Kobold King

The gatekeepers of the nether? Pshaw. They act all gruff and serious, but they're pretty chill guys once you take an eon or two to know 'em. Here's a postcard of me with Billy--we call him Billy--at next year's Zthulmas party: But since I'm here, I must ask a question. If the following statement is true and the previous statement is false, how many oranges will my chickens yield over the next couple of time cycles? I mean, what's your favorite TV show?

Not if we want Gympie-Gympies crossed with war elephants with clambering tarantula legs and the proportionate muscle strength of fleas.

Can Chimera combine plants with animals?

So. Who else saw the pony finale?

She made a column the size of some skyscrapers in under a minute. There aren't many characters we have that she couldn't trap / kill outright.

Taylor's not so lovable herself right now.

It's a cold rainy day and cold rainy days make me depressed. Stupid cold rainy day.

Sonic or regular?

Hey, Voidus is back! Welcome back Voidus! I don't suppose you know who that last mysterious Ookla was, do you?

Nah, he's just the only one of us who's iconically and hilariously evil enough to get away with it.

^ In that moment when you get logged out and momentarily forget your 17th Shard password, and then resolve to scrawl it on every wall of your house in permanent marker and possibly have it tattooed on your forearm.

A rewatch confirms for me that The Doctor's Wife is the greatest episode in the history of ever.

...I don't know why, but this one actually made me laugh out loud until my sides hurt.

And Aldo's the one who had to plug it in for him in the first place.

Just wait till he learns to operate the microwave and declares it proof that he deserves to rule the human race.

That's why I made sure the Museum tipped and lurched a few times. So it would disconnect from the column and descend without getting impaled. See, I'm always thinking.

I mean, on the one hand I'm not sure I like what that page says about me. On the other hand, the fact that I'm actually delighted that someone read a Trope and thought of me proves I'm exactly what the page says. Like I said. I have very conflicted feelings about this.

It's gonna take me a while before I can drag myself out of TV Tropes and figure out whether I should be offended.

See? The game is open to all play styles!

Well, I was considering two different ways to win: Create an advanced super-civilization, in which case everyone who contributed to it shares the victory; Successfully destroy the world, in which case the player is declared "Ruin" and wins the game. I feel that could make for interesting gameplay possibilities.

I'm trying to design a (somewhat) simple card game in which the players take the roles of the gods of a nascent world, choosing what species to create, endow with adaptations, and advance to a civilized intelligence. Each player would be dealt a hand of cards that allows them to affect the world in ways both tiny and profound, with the end goal being a species that either masters technology to the point of leaving the planet or a species of archmages capable of opening rifts in space-time and leaving their dimension. As you might expect, this is an ambitious idea and I have no professional experience to draw from. I do, however, have a huge stack of blank index cards to play with, so I'm having fun brainstorming ideas.

I forgot all about that, actually. I suppose we could say that. Given how the timelines aren't synced in a cohesive manner, is it possible that the Museum is slightly ahead of Thoughttown, so that Lightwards only gets the message now that he's coming out of the Museum?

Lightwards recruiting: Let me know if anything needs changing in that last post.

The man looked angry, his teeth gritted and his eyes clenched shut as he nodded. But he did nod. For all his anger, self preservation won out in the end. It always did. I wonder if he's as afraid of me as he is of Funtimes. Frowning at the unwelcome thought, Lightwards gestured at his Warriors to return the man's valuables. One by one they stepped forward, dumping armfuls of confiscated garbage in front of the bleeding Epic. A battered Star Wars helmet. A unicycle. A dirty set of bagpipes. All junk, but the man stared at them with greedy eyes. Lightwards knelt before him, grabbing his face and forcing him to look him in the eyes. "I give to you your powers," he said softly, letting the words sink in. "I hold them but return them to you. I own a portion of your soul. Bear this in mind when you take up arms, and know that if you betray me, I will have whatever's left of you dumped into the Willamette within the hour." He unhanded the man and straightened himself, turning and walking away down a forest path. "Equip yourself and follow us. You will be used in the day's crusade." Aldo and his assistant followed, until Lightwards stopped in a forest clearing beyond the Unicyclist's view. A pair of raptors began drifting around him, unfocused as the necromancer considered his next move. "It would grow tiresome," he said finally, leaning against one of Funtimes' fake trees, "to have my pterosaurs bring you to and fro the Museum for our excursions. Do the pair of you have your own ways of reaching the ground, short of falling?" Cricket nodded lazily. "I can get up from any fall. Can't really carry anyone, though. I tend to drop them." The magician smiled, twirling a leaf he'd plucked from a branch. In his fingers the leaf continually swelled and shrunk again, sometimes so slowly it could hardly be perceived and sometimes fast enough to move at a blur. "I can do better than that," he said with a chuckle. "Would you care to join me for a plumbing inspection?" ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While most of the Museum had been transformed into a Jurassic forest, the basement remained unaltered. It was dark and musty, and the beam of Aldo's inexplicably produced flashlight illuminated thick clouds of dust rising from between tightly-packed shelving units. The one aspect that Lightwards suspected as a new development was the loud humming that filled the air, a sound somewhere between a rattling air conditioner and a jet turbine. The flashlight's beam searched until it found the source of the noise--a constantly vibrating lump in the floor made of solid metal plates. There were plates of a different color on either side of it, from which emitted a gentler, but still loud, humming. "This is the top of the turbine," Aldo shouted cheerfully over the noise. "Underneath this floor there's nothing but open air and spinning rotors." "I thought Funtimes used gravatonics," Lightwards responded just as loudly, tempted to plug his ears from the noise. Calamity, why didn't this infernal noise rise up to the forest level? "She does," Aldo affirmed, patting the turbine plating. "The gravatonics counteract gravity, while the rotor keeps the Museum suspended." "How do you know all this?" "I don't," the magician grinned, "I'm largely guessing. I've never seen an apparatus like this before--our friend the Doctor is something of a genius." Lightwards huffed in irritation. "How does this relate to getting to the ground?" Aldo only smiled in the dim lighting, kneeling to touch one sheet of metal flooring to the side of the turbine top. His fingers moved across a few screws, shrinking them and pulling them out of the ground. He lifted the plates themselves, revealing the vibrant blue glow of... something. The magician's hand touched the glowing gravatonic component, and everything lurched. Lightwards lost his footing as he stumbled into a wall, the whole floor beneath him slanting dramatically in one direction. Shelves toppled, spilling priceless boxes of delicate fossils to the ground. Boards creaked even over the thrumming over the rotors, as if the entire Museum was slowly being tipped on its side in mid-air. "Are you insane?" Lightwards shouted, puling himself steady. "Quite!" Aldo laughed, clambering along the slanted floor to the other side of the hump. "But intent on living, I assure you!" The Epic worked quickly, unscrewing more of the plates and performing the same magic on each of them. The Museum lurched and jerked in the air, slanting first in one direction and then the other, before the floor became flat again and the only sensation was of a general downwards whooshing. The humming and thrumming was substantially less loud now, to the point that Lightwards could just about hear his thumping heart. "There we go," Aldo proclaimed, wiping a bit of sweat off his brow. "The gravatonics are simple enough that all it takes to weaken them is to shrink them." He yanked up a bit of flooring, shrank it to the size of a splinter, and peered through the hole in the ground at the open air outside. "We'll be close enough to the ground to disembark safely in a minute, and then we can go about our day's activities without trouble." Lightwards took a few deep breaths, steadying himself and fighting off a rising case of motion sickness as he glared at his new lieutenant. "Next time," he hissed quietly, "Warn me before nearly knocking my fortress out of the sky." Aldo bowed. "Of course," he said brightly. "Though this fortress was never in any danger, mind you. All I have done is to, shall we say, hack the controls that the Doctor made for herself." That made Lightwards pause, feeling his anger subside as he pondered the significance of this. I now have control over the Museum. I no longer need Funtimes or Lucentia merely to travel to and fro my abode. Finally, he gave a tight smile, straightened his bowler hat, and began walking out of the basement. "You have done good work, Aldo. Meet me on the street outside the Museum when you are finished... landing." Aldo tipped his own hat with a smile. "Yes, your majesty. I am only glad to have been of service." The Museum slowed in its drop, and began to hover a mere dozen feet above the crumbled asphalt ground.