whenever i see a baby in public i wish i were like a powerful faerie god mother character who could give the baby a gift like “you’ll never get a cold” or “math will always make sense to you” or something like bein’ great with string instruments but I don’t have any powers that I know of but it doesn’t stop me from trying so every time I see a baby in public I tell the adult with it “what a beautiful baby” and it makes them smile and then I pretend I can take the goodness of their smile and I look at the baby and I think very hard “you will have a good life, even if it’s hard, you will end up happy” and I’m just hopin’ the magic kicks in at some point
faerie: for your service, I will grant you one boon
“Character who looks dangerous but is actually harmless” and “character who looks harmless but is actually dangerous” are both well and good, but consider: character who looks dangerous, and actually is, but for a completely different reason than they look like they should be.
And no, I don’t mean like “guy who wears robes with a water motif is actually a fire wizard”. I mean like “seven-foot-tall mountain of gleaming muscle with sword the size of a surfboard strapped to his back is actually the Nine Realms’ most feared lawyer”.
Lyft driver: “Your name, is Slavic? Me too. Bulgarian. I drive fast for you, brother.”
Now he’s waxing philosophical about the Ottoman Empire, imperialism, and human nature. “Humans? We are the most dangerous animal. Other animals, they kill when they need to. We kill when we think we need to. It is not the same.”
He just monologued about climate change and the military industrial complex, and the difficulty of having a Balkan identity when every Balkan country changes hands “every twenty years”. “Our history is getting swallowed by the biggest fish, and that fish getting swallowed by the next biggest fish, and so on.”
He had so many more gems. We compared family names, realized that his daughter shares my grandfather’s name (the feminine version), and then he started talking about The Old Country. The city where he grew up had a population of 300, and the population of his whole country could fit inside Chicago. He came here twenty years ago seeking a better life, but “everything in America is too big, the cars, the problems, the inequality”. He pointed to his phone and called it “stupid little computer” that’s meant to control his life, not to improve it, and how the world is getting steadily worse and the little people can’t do anything about it. He told me to continue my studies so that I don’t grow up to work in the service industry and can instead try to stop the concentration of power into the hands of corrupt people. Then he shrugged and said, “But who knows? Can anyone do it? I don’t know if it’s possible.”
Instead of a human who shapeshifts into animals, they’re, like, an owlbear that shapeshifts into a human.
They’re mystically attuned to cities, which their powers treat as a sort of exotic but naturally occurring terrain.
Rather than seeking intuitive oneness with untamed nature, they carry out hilariously reductive scholarly analysis of humanoid society, all writing up thesis papers like “On the nesting habits of the Common Halfling”.
(They can still call down a lightning strike on your ass, though, because some things don’t change.)
Whittier, Alaska, is a town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in a 14-story former Army barracks built in 1956. The building, called Begich Towers, holds a police station, a health clinic, a church, and a laundromat. Its hallways resemble those of a school . One can often find residents shuffling around in slippers and pajamas.
Because the winters are so ferocious, the town’s only playground is indoors.
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This is some dystopian young adult novel bull.
To be fair pretty much all of Alaska is some dystopian young adult novel bull in one way or another.
I have only been to the outside of Whittier, that one time I took the ferry from Valdez, and it’s grim-looking as hell.
This also neglects to mention that the only ways to reach Whittier are either the aforementioned ferry, bush plane, or a 2.5 mile-long, approximately 15′x15′ tunnel through a mountain that looks like this inside:
The AKDOT website reassures us that “During the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake (the greatest magnitude earthquake ever recorded in North America) the tunnel suffered no significant structural damage and no cave-ins.”
Also please note that though most of the population now lives in the Begich Towers, the townspeople used to reside in the Buckner Building, which is now abandoned and just. Sitting there. Empty. The building that used to be a whole town. Looking super fucking haunted:
“The constant sound of cascading water echoes throughout the complex. Bears have been reported both wandering the upper floors in the spring and hibernating on the lower floors during winter.”
that last building isn’t abandoned, it literally says the bears live there now.
jinlinli 