I’m not crying at this William Shatner-credited novel describing Kirk thinking about McCoy, you are

Some more just for fun sketches for Nightmare Wives, because I was bored on my lunchbreak and in a staff meeting today. I'm playing with the idea of the wives being shapeshifters - it might make it a bit TOO similar to STP, but on the other hand, having the appearance of the characters and setting shift from scene to scene is something that really telegraphs that this explicitly takes place in a dream/nightmare rather than reality. Plus it means more monsters for the price of six.

Didn't get time to draw variations of Performa, unfortunately, but she would have some too. The Concierge, however, stays almost entirely the same no matter what.

WHERE do you think youre going. get back here

Mollusa

A female Northern silky anteater (Cyclopes dorsalis) carries her youngster on her back in Esmeraldas, Ecuador

by Chien Lee

thinking about the fucking screenshot spell twilight used once

naga cery for snake year 🐍

A good dragon hoard must have a princess

That must be where she's heading now!

The goblin looked at the orc. The orc looked at the goblin. They both looked down at the crumpled shape of the Overlord, His Unholy Majesty, in his obsidian armor.

His final spasms had been mesmerizingly acrobatic. The fall down the steps leading up to his iron throne had pretzelled his body quite impressively, both arms folded behind his back and one leg bent at a jaunty angle.

The goblin looked at the orc. The orc looked at the goblin.

"Shit," said the goblin.

"Shit," said the orc.

"We're likely to get blamed for this," the goblin said. She walked over to the head of the glittering mangled heap and started pulling the helmet off.

"It's not our fault," the orc said. "It's hard to help someone choking when they wear two-hundred pounds of spiked armor at all times."

"Yeah, well," the goblin grunted. The helmet came free, and the bald head of the Overlord bounced on the stone with a hollow, coconut noise. "You know how it is in this bloody country - thieves get their heads cut off so they can't think about thieving, and all that." She fished in the Overlord's mouth with a finger and pulled out the obstructing olive on the end of her claw.

She popped it into her mouth and chewed. "What do you reckon they do for a regicide?" she said.

"We should run," the orc said. She had started bouncing her leg. "I hear that there's some places in the Alliance where they just kill you and let you stay dead. That's got to be nicer than what'll happen if we stay here."

The goblin started to nod - and then her gaze fell on the helmet.

It looked like a pineapple designed by a deranged blacksmith. It was all thorns and spikes and hard edges, as though the maker had been very determined to not let pigeons roost on it. The only bits that weren't solid iron were eyeholes. Nobody had ever seen the Overlord's face.

She held up the helmet and squinted from it to the orc. One of the thorns had been bent badly in the fall.

Nobody had ever seen the Overlord's face...

"Right," she muttered. "Right. Could work - or."

The orc had a sudden vision of the immediate future. "No," she said.

"I mean you're about his height-"

"No."

"It would just be for a-"

"Absolutely not."

"Just hear me out," the goblin said. "Outside of this room are two-thousand men and orcs and goblins who are absolutely gonzo about this man, and there's a whole country of them outside of the castle, and at any moment someone's going to walk in that door and see one dead tit in black armor and two unbelievably dead idiots next to him.

"Or." She tossed the helmet up like a basketball to the orc, who fumbled and tried to find somewhere to hold it that wasn't a knife's edge. "We chuck him out the window now, walk out the door in the armor, and ditch the armor as soon as nobody sees us."

The orc had started bouncing her leg again. "They'll know something's up the second I walk out of the room."

"No worries," said the goblin. "Leave that to me."

---

It had been a very strange year for the Empire.

Change had rolled across the land as slow and inevitable as a glacier. Roads and bridges carved the gray, blasted wildlands, and a number of social reforms had made the country a place where you could be miserable, yes, but miserable in comfort and safety, and that was an improvement.

Barely anyone got boiled alive in molten metal, and even if the disgusted sun never rose to light the Empire, at least you had a roof over your head to protect yourself from the acid rain.

i’m listening to this account of the extinction of passenger pigeons. how they were so incredibly numerous they’d darken the sky, they’d sound like a tornado, they’d flock for days. you could throw your hat into a flock and knock a few down.

and they were such a common food item. everyone is eating them.

we had trains and we had efficient food markets and we had telegrams and thus we had professional bird hunters, they’d receive word of a flock or a roost of passenger pigeons and they’d travel to hunt them.

you need to understand that, naturally, partially because they were easier to catch and partially because they tasted better, the hunt is focused on young pigeons. you also need to understand that passenger pigeons didn’t breed in captivity. and you need to understand that they mated for life, so if you killed one of a pair they wouldn’t mate again.

it was clear that their numbers were decreasing, but it didn’t seem dire until it was too late. the flocks started to age and age and age and die of natural causes and so the final collapse of the species was sudden and fast.

we tried to bring the colonies together to breed, passenger pigeons were the first protected bird in the US, but it was too late. people almost couldn’t believe that it was happening but they watched the species die in real time. the last wild passenger pigeon was preserved through taxidermy, he was shot in ohio. the last passenger pigeon in the world was named Martha. she died september first, 1914. she died in the cincinnati zoo.

i cant stop thinking about the end of a species. i cant stop thinking about realizing, too late, that we’ve killed it. the dawning horror of an entire population as we realize that it’s not only possible to destroy something we took for granted, but that we already have, and it’s too late to pull it back from the brink. every day this planet gets warmer.

Snepcore

Thanks to Cynnia back on patreon for sponsoring this idea! https://patreon.com/luxar92

Posted using PostyBirb

snake maid...

The cute noises of being trans femme and a kobold DOES stack btw

There was a 'womp' sound from the yard. I looked out the window.

Where the large pile of leaves had been, a dragon sat.

"Oi!" I called.

"The hoard was unguarded," the dragon said. "I claim it."

Every damn year. It'll leave once the leaves lose their golden hue. Meanwhile, I can't order takeaway.

I mean, I kinda had to with how cute this was