Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Anonymous asked: BUT HOW DO YOU CATCH EVERYONES NAMES IN MAD MAX I JUST COULDNT NO MATTER HOW HARD I TRIED PLEASE SEND HELP

Wikipedia, Google, Tumblr, and this, my dude.  The end result is that I have a borderline encyclopedic knowledge of the characters in Fury Road.  Honestly I’m pretty sure like half of them don’t even get named in-movie, the script is probably like six pages.

Anonymous asked: My elementary school had the entire animorphs series and when I was in fifth grade I discovered them and I would check them out three at a time (I think at one point I was doing this every day) and just read through them. My teacher thought I was reading below my level and took away the one I was on and made me read "The Good Thief" and tell her how it ended before I could get it back.

This is eerily familiar, my elementary school experience looked very similar.  Admittedly I figured out really quick that I didn’t want to be explaining the Animorphs to my teachers (my mom asked about the first book while I was reading it at seven and she was VERY CONCERNED–of course then she read them herself and is easily as much of a die-hard as I am), but yeah man, I know that feel.  

Also I’m reading them out loud to my roommate and it’s fun times, and also-also you should ALWAYS feel free to come talk to me about Animorphs because it’s GOOD SHIT.  I have a Rachel/Tobias fic in reserve that I wrote today but won’t post just yet because I agreed not to torture my roommate while she’s feverish.

Anonymous asked: So I just went and saw Hidden Filigures and holy fuck is it a good movie. It is so amazing and I am in love

MY DESIRE TO SEE THAT MOVIE IS SO REAL.  I’m gonna make it happen, I just don’t have time right now because houseguests.

Anonymous asked: So, you mentioned there are different type of magic users in your Alleirat story. Any chance we could get a break down of the different types?

GODDAMN RIGHT YOU CAN

So I suppose the thing that bears mentioning that the way magic works in Alleirat is that a magic user (called a ‘worker,’ except for those who use fire magic) has inherent ability for a mode of using magic—they can channel magic in fire, in water, in plants, in metal, whatever, but they can’t do magic in anything else.  Someone who can channel magic through living plants can’t do the same with thread or water or fire, and they’ll never be able to learn.  So this can get REALLY specific really fast—someone might specifically be a silk worker, for example, or a bronze worker.  It’s more common, however, to specialize into a wide category, like ‘weather’ or ‘metal,’ so I’ll cover a few of the more common and/or pertinent ones.

• Fire magic, obviously.  Fire magic is revered as blessed by the Wanderer, the Alleirai god of fire, battle, and lies.  Brenneth, the main character, is a smith, which—in this universe—means that she’s specifically a broadly trained blacksmith with the ability to work in fire magic.  (Fire magic users are called fire smiths, not fire workers.)  This is pretty much what it says on the tin, with one major exception: unlike most fantasy universes where a mage can summon and throw fireballs, this is mundane fire, which means it needs fuel.  A fire smith of sufficient power can project a pillar of fire, but it’s incredibly short lived and impractical as a weapon.  Combat fire smiths generally carry small grenade-like packages that splash flammable oil over their target, when they can then ignite with ease.  

• Brenneth is something of an exception to this rule, because her trademark is something called white fire—white in Alleirat indicating death/deadly.  White fire isn’t actually white in color, but it’s the colloquial name for dragon fire, which needs no oxygen and no fuel save for the magical power and anger of the wielder. Brenneth earned her title of Fireheart by her preferred fighting style of igniting her sword with white fire—she refuses to teach this trick to anyone on the argument that it’s a dangerous technique with the potential for mass destruction, and she expects it to die with her.

• Weather magic, also obviously.  Weather magic is revered as blessed by the Lady of Stars, the Alleirai goddess of storms, stars, and fallen things.  Crispin is a powerful weather worker—and a fallen thing, and yes I am very pleased with that goddess.  Again, pretty much what it says on the tin, although to varying degrees.  Some weather workers expend themselves completely bringing down a single lightning strike, others—like Crispin—can rally hurricanes and still be standing.  Crispin is one of only a very few weather workers in history to be powerful enough to summon winds that are sufficiently strong and precise to carry him.  Much like fire smiths, combat weather workers often use an aid to direct their magic—it’s energetically taxing to aim lightning strikes, more so the further from one’s self the strike is going, so many weather workers carry rapiers.  They strike the rapier, which is close to themselves and strongly conductive, and then direct the charge at their target.

• Plant workers are also pretty much what it says on the tin, with the exception that a lot of plant workers have actual plant heritage—briatan are tree-people, descended from the universe-equivalent of dryads.  The briatan are more powerful, but less precise than pure human planet workers.  Isla Akekrei, generally known as Krei, the daughter of Brenneth’s old right hand woman and Brenneth’s new military ally, is briatan and a powerful plant worker—akekrei means oak. Krei, like many briatan plant workers, has tattoos in various plant-based inks on her arms, which she can manipulate and move around at will, and, also like many plant workers, she wears cuttings of vines and other plants on her person, which she can use as weapons.  You know that scene in Sky High where Layla flips out?  Yeah, like that.

• Flesh workers, ironically, are probably the most feared people in Alleirat, save Crispin himself.  Flesh workers channel magic through living flesh, which means they’re the magical healers in-universe.  However, a flesh worker is equally capable of healing a mortal wound or of clapping their hand to someone’s chest and making their heart explode, making every bone in their body shatter, or flaying them alive. The moment blood stops moving through the body, a flesh worker’s power is no longer capable of affecting an individual, but up until that point…  As long as they have skin-to-skin contact, a flesh worker can do pretty much whatever they want, no matter how physiologically improbable it is.  The only thing they really can’t do is reattach a completely severed limb. Incidentally, this is the most common kind of worker overall—and again, there are degrees—and the most common type of worker to go full dark side.  There’s a whole cadre of flesh worker assassins because, shocker, they’re the best at it.

• Death workers, on the other hand, are viewed in a similar way to healers in most fantasy universes—people literally cannot fathom a death worker going dark side.  Death workers are basically a variant on necromancers, with the ability to see spirits who’ve become trapped on the “wrong side of the day” (Alleirai religion says that spirits exist between days/on the other side of a day, and keep watch on their loved ones) and raise the dead as…puppets, I guess.  It’s very rare that the latter ability is used, and generally death workers are sort of like grief counselors/priests, responsible for performing funerals and speaking to the bereaved.  

• That being said, death workers are fearsome in combat.  There are stories from back when Alleirat was a bunch of small warring city-states, millennia ago, about death workers at war, and this is how they usually go.

• Two armies have been at war for years, and one, City-State A, is finally losing.  They know that if City-State B wins the war, they’ll sweep in and slaughter everyone left in City-State A, burn their cities—the traditional Sack of Magdeburg-esque situation.  So, a powerful death worker who’s been serving to ensure that all the spirits of the dead are safely on the other side of the day goes to her lord.
• “Lord,” she inevitably says, “I have the power to end this war, here and now.”  
• Her lord demurs, because what she’s offering is horrific in the Alleirai culture—you never ever tamper with a dead body except to put them to rest in the manner specified by the dead person.  This is a capital crime.
• “I will do this, and you cannot stop me,” she says.  “So bring in all the guards and tell the camp to go to sleep, and I will save us, and then I will die for what I’ve done.”
• Her lord agrees, because what other choice is there?  And the camp goes to sleep, and the death worker walks out onto the battlefield, where the bodies of the dead are neatly laid out and waiting to be laid to rest.  She stands in the middle of the dead, and she reaches out her hands, and all around her, they stand and take up weapons and march toward the enemy lines.  There is a single night of battle.  Every enemy soldier who falls is raised to march in the death worker’s army, and there are always more dead bodies to drive forward.
• The sun rises. The camp wakes.  The enemy lines are decimated, littered with dead bodies, and some distance away, somewhere with a clear view of the entire battle, the death worker lies dead.

• The worker wreaking havoc as a weapon of a lordling when Brenneth and Crispin come back to Alleirat?  A death worker fallen through from Earth named Hoshiko, with no friends, no support, and a conviction that she’s going insane.  ILY Shiko, I’m sorry I’m mean.

callipygianflamingo asked: hi, i just wanted to pop by and say that things we lost in the fire is an amazing fic! not many people can successfully write angst in fics without turning the character into a pathetic woobie drowning in wangst and manpain but you do it incredibly well! you're a super talented writer and i hope you have a wonderful day!!! :D :D :D

THANK YOU SO MUCH, oh my God I’m so glad you think the angst thing is going well.  I have a POWERFUL aversion to the woobie trope and I LIVE IN FEAR, okay, IN FEAR.  I’m so thrilled that people seem to be of the opinion that Grantaire is a well-executed character in ‘things we lost in the fire’, I’m???  I’m not a supremely coherent recipient of compliments, not gonna lie, but THANK YOU SO MUCH.

Anonymous asked: SAY, WHAT IS YOUR THESIS ABOUT? IF YOU DONT MIND.

FOR ALL MY BITCHING, I REALLY DO LOVE MY THESIS, SO.

I’m a pre-med major, but I discovered over the summer that I really, really hate research.  Which I pretty much knew already but now I have proof, so.  But the point is that when I picked my thesis topic I said flat out that I would do an experimental thesis when Satan built a snow fort, and the guy in charge of the pre-medical studies division was my Orgo teacher so he knew not to fuck with me.  (Teachers tend to fall into one of two categories with me: they get angry about butting heads with me nonstop OR they come to terms with the fact that it’s kind of like trying to corral a hurricane and thereupon give up.)

So I thought about what I could stand doing for a full year and decided that things I like include:

• Medicine
  
• History
• Military history
• Weird facts about old battle tactics
• Things that make other people’s eyes bug out when I tell them
• The Princess Bride
• Being a fucking smart-ass

And subsequently I am writing my thesis on the development of battlefield medicine through American history and I’m gonna title that bitch Only Mostly Dead.

Anonymous asked: WILL WE BE SEEING ANY MORE OF THE ALL IN ONE SPOT AU

YES WE WILL, I ACTUALLY HAVE LIKE FOUR PROMPTS BUT UNFORTUNATELY I HAVE ZERO BANDWIDTH TO, LIKE, FUNCTION.

SENIOR YEAR, KIDDIES, DON’T DO THIS TO YOURSELVES.

BUT REST ASSURED, I DEARLY LOVE THE AIOS AU AND WILL BE WRITING ALL THE PROMPTS ONCE I’M NOT EXHAUSTING MYSELF WITH MY THESIS ALL THE TIME.

Seriously, though, I’m going to try to get at least one more installment out before I go back to school, and I WILL get to the rest of the prompts.

Anonymous asked: Ego sum perlaetus ti lectito "Secrete Historium"! Est unum mi gratus libri. Loquor de libri, ego habeo duo libri de "Winnie Il Pu." Mi finis est ut lego illis.

Habebatis tu adipisci mi ultimus nuntius? Ego empticius verus Latine dictionarium nunc. Est a MCMXLVIII! Ego spes mi Latine emendo.

Corculum!  Nuntium ultimum tui accipiebam, sed occupatissima sum–thesem scribo.  Aliquando ultra lassa sum, Latineque laboriosus est.  Et librum tuum optimum esse puto!  Aliqua in domo mea, “Harry Potter et Philosopi Lapis” Latine habeo, sed lego non diu.  

Si vis, modicum Latinum te docere possum?  Ego etiam discipula sum, sed scriptos Ciceronis Virgilisque legere possum, et grammaticam Latini scio.

Anonymous asked: So far 2017 has been the worst. My dad is in the hospital and has a ripped kidney my dog ran away and she is a tiny dog and we dont even know if shes alive and I haven't slept since the first and I have the worst headache and I dont know what to do

Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.  I wish I could fix it for you.  At the very least, I can offer some tricks that work for me when I have a migraine, try and fix at least part of it?  

• Take a Benadryl with some caffeine, if both of those things interact well with your system.  Benadryl is an antihistamine and caffeine is a vasoconstrictor, so they help with swelling.  This might be the only time I recommend someone mixing an upper and a downer.
  
• Put on a tight hat.  I have no science to support this, but it works.
• Sit somewhere dark and quiet (obviously), but if you’re like me and you don’t like silence, some familiar music can help because you know the rhythm well enough not to startle yourself.
• I know some people recommend, like, peppermint oil dabbed at the points where the pain is worst?  I’ve never tried this, but hey.

I can also tell you that, if you’ve gotta damage an organ, the reason for having two kidneys is because they get damaged a lot.  The hospital is the best possible place for your dad, but on the other hand I know that’s not helpful, because it’s still your dad who’s hurt and that’s so, so hard.  

As for the rest of it…God, it’s so terrible when everything is falling apart around you.  When things are going to shit because you made a mistake or a bad decision, at least you can pinpoint the why, you know?  When it’s just because everything is going wrong all at once, it’s like everything spinning apart around you with no ground left to stand on.  You’re gonna live through this, baby, even though I know it might not seem like it, and you can totally feel free to come into my inbox whenever you want to talk, okay?

Anonymous asked: TALK TO ME ABOUT FURIOSA I LOVE HER SO MUCH

So I’ve been planning a fic for a while and I was gonna just write it here but then I realized that HA this is an ask and you seem too nice for me to dump a few (like maybe ten) thousand words in here.  So instead here are some headcanons for the fic I am writing where Max is the immortal unaging fey avatar of the desert who fetches up at people’s doorsteps and loses himself in months and lonely years without water or company, and is delighted to find Furiosa, who is growing into the immortal unaging fey avatar of green places and oases.

• Max doesn’t stay places, he leaves places, and Furiosa knows someone who leaves when she sees them.  So it shocks the hell out of her when she gets a Fury Boy (the name wasn’t her idea, it was the Dag and, well, they had to call them something other than War Boys) rushing up to her and insisting that there’s a bike coming toward them, and it’s the road warrior who fought on their side.  And she meets Max when he pulls up through the Wretched—not Wretched anymore, just people, people who look better than ever with Capable and Cheedo piecing together a cistern for the water—and he offers her the faint shadow-smile she remembers as he brings his (wrecked) bike to a halt.  He’s loaded down with a small bag of seeds, an assortment of weapons, and a sheepish expression.

• She takes herself by surprise as much as him, when she strides forward without a pause and presses their foreheads together.  His eyes are as blue and burnished as the scorched sky overhead.

• He comes back…not often, but not rarely, never gone for more than a year or so. Furiosa flatters herself that he’s glad to see her, when he returns, and her heart tightens when he begins to initiate the gentle forehead-touch of the Vuvalini.  (The third time he comes back, they have found another underground current, and they have enough water for a public bath.  She worries that Max might have drowned himself, after the third hour of him sitting in the water, but he’s still breathing.  He tells her, in his quiet, stilted way, that it’s the first time he hasn’t been thirsty in he doesn’t know how long, and she wonders about that. She wonders how he’d known that, a hundred and sixty days out, there was nothing but salt.)  

• People start to trickle in, drawn by the siren-call of water and food, because with the Wives—the Sisters, now—in charge, there is more than enough.  And Furiosa begins to hear stories, about how the Road Warrior saved people or killed tyrants or, more often than not, was dragged into a fight not his, quite against his will, and did the right thing anyway.  Here’s the thing, though.  Some of the stories are recent, just months or years past.  Others…well.  She talks to a child, who claims that her grandfather was a child when he knew Max. But Max can’t possibly be much older than she is, and she’s…Furiosa doesn’t really know.  She tries to count back in her head, but…  The Dag’s daughter Angharad is walking well, talking well, maybe seven years old.  When did that happen?  Shouldn’t Furiosa be greying, shouldn’t there be lines at her eyes and aches in her joints?

• The next time Max comes to the Citadel, she asks him how old he is.  He tells her, in his quiet way, less stilted now than when they met because he’s more at ease with her, that he doesn’t know.  But he tells her that he had a child, once, and they played in grass, and he and his wife had all the sweet clear water anyone could want.

• Furiosa goes out on a mission.  She runs out of water in a sandstorm, and she waits to die.

• She strides back into the Citadel two weeks later, and her throat is not even dry. She drinks, and it’s good, but not necessary.  Max is there, and while everyone else marvels over the fact that she’s alive, little Radi—Angharad who is not so little, who is thirteen now and as mad and gifted as her mother—touching her unlined face in wonder, Max watches her and nods.  He doesn’t need to marvel, doesn’t need to question, because he has stood in her place and felt time trickle by like water, like sand in a clenched fist.

• Furiosa remembers being a little girl, screaming for the loss of her mother and her arm and her innocence, and wishing that, if nothing else, she might live to see victory.  She has. And it seems she will live to see a good deal more.  She leaves the Citadel more and more, and she never grows thirsty, never grows tired. She has an impossible talent for finding water, for finding places where seeds will take root, and Max trails after her like a desert wraith.  (She’s not sure how long it’s been since they met, when she kisses him.  But his breath is as hot and dry as the wind under the sun, and she is growth and water and life to his desert, and he melts under her touch.)

• She leaves for good, when Radi is old enough to take her place as Fury, the Citadel’s Road Warrior, and she and Max wander.  They will not die.  The desert has been fed for too long to be taken by the green places, but life is tenacious and neither will Max’s desert swallow Furiosa’s green places whole.  It’s an uneasy truce, between his and hers, but it stands.