i don’t care about its tragic backstory that thing had better have all its shots
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #fandom #puns #murder cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
the “oh. oh.” moment in fan fic but instead of a character realizing they’re in love it’s them discovering they have a specific kink at the worst possible moment
#A Rental Car Takes a Left Down Rake Street and Disappears #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #rape tw #murder cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
There is a forbidden type of magic out there. It isn’t forbidden because it’s inherently evil, or forces you to lose your humanity, or requires human sacrifices – it’s just forbidden because it’s annoying as heck to fight against.
“Ma’am, I really must insist that you pay for the room and board I’ve been giving you! It’s been a week!”“Fine, fine,” I grumble. “I have a few options for payment: I could give you paper money, cheap gaudy jewelry, chocolate coins, spiders, some pretty seashells-”
“Spiders????” he repeats, baffled.
“Spiders it is, then,” I agree equitably, and with a wave of my hand the bed I’ve been sleeping in for the last week turns into a writhing mass of various spiders.
Worth it.
—
“Stop right there! You’re under arrest for fraud, destruction of property, and-!”
I yawn. “Didn’t ask, don’t care.” A few gestures, and the guards’ swords are all transmuted into spiders, and then they’re too busy to worry about little ol’ me.
—
“You have insulted my honor and humiliated me in front of my children! I demand satisfaction! I demand a wizard’s duel!”
Shrugging, I say, “Sure, okay, whatever. Right here and now okay?”
The pompous wizard-noble blinks. “I- you don’t want to prepare? Get your wizard’s staff or anything?”
“Nah, I’m pretty good with somatic gestures.”
“Well, if you’re sure… here and now then! Have at you!” He slams his staff down on the ground dramatically, a small shockwave of fire radiating out from the impact.
So of course, I turn his staff into spiders.
“AHHHH WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK”
“So if you’re too busy screaming to cast spells, does that mean I win?”
“AUGH ONE OF THEM BIT ME”
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
—
After that, they start coming at me in waves, with cheap wands and staves and swords and bows bought in bulk, hoping to exhaust my magical reserves so they can get close enough to put a magic inhibitor on me.
They did not expect my reserves to be as vast as they were, not did they expect me to be able to transmute the inhibitors themselves into spiders.
“Didn’t you take Magic Basics in wizard college?” I yell at the panicking mages. “Inhibitors aren’t immune to magic until the moment they activate! Serious weak point in the design, tell your magitechnicians to fix that!”
—
So of course they try assassins next.
Poison fails, because I transmute any food and drink I get into spiders and then transmute them back. Pretty easy way to get rid of poison.
So then they try knives in dark alleys. The knives bruise through my full-body spider-silk outfit, but do not penetrate, and they only get one shot before they have bigger problems.
Next is killing me in my sleep. None live to report back that the human-shaped lump under the blankets is actually a mass of highly venomous spiders.
The kingdom throws everything it has at me, and I continue to walk away, heralded by the chittering of spiders and the screams of everyone else.
—
Finally, I stand before the king himself in his overly opulent throne room, and by now he is a broken shell of a man in the face of my unorthodox tactics.
Good.
“What do you want?” he practically sobs. “You’ve singlehandedly redirected the entire crown’s budget for the next three years into replacing every weapon you’ve turned into spiders. Much more and we’ll be invaded by our neighbors! We wouldn’t be able to resist being annexed! So what can I give you to make you stop doing this?!”
I pause and pretend to consider, tapping a finger against my chin thoughtfully. “You know, you sent my brother off to war a few years back. That conflict with the Yughs up north, I believe. He didn’t want to go, so your guards forced him at spearpoint. I haven’t seen him since.”
He seizes on that, as I expected. “Yes, yes, I’ll have him returned right away! Tell me his name and I’ll honorably release him from duty and have him escorted safely home!”
“Oh?” I raise one sardonic eyebrow. “Are you able to bring back the dead now, oh wise and glorious king?”
He pales, and it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve seen in years.
“You have nothing I want,” I growl, letting the anger slip through for the first time in years. “You cannot bring him back, you cannot make up for my loss with all the riches in your kingdom. The only thing I want is to take everything from you, the way you did to me. Your kingdom will bleed out of resources, one of the neighboring countries you’ve been trying to conquer for decades now will take advantage and annex this place, and you will either be executed or forced to work for a living for the first time in your life.”
I glare at him, and he refuses to meet my eyes. “You will lose everything you ever cared about in your life. One spider at a time.”
I transmute his throne and crown into spiders (non-deadly; he doesn’t get to escape my wrath that easily), then turn and walk away, ignoring his screams and sobs.
—
And that’s why, when the Yughs finally annexed the kingdom I grew up in, they preemptively made Transarachnomancy a forbidden magical art. Not sure how they intend to enforce that, mind, but I’m not looking to challenge that. I’ve gotten what I wanted; if some other aspiring mage wants to try and follow in my footsteps, that’s not my problem.
Besides, in terms of magical skill, I’ve always been an outlier anyway. Most mages would be lucky to turn just one knife into a spider at a time; I can turn ten thousand with a few gestures. I doubt anyone will outdo my legacy.
But hey, if you want to try and surpass Georgia of the Spiders? Feel free. I’ll welcome the competition.
#that moment of dawning comprehension at ”I’ve always been an outlier anyway” #storytime #spiders #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Spiders Georg #murder cw? #death tw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
With full respect to the Professor, if I were to ever work a “subject cannot be killed by any living man” prophecy into one of my stories, I think I’d want to actually play with the ‘living’ part of the condition instead of ‘male’ or even ‘human.’ Imagine the drama if Bob Redshirt, beloved secondary character, looses an arrow at the villain, kicks the bucket himself while it’s in flight, and posthumously lands a perfect shot.
i love both equally
The other option of course is to place an entire army of dead men on the same battlefield, and then have them not intersect with prophecy dude at all.
Tags:
#Middle Earth #fun with loopholes #story ideas I will never write #death tw #murder cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Android Netrunner was a fun CCG and I’m still sad it got canned, but having to explain the lore makes me wince because it’s essentially this, unironically.
Tags:
#storytime #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”Tums 2”) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #murder cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#Girl Genius #art #comics #murder cw? #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(I also don’t go *here* but who among us has never wanted to murder someone with a block of Swiss cheese) #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
i think i could design a better death arena for children than those hunger games amateurs.
the whole premise of the games is all pageantry. every year you get a crop of 24 candidates around whom the entire state media apparatus dedicates an entire year to building celebrity narratives. this candidate is the younger sibling of last year’s winner – these candidates are young lovers forced to compete – he’s smart – she’s fast – root for them, care about them, watch them, form opinions on them, bet on them. and then they stick them all in an arena to kill each other, which is a great entertainment premise, except that they make the arenas themselves really boring and generic. ooo, they’re in…a forest.
it’s not even an interestingly designed forest. imagine if the game designers treated their arena like an actual video game designer treats level design. discrete zones with multiple paths between each room, creative use of lighting to guide players to points of interest, points of interest scattered across the map, discoverable resources hidden to encourage exploration. instead they just have a generic outdoors location and if you get too close to the edge they throw a random fireball at you.
the 75th games are especially bad about this. the arena is laid out radially into 12 wedges, and each hour one wedge becomes especially dangerous in a 12-hour loop. as a mechanic, this is genius. it forces everyone to keep moving, making “survival by hiding” an engaging and tense viewing experience instead of someone sitting in a tree for three days. plus, it encourages players to return to the center of the arena, where travel time between wedges is short, which creates a high-value zone for players to regularly return to and conflict over. in other words, it’s a mechanic which incentives players to adopt dramatic, dynamic, exciting behaviors which are entertaining to watch (not to mention it communicates geography to the audience well). but it only incentives those behaviors if the players understand what’s happening, and they go out of their way not to tell the players anything! when they figure out what’s going on, the showrunners spin the arena to disorient the players, like they’re intentionally trying to get them to just. randomly wander the jungle instead.
this isn’t even to mention how often they create undramatic, boring deaths. they plant poison berries around the arena. they supply no fresh water and no way to get it. they roll poison clouds over sleeping victims. these happen to work out in the books themselves but you have to imagine that extremely often these just result in players dying unexciting deaths.
the cardinal sin though, of course, is that nothing is done to personalize the arena for the crop of contestants that year. if i’m designing the 75th hunger games and two of my most beloved contestants famously had to cancel their wedding because of a return to the games, i would OBVIOUSLY give them a trail of, i don’t know, wild game which conveniently leads directly past a well defended wedding chapel. will they hole up there for a while? hold a mock ceremony for themselves? do or receive ironic violence here? stare wistfully and move on? any of it is better television than getting attacked by generic attack monkeys. you should have a dozen of these things on the map for every single candidate. but the game makers are more interested in doing the same thing every other game has done than in telling a compelling story.
it makes me second guess enjoying the children’s murder arenas at all.
I mean, if you’re going to orchestrate an annual media stunt to keep people pacified, then you should put more effort into it to, you know, keep people involved.
Tags:
#Hunger Games #meta #death tw? #murder cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
If you believe the news, these days, it’s never been easier to get murdered. Everyone is waiting to snuff you out. Even suburbs are roiling apocalyptic zones that mandate you buy a very expensive security system and an up-armoured luxury SUV. A road trip is completely out of the question. After all, who knows what kind of whackos are out there?
To answer this question, we became those whackos. No, we didn’t serial kill, or even parallel kill anyone. What we did was load up the old ‘72 Toyota Crown wagon with a bunch of spare oil and parts and hit the road. We wanted to figure out if the world really was all that dangerous, and to prove it, we stayed at only the sketchiest bed and breakfasts across New England.
Things got off to a bad start. You see, the coterie of folks that I usually travel with are not exactly the most refined individuals. Because a lot of us were raised entirely by junkyards and our parents’ respective parole officers (thanks Joerg) we have trouble “fitting into” the conventional structure of society. That wouldn’t stop a serial killer, of course, who would surely prey on at least one of our group as we slept soundly inside Maryland’s least rat-infested rustic cabin.
No such luck. In fact, it turns out that the proprietors were afraid of us. They had been conditioned by the news, you see, and spent the entire night sleeping in shifts, wondering when we would burst through their bedroom door, looking for jewelry that we could hock for money to afford a Holley carburetor rebuild kit. Little did they know that the Crown was in fact running a diesel engine out of a Cuban grey-market lawn tractor, and also that we had no intention of ruining the experiment by trying to cause trouble.
That first morning, we parted, each group wary of the other. The experiment could not continue: it was likely that we would encounter the same problem the entire way up the Old Bay Expressway. We knew what had to happen next. After driving at high speed, we arrived at the local TV station, barely shaven and ready to pitch our new fear-based “action news” program. The audience would surely believe ridiculous lies coming from disgusting dirtbags like ourselves, our crude language and 10w40-stained visages lending our dire warnings extra authenticity.
“Folks,” I began, in my most folksy voice, “you gotta get rid of any old Mopar parts you have on your property. They were made by sleeper-agent Communist agitators working with the Y2K bug. Send them to me for destruction.”
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #storytime #unreality cw? #murder cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#Almost Nowhere #reactionblogging #out of context quotes #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #murder cw? #(I have now returned to Tumblr after leaving for eight days to avoid Almost Nowhere spoilers) #(I do expect to catch up; I’ve already made it up to the afternoon of July 8th)
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Umineko #murder cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 