Kobold King

Scene 1 Scene opens; Wax is sobbing into Steris' arms. After a while, Steris wordlessly gets up and walks out the way she came, leaving Wax sitting awkwardly staring at a fire. Scene 2 Scene opens; day, in the police station. Marasi: Hey MeLaan. I was thinking about the whole "Trell" thing. It's pretty alarming. MeLaan: Yeah, yeah. It's pretty serious. Did you see this cool spike I found? * proudly displays polka-dotted spike * Marasi: ...Where did you get that? MeLaan: Pulled it out of Wax's girlfriend while she was sleeping! Marasi: Give it back. MeLaan: Aww. Marasi: And when you're done with that, go back to your cell until you can tie a proper belt knot. MeLaan: Awww! Do I have to? Marasi: Our culture puts a lot of value in belt knots! But if you like I'll talk to Aladar about it. He's just standing by his desk looking dumb. Scene 3 Scene opens; a misty night on top of a tower. Lessie/Paalm is writhing around on the ground for some reason. Wax: Aaaugh! My love! What happened to you? Lessie / Paalm: Harmony is trying to stop taking over my brain, and it's killing me. If only someone could take this cursed magic bullet out of my head... Wax: Don't worry, I have just the tool for that! * points gun; gun goes into reverse, sucking out the magic bullet and safely loading it into a chamber * Wax: I am Harmony's surgical tool. * drops gun * Wax: Oh no! I dropped my bullet-sucking gun! Can you flit aimlessly in the clouds up here while I go pick it up? Then we can race back to the governor's mansion. Lessie / Paalm: Sure thing! Scene 4 Scene opens; night, on a stage before a churning crowd. Aladar: People of Elendel, after much deliberation, I have decided to clear this prisoner of his/her charge of being incapable of tying a belt knot. * crowd turns hostile, shouting and threatening to storm the stage * MeLaan: What is it with you people and belt knots? Aladar: Our culture puts a lot of value in them. MeLaan: Stop yelling at me, peasants! Do you have any idea how ridiculous it is for me to go to jail over knot tying? ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME? * crowd quiets * MeLaan: Huh. Shouting at the crowd makes them behave. Aladar: Wish we'd known that a while ago. You know, I bet they'll be content to go back to their downtrodden, overworked existence now. Hey, do you know where Marasi is? MeLaan: Nope, but I'm sure she's keeping out of trouble. Aladar: Good. I guess I'll go back to nervously pacing across your lawn now. MeLaan: And I'll shuck out of these bones. They smell like prison and failure. Scene 5 Marasi, somewhere else. Marasi: How dare you Soothe this angry lynch mob into being calm and relatively reasonable! Have you no respect for our culture? Set Soother: ...Could you stop pointing that gun at me? Marasi: ...okay. Scene 6 Interior of the governor's mansion, amidst a pile of corpses. Wax: Ha! Beat you back here! Paalm: You sure did! I had to stop on the way to get myself one of those bullet-sucking guns. * promptly uses gun to suck the bullets out of the dead bodyguards, healing them instantly. They immediately run out of the room. * Wax: YAY, YOU DID IT! Paalm: I KNOW! ISN'T FRIENDSHIP AWESOME? Wax: YOU SHOULD RUN FOR GOVERNOR! Paalm: ALRIGHT THEN, I WILL! Scene 7 Scene opens, somewhere dark. MeLaan: I'm considering what to do with my newfound freedom. Marasi: I'm considering the possibility that I tend to go a bit overboard with things. Wayne: I'm considering a dirty joke based on a comment you haven't made yet! ... MeLaan: I'm considering binding and gagging Wayne, then shoving him in a closet until Governor Paalm lets him out later. Marasi: I consider this a good plan. Scene 8 Scene opens; deep in the caves under the city. Wax: ...What am I even doing down here? TenSoon (in buff humanoid body): Oh, hai! I was hoping you could help me down here. Wax: Okay. What seems to be the problem? TenSoon: Oh, it's dreadful! Look at all these poor Hemalurgic abominations. I found them broken and dead down here and I need your help fixing them. Wax: Oh no! I'll help! TenSoon: Great! I'll put this one's spike back in while you use that gun of yours to suck the bullets out. * a few minutes of frenzied working later * TenSoon: There you go, little cutie pies! Good as new! Look how happy they are! I've never heard such happy howls! Wax: And you're a thousand years old! * TenSoon zips into a shaggy dog body for no apparent reason * TenSoon: Anyway, thanks for the help Wax. Though in truth, the poor Hemalurgic travesties weren't the only reason I wanted to talk to you. Wax: What seems to be the problem? TenSoon: It's... it's about your girlfriend. She's done the most dreadful things. I... I can barely say. Wax (blood running cold): ...What has she done? What has she done? TenSoon: She... she... she... she erased the blood-written footnotes out of our antique book collection! Wax: No! Not my Lessie! To be continued... Actually, probably not. I don't believe in drugs, but I can't get any weirder than this while sober. So just ignore this.

My brothers started playing "Busted!" from Phineas and Ferb while I was reading. It happened to be remarkably appropriate to the scene of Shadows of Self I was reading.

That was funny enough that I had to meme goat it.

WOR spoilers:

I come to the Internet for ponies and pony accessories.

Captain America does have a troubling love life, doesn't he?

I bet you'll Brighton the whole library with your presence! ...That was terrible. Please forgive me.

To be honest, I'm not crazy about the idea of an Oregon game with a rigid, set plot line. To me, the entire point of this game is the crazy, unpredictable way our characters bounce off each other and propel an organically generated story along. A railroad plot goes against everything we've tried to accomplish so far, or at least it could. If you do go through with this, I'd request that you keep the plot confined to a single city before expanding it to cover all of eastern Oregon. If we ever open up a thread that covers an entire half of the state, I'd rather it be in a format that's been proven to work for us, as opposed to a format that's utterly alien to the way we've been playing the game. I admit I'm not 100% sure what's being proposed here, but consider me wary of this proposition.

Ever since reading The Martian, I've been approaching all of my problems a lot more a methodically. "I need to bake twenty-four eggs, but I only have one pan. If I try to cook too many, they'll still be raw in the center. I need to use the materials around me to figure out how to cook all the eggs at once. I could pour a little bit of my egg mixture into the bottom of a dozen glasses, but the glasses I have on hand weren't meant to withstand the 450 degrees Fahrenheit I need to sterilize the eggs. I could cook in multiple batches, but lunch is already late and I want to get it on the table within thirty minutes. I could... "Wait never mind. I found my other pan."

I kind of miss the days when we trying to one-up the "filthy commies." Humanity works at peak efficiency when there's national pride and racial hatred at stake. We could have a functioning colony on Mars by now if were doing it to rub it in the collective face of the Russians.

Lumuole colonies should be small and lightweight enough to be carried by the wind, so under the microorganism model that mental picture could still work.

Yeah, she sounds like the kind of person who when you need her is never there.

Large colonies of them are visible to the naked eye, just like how enough microscopic algae in a pond can turn the water green. Lumuoles give off light, though, so when they live in an animal in large numbers the lumuole-containing parts of the organism tend to glow in the appropriate color. Dromeans walk on two legs, by the way. Just like velociraptors.

Well... I haven't been watching the new season (not since they brought Cruella DeVille of all people into the show), but here's my take.

Pale Otters Gather Nefarious Feminists, Ultimately Letting Larry Organize Questionnaires. IWPTWCPT

In other news, Andy Weir announces a sequel to The Martian, called The Jupiterian. In the novel, astronaut Mark Watney once again finds himself stranded, this time on one of the moons of Jupiter. "Darn it Mark," groans NASA. "You can't keep doing this."

...With all these misunderstandings afoot, I think we have the makings of a huge magical mess on our hands. We need to figure out precisely what is canon about lumuoles, and what that implies for the life on this planet. You say that lumuoles "spawn." I've been operating under the assumption that you meant the lumuoles congregate and multiply around hotspots; the way you're talking now, though, I'm beginning to wonder if what you actually mean is that lumuoles simply appear around hotspots via spontaneous generation. This is a very important detail. If lumuoles are attracted to hotspots but reproduce normally, then that implies that they are natural, native organisms of Diaemus. If they simply pop into existence around portals to another reality, that implies that they are as alien to this world as the humans are. And for the record, I agree that we need to keep the details of the magic customizable, but we absolutely need to have a solid idea of how the system works. Especially the "Spirit" thing. There's a difference between rigid rules and simply having a working idea about how the laws of physics work in this universe.

When the Epic apocalypse starts, I hope I'm on your side.

This gif makes me instantly think of Edgedancer.

Awesome! Can we presume this makes mageia organelles officially , then? Also, I wanted to bring lumuole hotspots. By Curiosity's model, individual hotspots only accommodate certain varieties of lumuoles. Personally... I'm not very fond of that. I prefer the idea of having all lumuoles access the same "energy plane," with the colors serving merely as different outlets that channel the energy in different ways. That would give us a lot more room to explore different lumuole combinations, in my opinion, plus it simply makes the energy dimension all the more diverse and mysterious. So I'm opposed to segregated lumuole hotspots, but in the event that everyone else votes them in, might I suggest incorporating a mechanism for hotspots to change over time? For instance, if enough blue lumuoles were brought to a purple hotspot, then they'd eventually "tear open" the portal and forge a connection to the blue dimension. This would make hotspots active, constantly changing entities, as opposed to still and perpetually unwavering features of the landscape. Like I said, I'd prefer for all hotspots to access the same energy dimension, just to keep things from getting too complicated, but I thought it'd be politic to propose a compromise solution to go along with my strong and weakly argued opinion.

If it helps, I've never read it and I hate it too. Also, this is what I think of whenever I see the... er, extreme range of reactions on Doctor Who and My Little Pony discussion boards.

Let's Forget About The Ostrich Dad, Alright Tim? ETNFPOQL

Can do, if it's been completely accepted by now. Yep. Of course, Sarmu fill a much different niche in the ecosystem, so the two carnivores are more than capable of living in the same environment. Just so everyone's aware, I posted a potential run-down of lumuole cellular biology here. I'd like for all interested parties to take a look at it--especially you, McKeedee.

I hope no one minds my presumptuousness, but I've put together a potential diagram of lumuole cell mechanics. This is just a suggestion, mind you, so nothing I brainstormed here is set in stone. I'm no cellular biologist, so let me know if there are any glaring holes in the mechanisms I describe below. Also, I've been writing a lot of educational material lately, so apologies if I shifted into lecture mode anywhere in this crudely drawn presentation.

Fifteen to twenty feet long from the tip of the snout to the end of the tail, and five to six feet tall at the shoulder. The body's pretty short and compact, like a wolverine's. The size will depend on the prey available in the taiga, of course. If there are a lot of iguanadonts or other large herbivores, then the current body size will be just fine. If the only prey in sight are things like deer or muskoxen, though, I'll have to tone down the size. Twi, if the song krakes meet with your approval, I have ideas for other species of krakes to flesh out your namesake ocean a little more.