Kobold King

Good one! ...Wait. You're serious, aren't you? :mellow Sometimes we go a couple of weeks at a time without a post. Sometimes posts go in a rapid fire, several a day. There's no set speed or quota you have to meet.

Testing a silly little limerick right now. Mostly posting here so I can see if it complies with the sig rules properly.

I wrote it that way the first time around but took out the "had" to keep the number of syllables equal on either end. You're right though, I think keeping the right rhythm is more important in the long run than syllable equality.

Oh, and congratulations. I decided you'd become the first in-universe limerick of this setting. There once was a planet called Hugh Filled with large sea cows through and through "Oh, the Hugh manatees!" Giggled humanity And the man who named them did rue.

Hark; let it be remembered now and forever that a new piece of Humaneria 'verse canon was hatched upon this day.

"For the last time Pedro. We're not naming the new planet... whatever it was you just said." "What, it's okay to name planets Persephone or Demeter, but not Huitzilopochtli? Is it because your ancestors were Greeks and mine were Aztec? If we're going to be fair, my culture has to be represented!" "Pedro, people are going to be talking about this planet. Engineers with speech impediments are going to be booking flights to this place. Moms with a bunch of fussing kids will be struggling to spit out its name buying spaceport tickets." "They can shorten it. You know, give it a nickname." "You want people to name your planet 'Hugh'"?

Well we're kind of making things up as we go along, but I'll send you an invite nonetheless.

Slytherin has it pretty rough in a lot of regards, but to be fair, Snape really, really sucked as a professor.

Laziness is symptomatic of not caring for one's cluster enough to labor. It is offensive for a member of one's cluster to act that way; when one of my siblings display laziness, I am sure to lash my claws or teeth across their flanks in communication of my irritation. It is a thing that provokes temporary wrath, but not a thing worth holding a grudge against a fellow cluster member over. By and large our sins and viceful qualities are the same. There are some differences, largely pertaining to the fact that feelings like pride and envy could not be concealed even if we wanted them to be; we do not look down on pride unless it swells to the point of absurdity, and we feel envy as a natural sensation that needs little moderating. I have never heard of such a race. That is simply not how warfare works; while our claws and fangs are quite adequately suited for the job of slicing one another open, there were ways of improving upon their function. Spears in our earliest epoch helped warriors extend their reach in combat, fending off enemies before they could get into range with their own claws. Later, metal weapons like scimitars and cutlasses improved cutting power for cleaner, more efficient killing. When it comes to war, there is nothing in nature that cannot be improved upon. Oh no. Such development would be quite impossible. They spend the entirety of their existence underwater unless beached; without fire they could never so much as reach the bronze age, much less the space age. The only marine Supernalians to have left the homeworld are the ones my own culture have decided to bring into space.

You can get sugar-free koolaid, right? That's what we get.

His worst fear was being frozen into a block of ice. Fortunately he faced that fear of his own free will, and comes out without any corruption that would impede his dedication to life, liberty, and the punching of bad guys.

Three questions for Ms. Whitelaw: Can you choose to 'turn off' your powers, ignoring all possible futures and being as blind to the possibilities around you as everyone else? Do you play chess? Would you rather fight one precognitive duck, or a dozen duck-sized precogs?

"We should be extra nice to the furry creatures of Alpha Centauri. That way we can bring up how nice we were to them now in a few hundred years when they're advanced enough to build stuff for us." --Twi's mom, a few decades in the future.

"In my day, men were men and women were women! We're going to breeze right by the fact that if the current trend is a problem, then surely my generation is somewhat culpable for not rearing you youngsters right. No, the problem is you Millennials. Nothing else in society was ever wrong before you gosh-darned Millennials."

Tssss. Annoying human insistence on clinging to meaningless turns of thought. There is no significance beyond bias for my own species' welfare. "Rightful" is subjective. If you seek greater meaning: it is unlikely that the predator we outcompeted would itself have evolved sapience. The Jewel would have been without beings capable of understanding its true splendor. But that is Glory doctrine, very subjective and imprecise. Perhaps Glory doctrine has contaminated my speech...

It's for a good cause.

Dang. I really hope the City Guard is better at keeping up with incoming Epic invaders than we are.

Ozymandias is still in town, right? 'Cuz I'm pretty sure he and Glamour could recreate the whole time in a bottle scene.

It has been some days since we answered questions. This time the human who types these replies was not busy but was merely lazy. He is vexed by my saying so, but it is the truth. My apologies. This is a difficult question, and many would suggest different answers. For instance, many who are not Supernalians propose that our reluctance to lie puts us at a disadvantage with races that employ natural dishonesty. (This is not so. Those of us who interact with aliens have become quite skilled at smelling falsehoods, and as much as we refrain from thinking and speaking of it in peace time, deceptive maneuvers have always been a part of our military history.) Psychologically, I would maintain that our chief weakness is a propensity towards xenophobia. Or not xenophobia precisely; xenophobia implies fear, while it is our inclination to feel more of an indignation against aliens than any form of phobia. In any case, we are not disposed towards coexisting with most alien life forms, and as a consequence few of us leave our own small section of space. Fortunately, with orbital habitations cheap and affordable, colonizing other worlds is not a necessity for any species' short-term survival. They are fins. We can stretch them to be taut or fold them neatly by our sides, but they are not used for flight. They are used for communicating, as I have described, but also to steer our bodies when leaping. The low gravity of our homeworld combined with its dense atmosphere makes such fins quite advantageous. Most animals have them. Females such as myself will almost always stay with the clusters we were born with. Males however will leave their families to join other clusters, serving diligently beneath the head female in hopes of enticing her to accept them as mates. We are not monogamous, but a male can only mate with one female in around a year's time. For this reason he will only seek to entice a female that is strong, powerful, or otherwise worthy of his respect and devotion. The female will mate with many such devoted males when the inclination to breed takes her. The males will often stay in the cluster after mating, often mating with the head female again the next time she wishes to birth a brood, but it is not unusual for them to instead find other clusters to spread their services. Once fertilized, a female will seek a still body of water to lay her eggs, of which there can be several dozen in one brood. She will remain in the water, eating food brought to her by the rest of the cluster, for the equivalent of about six of your months before the young ones are hatched and capable of functioning on land on their own. Our child-rearing process is not as... personal as yours. What little parenting we conduct is communal, and a cluster will often have as many forty young ones running underfoot at one time. We do not, in general, feed them. They hunt for insects and vermin for their sustenance, or else scavenge from the leftovers of their elders' meals. We do not, in general, teach them. They are possessed of a natural curiosity that leads them to follow us in our daily habits and to learn from our examples. We do not, in general, name them. As they learn our language from observation they name themselves, using word combinations that they find particularly powerful or edifying. For instance, I was particularly fond of swimming and leaping out of rivers when I was young and freshly hatched. I found leaping from rivers alongside by sisters and brothers to be exhilarating and the ultimate form of freedom, and so chose "River Leaper" as my name. There is usually a very small mortality rate among the young ones before this age, and many may be traded to smaller clusters in exchange for more useful goods. When the remaining young ones have reached approximately ten years of your age, they will have reached a level of size and intellect that makes them worthy of being fully accepted as an equal by the cluster. The adults will then take a greater interest in their personal upbringing, learning the names they took for themselves and beginning to teach them the more extensive bodies of knowledge our cultural history has to offer. Over the course of our history, our cultures began to become more unified as a result of conquest and assimilation. But there still exist differing cultures in the subspecies. There is a subspecies of plains hunters, for instance, that is nomadic rather than territorial. Their males are segregated permanently into separate clusters from the females. They also have an extensive history and lore that they celebrate in intricate bone carvings. My culture sells them cheap starships in exchange for authentic pieces of traditional bone artwork, and many of them now roam far beyond the borders of our explored space. We are often surprised by how much they thrive once given an entire galaxy to inhabit, and some of them have returned from the far corners of the galaxy in ships far greater in size and capabilities than the ones we sent them off in. The various marine subraces also possess their own cultures, always unique to the parts of the ocean they inhabit. Not all of their tribes have been extensively studied, but many of them herd flocks of prey fish and have been known to help their terrestrial cousins to shore after shipwrecks.

Family members are arguing about the X-Men and Avengers movies, arguing over which has the better version of Quicksilver. "The 'Time in a Bottle' scene in X-Men was the best," says Father. "It was hilarious seeing Quicksilver telling the police to hurry up in Avengers 2," says Mother. "I liked the part where he gouges out somebody's eyes and replaces them with creepy sword insignia," Kobold refrains from saying.

Are there any Supers who have become essentially indestructible through their powers? Also, is there a way to test people for powers with a blood sample, or some similar method?

Why should we pay you two instead of non-magical mercenaries? What powers and advantages do you have?

Ah, that magical moment when you realize that your new paradigm of instantaneous interstellar travel renders the very concept of strategic locations obsolete, thus causing you to rethink the map of the cosmos you've been putting together in your head.

Maybe. Maybe I'll just fill out a dating website's form with Bactrack's info and see what happens.