it. Basically I’m saying that Merry and Pippin should be able to pester Aragon from a thousand miles away. No palantir, no problem.

[winterpinetrees]

Okay, so. Star Wars has all these concepts that weirdo New Left boomer George Lucas tosses in there but because of storyteller limitations it would kill the plot to fully explain them all, so later writers have to come in for the spin-off materials and bat clean-up to fully explain all this crazy crap. And I would like to talk about something that made me actively angry at first, but which I now adore. And that is the Naboo.

So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.

Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.

There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.

The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.

The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.

Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.

The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.

Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.

Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.

Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.

The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.

Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.

They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!

There you go, @charmwasjess

[winterpinetrees]

Anyway the reason I’m going insane about the New Gods right now is because it suddenly clicked for me that they really are superhero gods?? Like, real-world pantheons reflect the cultures that created them, but Jack Kirby designed the New Gods as a pantheon of deities that reflect a world that’s filled with superheroes. I was specifically thinking about how Mister Miracle is like a mythological synthesis of a ton of common superhero tropes — he’s an origin story turned into theology. basically

his father sent him away from his home planet as their last hope for salvation (Superman)

he was raised as an orphan and put his focus into training for survival (Batman)

he’s the child of royalty from a distant land, is a peaceful person willing to take up arms to defend the weak, and falls in love with a commoner in the military (Wonder Woman)

he crashed on Earth and was taken in by a kindly stranger in the American Midwest (Superman again) who brought him to a circus and took him on as a pupil (Dick Grayson)

Mister Miracle exists as Freedom incarnate, and he often fights against the literal God of Fascism, Darkseid; that’s about as grandiose the battle of good vs evil can get, especially when you consider Jack Kirby witnessed WWII firsthand

His tagline “No Trap Can Hold Him!” and his tendency to escape chains is evocative of the classic “Superman shatters chains” image:

Finally, Scott and Barda are the only New Gods to have any kind of a civilian life, with Scott specifically splitting his time between being a husband, a father, a performer, a superhero and a god. It’s the ultimate application of “secret identity” as a concept

Anyway, yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Truly nobody was doing it like the King did with his Fourth World mythos