“you're so quiet” bro i lost all my communication skills
I've grown tired of this body
Cumbersome and heavy body
Drawing bulls is kinda fun ngl
Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.
The thing the recruiters don’t tell you about space battles is that you die slowly.
Ships don’t blow up cleanly in flashes and sparks. Oh, if you’re in the engine room, you’ll probably die instantly, but away from that? In the computer core, or the communications hub? You just lose power. And have to sit, air going stale and room slowly cooling, while you wait to find out if the battle is won or lost.
If it’s lost, nobody comes for you.
It had been about half a day (that’s a Raithar day, probably a bit shorter than yours) and Kvala and I were pretty sure we had lost. Kvala was injured, Traav and I were dehydrated and exhausted, and Louv was dead, hit by shrapnel when the conduits blew.
Most fleets give you something, of course. For Raithari, it’s essence of windgrass. I looked at the vial.
“It’s too soon,” Traav said.
Kvala gestured negation, shakily. She had been burned when conduits blew, and her feathers were charred, and her leftmost eye was bubbly and blind now. Even if we were rescued, she probably wouldn’t survive. “You know we’re losing the war.”
They couldn’t deny that. “It doesn’t mean we lost the battle.”
“Doesn’t it? The Chreee have better technology. Better resources. And they have their warrior code. They don’t care if they die.”
“We can’t give up!” Traav protested. They were young, a young and reckless thar who had listened to a recruiting officer and still believed scraps of what they had been told. “Any heartbeat now—”
There was a clunk. Something had docked with our fragment of the ship.
“You see?!” Traav crowed triumphantly.
Kvala exchanged glances with me. The Chreee never bothered to hunt down survivors. What was the point, after all?
The Aushkune did.
There weren’t supposed to be Aushkune here. They were supposed to hide in nebulas.
But if there were—
If there were, we were too late. The windgrass couldn’t possibly destroy our nervous systems in time to stop the corpse-reviving implants, and once you were implanted, it was over—or it would never be over, depending on how you looked at it and whether Aushkune drones were aware of anything—
Footsteps.
Bipedal. The Aushkune were supposed to be bipedal.
And then the blast door opened, and a figure stood in it. My first thought was, robot? That’s almost worse than Aushkune . . . But no, it was a being in some sort of suit.
Who wore suits?
“Friendly contact,” the suit’s sound system blared, as the being moved over to Kvala. “Urgent treatment. Evacuation.”
“Who are you?” Kvala struggled upright.
Despite the primitive suit, the blocky being was using up-to-date medical scanners. “Low frequency right angle shape,” it explained—or maybe didn’t explain. Two more figures came into the room and put Kvala firmly onto a stretcher.
“You’re with the Chreee, aren’t you?” Kvala was not at all happy to be on a stretcher.
“Not Chreee,” the sound system said. “You Man. Soil Starship Nichols.” The being hesitated. “Rescue Chreee as well. On ship. Will separate.”
“You what?” I said faintly. Who would do that?
“Oath,” the being explained.
“What kind of oath? To what deity?”
The shoulders of the being moved up and down. “Several different. Also none. For me, none. Just—oath.”
I exchanged glances with Traav, who looked as unsettled as I was. I had never, ever heard of groups cooperating when they couldn’t even swear to or by the same power.
The being scanned me. “Have water,” it said. “Recommend.”
Raithari have fast metabolisms. I could—would—die of thirst quickly, and painfully.
“Where will you take us,” Traav asked, “after you give us water?”
“Raithari to Raithar. Chreee to Chreeeholm.”
“Chreeeholm would kill them for failing,” Traav remarked.
The being hesitated, and then said, “War news sometimes bad. Sometimes lie.”
We had learned long ago not to believe the recruiting officers, but what did that have to do with anything?
“And you—what?” I asked. “Just fly around looking for battles and rescuing victims?”
The being seemed to consider this. “Best invention of soil,” it said finally.
Most of what it was saying didn’t make any sense. Did it worship soil? But it had said that it had sworn to no deity . . .
Madness.
On the other hand—war was a deliberate, rational act by deliberate, rational people, and I wanted no more of it. So why not embrace madness and see what happened?
“Soil Starship—Rrikkol?” I asked, stumbling over the word.
“Yes. Soil Starship Nichols.”
I followed the being in the suit.
Took me well over a minute to realize "low frequency right angle shape" was Red Cross.
I love how this shows the weirdness both of language and of culture. Excellent writing!
"Soil Starship Nichols"
This is what took me a moment.
Earth Starship [Nichelle] Nichols
Excellent writing! I loved this!! (I caught the Nichelle Nichols’s not but was lost by the Red Cross one 😂😂)
This is so ...so what I want my fiction to be. Great work.
wow this is too intimate to share with my close friends or family let me put this on my tumblr blog for hundreds of strangers to see
The wise man, when caught naked in public, covers not his junk but his face.
what i love about mlp fim is that the power of friendship is not a symbolic thing it is a real and tangible force so potent it can be channeled into killing people
friendship beam. explode
orpheus ass fucker choosing to look back over his shoulder at his beloved
orpheus watching eurydice rake leaves
i hate it here i hate gay people
doodle of a BUG
One more Rukia drawing to destress myself <3
hello my name is Very tiny flying insect i see you’ve got an uncovered beverage outdoors. Can i fall into it and kill myself please please please please please please please please please please
hmmm why does my uterus hurt and why do i feel kinda off. weird. surely these are not the warning symptoms of a predictable biological process that occurs on a regular schedule. anyway. im going to wear white pants today.
by talos this cant be happening
it's always a little funny seeing people watch supernatural for the first time and they get to cas' intro and expect him to be really sweet and then he's like. threatening dean and pushing him up against the wall and chokeslamming demons and he sounds like he smokes a pack a day. and then 3 seasons from his introduction he's practically committing angel genocide. he's our little war criminal your honor <3
#what#i thought he was like 👉👈 hey you dont know me but i saved you bc im a little guy (via @romenthenoodle)
at the end of season 6 he betrays sam, dean, and crowley and consumes hundreds of primordial monster souls and goes a little mad with power. he also completely shatters sam's mind in the process. anyway it ends with him slaughtering like. half the angels in heaven and declaring himself the new god. cas mellows out a little over the years but he's pretty fucking far from being an innocent little guy
he exploded but he's ok now
she knows she’s not allowed to bark at the cat, so her loophole is just to make a bunch of noises that are not barking instead.
Long Horse Makes Sad Horn Noises At Local Bastard Man
exclusive suicide hotline for girls who have just gone shopping for jeans
'thats probably fine' is my favourite thing to say after seeing something that is incredibly obviously not fine. it is very played out and i will never ever stop doing it