Tag: excellent

prokopetz:

Alternative cursed monarchies for your fantasy RPG settings:

  • In an effort to transform the kingship into a pure meritocracy, a mighty enchantment was wrought to ensure that only the most skilled citizen of the kingdom could wield the power of rulership. Being somewhat absent-minded, the wizard in question neglected to specify most skilled at what, so past monarchs have included the kingdom’s best baker, the kingdom’s best shoemaker, and the kingdom’s best mom; how the spell judges comparative excellence at completely unrelated skill sets is as yet poorly understood.
  • A century ago the king jokingly designated his favourite housecat as his heir, and was promptly killed in a hunting accident before he could rescind the order. Unfortunately, the king ruled by Divine Right, which actually passed to the cat, and thereafter to the cat’s descendants. Efforts to teach the current monarch to designate a human heir have failed because, well, it’s just a cat, albeit a cat whose commands – insofar as its human attendants are able to understand them – are divine law.
  • The throne is enspelled so that the current monarch is obliged to rule with compassion and justice, with even the slightest impropriety resulting in unbearable suffering. The royal succession is carried out primarily by means of tricking foreign visitors who don’t know about the curse into accepting the crown – whereupon the newly-ex-monarch promptly runs away before they can change their mind!

alphynix:

Some quick concept doodles for a speculative type of marine pterosaur. The very earliest discoveries of pterosaurs were actually interpreted as being aquatic animals, and I wanted to play with that idea a bit while keeping the anatomy recognizable.

These guys are vaguely based on Pteranodon. They use their wing-flippers to cruise around like manta rays, with their crests serving as dorsal fins and their feet reduced to small fluke-like flippers for steering.

I imagine they’re probably capable of spectacular breaching and gliding short distances over the water’s surface to escape predators, similar to flying fish and squid.

and-a-pidgey-in-a-wepear-tree:

scoutdoesstuff:

nonbinaryjasontodd:

twitter canceled

It becomes a pattern in the aftermath. 

Bruce has set up a makeshift lab in Wakanda, while the world takes stock of their dead and Wakanda mourns for their king. Bruce isn’t doing anything important, but he needs to do something, so he studies Wakanda’s vibranium supply and attempts to keep Shuri busy. 

Otherwise, the grief might just be too much for the both of them to bear. 

Bruce also tries very hard not to think about Tony and what form of matter Tony may or may not be at this very moment. He’s only moderately successful. 

It’s on the third day of the second week after half of the world has turned to ash that Thor brings Bruce a little green snake. Bruce is baffled, but he tried to be polite about it. Bruce is heartsick, though, so that makes everything a little harder. 

Then Thor asks for Bruce to see if the snake is Loki, and it takes every bit of willpower Bruce Banner poses to not burst into tears. Thor is so strong and so keen to smile, he makes it so easy for everyone to forget that he has lost nearly everything. 

Bruce pokes at the snake without any further complaints. When nothing happens, the grief on Thor’s face is unimaginable. 

Bruce begins spending time with both Thor and Shuri, in a desperate attempt to combat his own grief by combatting theirs. 

All the while, every second or third day, Thor brings Bruce a small green animal and asks Bruce to see if it his lost brother. Bruce checks every time, with care and precision, but the result is always negative. It’s awful for both of them, but Thor can’t seem to stop and Bruce doesn’t know how to make him. 

This pattern holds for a few weeks, until Thor brings Bruce a beaten and battered lizard. It’d been burned somehow and it looked like one of its limbs had been badly broken. When Thor presents it to him, Bruce honestly isn’t sure if Thor had just brought the little thing to Bruce to see if it could be saved. 

“Could you check?” Thor asks, the question quiet and hurt after so many weeks of negative results from Bruce’s prodding and poking. 

“Of course,” Bruce says softly, adding his portion of the call and response. 

He gingerly picks up the lizard, as the poor also looks like he’d been through the wringer, and gives him a quick once over. Bruce’d been right about the broken leg and the burns were pretty –

The lizard fucking turns into Loki. A damaged, burnt Loki who scuttles backward on a broken leg while spitting blood. 

Thor bursts into tears. Bruce bursts out laughing. Everyone has their own way of processing grief and shock and grief turned into shock, apparently. 

It’s later, when they’ve gotten Loki a little patched up, convinced Okoye not to kill Loki (”He tried to destroy the world!” she says – “He’s gotten better,” Bruce says), and Thor’s eyes were mostly dry, that Loki finally says through clenched, bloodied teeth: 

“They’re in a pocket dimension.”

“Who?” Bruce whispers, stunned. 

“Everyone. I told him he’d never be a god. He was just a warlord playing at being something powerful. He should’ve fucking listened.”

JUST THIS ONCE, ROSE, EVERYBODY LIVES