snailkites:

tangledwing:

it’s seldom difficult to tell when a party of grey-crowned babblers is in the vicinity. Their scolding, whistling and chattering calls readily give their presence away, but their most well-known call is a distinctive ‘ya-hoo’, given as a duet by pairs of birds –the female gives a harsh ‘ya’ and the male responds with a high-pitched ‘hoo’, though given the precise timing it sounds as though the call was given by a single bird.
Top Photo: Chris Tzaros/BirdLife Australia

“Now, for the next photo, everyone do your silly pose!”

Source: tangledwing

Driller Yaatree aka Fuck This Entire Everything In Particular And Most Especially You Shockwave

Yaatree was in a foul mood

Shockwave’s latest experimental implants were still settling, the durasteel pinging as it shifted. An assortment of scavenged metal hunks and fibers was spread alongside him, and he sourly picked through the meager scraps. He wasn’t supposed to ingest anything for several more hours, but his tanks pinged insistently, low fuel warning warnings flashing as the integrations ate up his reserves.

Even small movements hurt, the coils of serrated blading scraping harshly against the floor. Yaatree tried to still, but his patience was wearing thin. Shockwave would know if he left the room, he always did… but he hadn’t forbidden Yaatree from exploring, only from disturbing the implants. 

Yaatree flinched inwardly, remembering how his fussing had inadvertently pulled out some delicate circuitry, and the many welds he’d had to replace it. But really, who would put that many optical sensors on a driller? Yaatree was hardly a stealthy mecha, totally unsuited for surveillance.

If Shockwave wanted to court Soundwave, Yaatree was a poor choice. Even if he was not much bigger than the typical Autobot now, (and therefore the perfect size and age to ping Soundwave’s carrier instincts) he would grow, quickly. 

Yaatree was hardly one for cuddling, anyways, despite what Shockwave insisted to himself when he thought he was alone in the lab.

Peering around the doorway, Yaatree slithered through the cross-corridor and into a smaller lab room he hadn’t been in before. He squirmed under a table, and plucked open a cabinet to rifle through the contents.

Yaatree froze, suddenly aware he wasn’t alone. 

Yaatree turned slowly, blenders chirring as his blades spun uneasily. Faint red optics peered up over the edge of the table. 

Spinflask was not having a good day. 

He’d just wanted a bit of privacy. Duo were lovely, but they were… they were a lot. Energetic, to say the least. He’d wanted some time alone, and had apparently picked entirely the wrong spot for it. Namely, a spot Shockwave frequented. 

And Shockwave was strong enough that, even with Spinflask’s adrenaline spiking enough to have him trying to drive claws through the other’s plating, he could grab Spinflask by the scruff and hold him easily in one servo. All of Spinflask’s adrenaline had only gotten him deemed “interesting” and strapped to a table with a crown of sensors on until he wore himself out. 

Once he’d woken up, he’d found himself on top of a table entirely suited for his alt mode, fastened to the table by a leash around his ankle. There was an IV dripping energon into his systems, another cube nearby, and a short list of tasks and supplies in front of him. It was probably not wise to upset his captor, so he did as was implied-slash-ordered, loading up his internal rack and spinning everything as was specified. 

He could do this. It wasn’t exactly fun, working for an unknown purpose, but he could do it. Wasn’t difficult or particularly distressing. He could just… do this. Hopefully Duo would come to rescue him, but… that wasn’t really a reasonable expectation, was it? He… probably wasn’t worth the trouble of getting into Shockwave’s lab, after all, even if they knew where he was. Which they didn’t. 

So… he could work with this. Could be worse, after all. 

And then a thing came into the room, and it was worse. Spinflask hunched himself into the smallest ball possible on top of the table, optics nervously locked on… whatever that was, and waited to see if it would leave. 

It did not leave. 

It noticed him. 

Slag. 

Not knowing what else to do, Spinflask offered the thing a tiny wave, then tucked his servos up with the rest of himself and tried to look uninteresting. And not edible.

gallusrostromegalus:

jhaernyl:

ceruleancynic:

jumpingjacktrash:

kaasknot:

scottislate:

darkbookworm13:

sasstricbypass:

chromolume:

it’s all you americans talk about… liminal space this… cryptid that

america is big, we got.,.,.,. its a lot happening here

It’s at least 3,000 miles just from the East Coast to the West, depending on where you start.

If I try to drive from here in Maine to New Mexico, it’s 2,400 miles. 

From here to Oregon, 800 miles from my current residence to my relatives in NJ, then another 3,000 miles after that. 

A brisk 8 day drive that meanders through mountains, forests, corn fields, dry, flat, empty plains, more mountains, and then a temperate rain forest in Oregon.

The land has some seriously creepy stuff, even just right outside our doors. 

There is often barking sounds on the other side of our back door. 

At 3 am. 

When no one would let their dog out. 

It’s a consensus not to even look out the fucking windows at night. 

Especially during the winter months. 

Nothing chills your heart faster than sitting in front of a window and hearing footsteps breaking through the snow behind you, only to look and not see anything. 

I live in a tiny town whose distance from larger cities ranges from 30 miles, to 70 miles. What is in between?

Giant stretches of forests, swamps, pockets of civilization, more trees, farms, wildlife, and winding roads. All of which gives the feeling of nature merely tolerating humans, and that we are one frost heave away from our houses being destroyed, one stretch of undergrowth away from our roads being pulled back into the earth.

And almost every night, we have to convince ourselves that the popping, echoing gunshot sounds are really fireworks, because we have no idea what they might be shooting at.

There’s a reason Stephen King sets almost all his stories in Maine.

New Mexico, stuck under Colorado, next to Texas, and uncomfortably close to Arizona. I grew up there. The air is so dry your skin splits and doesn’t bleed. Coyotes sing at night. It starts off in the distance, but the response comes from all around. The sky, my gods, the sky. In the day it is vast and unfeeling. At night the stars show how little you truly are.

This is the gentle stuff. I’m not going to talk about the whispered tales from those that live on, or close, to the reservations. I’m not going to go on about the years of drought, or how the ground gives way once the rain falls. The frost in the winter stays in the shadows, you can see the line where the sun stops. It will stay there until spring. People don’t tell you about the elevation, or how thin the air truly is. The stretches of empty road with only husks of houses to dot the side of the horizon. There’s no one around for miles except those three houses. How do they live out here? The closest town is half an hour away and it’s just a gas station with a laundry attached.  

No one wants to be there. They’re just stuck. It has a talent for pulling people back to it. I’ve been across the country for years, but part of me is still there. The few that do get out don’t return. A visit to family turns into an extended stay. Car troubles, a missed flight, and then suddenly there’s a health scare. Can’t leave Aunt/Uncle/Grandparent alone in their time of need. It’s got you.

Roswell is a joke. A failed National Inquirer article slapped with bumperstickers and half-assed tourist junk. The places that really run that chill down the spine are in the spaces between the sprawling mesas and hidden arroyos. Stand at the top of the Carlsbad Caverns trail. Look a mile down into the darkness. Don’t step off the path. just don’t.

The Land of Entrapment

here in minnesota we’re making jokes about how bad is the limescale in your sink

pretending we don’t know we’re sitting on top of limestone caverns filled with icy water

pretending we don’t suspect something lives down there

dammit jesse now I want to read about the things that live down there

meanwhile in maryland the summer is killing-hot, the air made of wet flannel, white heat-haze glazing the horizon, and the endless cicadas shrilling in every single tree sound like a vast engine revving and falling off, revving and falling off, slow and repeated, and everything is so green, lush poison-green, and you could swear you can hear the things growing, hear the fibrous creak and swell of tendrils flexing

and sometimes in the old places, the oldest places, where the salt-odor of woodsmoke and tobacco never quite go away, there is unexplained music in the night, and you should not try to find out where it’s coming from.  

@gallusrostromegalus

The intense and permanent haunting of a land upon which countess horrors have been visited, and that is too large and wild for us to really comprehend is probably the most intense and universal American feeling.