Mana-pool and Mana-strength. Why nobody else understands those concepts is a mystery to you. With a large Pool one can force the issue, with high strength came less expenditure. Everyone has both of these, but the way they train is inefficient, because they only measure the Mana Pool.

After becoming the most powerful person in this kingdom, I end up defeating a threat so great that people don’t speak of it. The devastation and loss are too much to bare, so everyone tries to forget that it ever happened. It’s too much to bear.

But they all remember that battle, as much as they try to forget.

I don’t come out fully unscathed. There’s damage from the war that’ll end up killing me eventually. But overall, I’m ok. Ok, scratch that, I’M ALIVE. But I’m no longer able to fight.

So I retire and open a training studio where I teach people how to become fighters themselves. I don’t just take anyone. People have to apply, and if I deem you worthy, you get to learn these skills under my tutelage for free.

If you’re an asshole but are super rich, you can pay a hefty fee to learn some of these skills, but it’s a lesser product. The last thing we need are MORE powerful monsters trying to take over our home.

The only real challenge I have is figuring out the advertising campaign for my fighting studio. How do broadcast my qualifications to a younger generation if my heroic actions saved us from such an event so awful, so traumatic, that people refuse to talk about it?

“Hey, remember how I saved ya’ll from <redacted>? Come learn how to become the next generation of prestige fighters, powerful enough to protect our home from the next insanely evil and powerful enemy?”

I end up hiring a PR team to handle promotion. That’s what professionals are for.

Hello readers! Prophet of the Sun chapter two will be complete in mid March, and I would love to feature some guest art before starting the next one!

Due date is March 1st, I'll take fanart, silly comics, crossovers, or anything else! Feel free to @ me or DM me on tumblr or shoot me an email at bigbluebirb@gmail.com.

Thanks in advance!

I got you fam

boom roasted

new year new mountain goats

You rush into a church to stop the love of your life from marrying the wrong person. Not paying attention you barge in yelling "I OBJECT" only to realize it's a funeral. The deceased immediately rises in perfect health. All eyes turn to you.

"UH..." you stall.

"W-want to get married?"

You marry the now undeceased corpse, it turns out he's a real sweetheart named Bert. You live happily ever after.

“So what do you think?”’

“Are those- Goya panties?”’

She hopped onto his lap and started kissing along his neck-

“Yeah,” she whispered, “what do you think of them?”

This woman is going to kill me. 

They had been dating for a little over a month at this point. It was the first time they were going to sleep with each other.

She cupped his cheek and then proceeded to ram her tongue down his throat.

I’m going to marry her.

They had met in an art museum. He had overheard commenting on a few of the paintings, but her full on rant on how much she hated Hopper is what finally got him to get the nerve to talk to her.

“Stupid nostalgic Americana bullshit-”

“I don’t know, he’s one of my favorites actually.”

She snapped her neck to look at him. Her friends- all artsy ,punk-types, just like her, immediately started snickering. 

They knew what was happening, even if she had no idea. 

“Of course he is,” she seethed, her words dripping with contempt.

Of course this straight, white, cis loser is going to love this bland ass painting-

“I like the nostalgia element, plus there’s like, this coldness to it…It’s like, you're also, like, an outsider…? Like, you don’t get to be part of this painting? It kind of hurts but is…uh…relatable.” He rubbed the back of his neck, “Look, I’m not an artist, so I’m probably talking out of my ass. I assume you are-” pregnant pause, “an artist I mean.”

This was not what she had expected. She hadn’t expected this dude in a polo shirt to accidentally reveal the beginning of something, possibly, vulnerable about himself.

“I am,” she said, though labels were annoying, “an artist I mean.”

He looked at the painting and then looked at her. “You’ve got more valid opinions then. Do you have any favorite pieces here?”

They ended up walking the rest of the gallery together. She glared at her friends when they VERY obviously went to other rooms to give them privacy.

But the guy, much to her chagrin (and maybe delight- way too early to acknowledge that) had opinions on art that she could respect, even if her taste was wildly different.

They ended up exchanging numbers.

“Free drinks.”  She shrugged when her friends teased her about it. One of them rolled their eyes- “You are so full of shit.”

On their first date, they established that he was getting his undergrad degree in business, having just completed his military service. Her friends would NEVER let her live that down that she was dating ex military. She was an artist (shocking, she knew- her lack of shaving and piercings were kind of a give away). He was also sober, “Or not- I just never drink, or uh, have drank.” It was a bit disappointing- no free drinks- but she was chill with him taking her out to brunch. It turns out she was a few years older than him, though most people would assume the opposite, both based on appearance and maturity levels.

They talked about art. She loved insane imagery and intense political pieces. Goya, Picasso, a lot of political woodcuts from the 1900s. He liked representational work, so a bunch of stuff she didn’t care for- but she was impressed when he mentioned Mucha and Liondecker.They covered other topics. They had wildly different taste in TV shows (“you really like Andy Griffith???”) but oddly had very similar taste in movies and music (“your favorite movie is Anything, Anywhere, All At Once but your favorite TV show is ANDY GRIFFITH??? Are you a fucking alien or something???” He had laughed at that, howled at it- it was the only time he was actually loud the entire date. The majority of the time he was so quiet it was a struggle to hear him in the restaurant).

When he asked her out for a second date, she hesitated, but she said yes because he had said, “You are so funny, I’m kind of in awe over here,” as they were exiting the restaurant. She had gotten so much shit for being too loud or too over the top or too masculine or too whatever from dates and boyfriends over the years. So, she agreed.

And she was A LOT. She had people staring at her everywhere they went, often because she was ranting (loudly) about something while using a lot of swear words. She also would gesture wildly while speaking. He, unlike half of her non consenting audience of various strangers at various times, actually dug it. He liked how uninhibited she was, the exact opposite of him.  The fact that she never wore bras, including during her wild gesturing while ranting, was just a bonus really. 

He loved how unibited she was in her art too. 

Don’t get him wrong, he didn’t love all of her pieces. He liked a lot of them, loved some of them even, but there were some he thought were trite or derivative, or just straight up ugly. But every piece was made with gusto- the good and bad art- all of it. When she made things, she wouldn’t hesitate. She would go back and change things later, but she was fully into whatever she was making.

Only when something was done would she decide whether or not the piece was successful. She also took critique extremely well, and often used it to improve pieces, but at the end of the day her decision on whether a work was a success was only hers to make.

He respected that.

He definitely was attracted to her. He was dating a hot artist. It was almost exotic. They looked insane together. When she made out with him at a house show where one of her favorite bands was playing (completely sober by the way- she was still going to drink and smoke but not in front of him) people who didn’t know them assumed it was just two drunk people making out- how the hell would these two have even met? She was a hot artist. He was “literally wearing khakis to the punk show,” she said repeatedly (they were actually chinos, but her teasing had been INSPIRED on this particular topic, so he stopped correcting her and let her go).

He found it intoxicating. Both her and the attention. He somehow was, with all these cool looking people at this party, many of whom were artists and musicians whose work he now knew and sometimes liked, the center of her attention for most of the night.

He fell in love with her eight dates in.

It was late. They were playing video games and they had been discussing his love of “Americana nostalgia bullshit” media, specifically The Brady Bunch this time. They had been laughing, but at one point he said softly, “It’s not like it’s bad that this stuff isn’t realistic. All of the representation problems and bad tropes you point out are valid but…I don’t know as a kid, I didn’t really like where I was or who I was with,”  his tone with the last few words had switched from a somber sadness into a quiet rage. He realized it and took a beat to compose himself. “These TV shows don’t have to be realistic. They just take place in places I’d rather be. Where people just know each other and there’s,” he rubbed the back of his neck, “like…community…I guess? No one’s really mean in them anyway. And if they are, they get what’s coming to them.”

He put down her controller and put her arms around him.

“What are you doing?”

“Hugging you, you dipshit.”

Oh. 

A few things things crossed his mind as he hugged her back:

I’ve never told anyone that before.

You felt safe enough to let me say that.

…I’m in love with you.

Getting to know him took time. It took literally over a year for him to tell her WHY he was studying business. It was during his final semester, while stressed out about finals,  for him to talk about it. She hadn’t really taken an interest in it, she actually glazed over it when introducing him to company, like she was almost embarrassed to let people know how boring he really was, or not notice that her friends who blamed late stage capitalism for everything gave him side-eye when it came up. But he had been totally frazzled and needed a good  job ASAP on top of getting this stupid degree and he had snapped at her.

She had looked scared and he had been MORTIFIED. He had sworn that once he left the military he would do everything he could to make sure people didn’t fear him anymore.

He apologized, sunk into the couch, and told her that he didn’t really give a shit about business, he cared about money. Money meant security and independence, and with enough of it he would NEVER have to go back to Oklahoma EVER AGAIN.

She leaned her head on his shoulder and told him they should make a study schedule. She hated highly structured days but knew he thrived on them.

All of his walls crumbled after that night. For the next few weeks he told her everything. She held him and listened, and he was safe. 

He started therapy when his health insurance kicked in at his new job.

The second he saved enough money to buy a ring he felt was worthy of her, proposed to her.

She said yes but hated the ring he chose. They picked one out that was much more her, and was ethically made and cheaper instead of the “ boring ass diamond” ring he had saved up for thank you very much!

The wedding had been postponed due to covid, but the pandemic had driven them closer together instead of farther apart like a lot of their friends.

So, years later, while discussing wedding planning minutia, he was shocked to learn the night she had fallen in love with him.

It had been way earlier, on the night where she wore the Goya panties.

He shook his head and snorted, “Of course it was.”

“Christ, it’s not what you think. Well, I mean, it was a test.”

“A TEST????”

“Yeah, to see if you could handle me at a more insane level. Remember I was pretty demure at the beginning, I was holding back a lot.”

In what universe were you demure EVER??? You were totally nuts from the beginning, it’s why I asked you out-

“But that night you kissed my scars,” she looked away, she was surprised she was tearing up. 

The “Night of the Goya Panties™” (she told him they needed to copyright the phrase. She also called it “the night of infamy” when she insisted on talking about it in public, which he both hated and secretly loved to do) was the first night he had seen her naked, and was also the first night he had seen her self harm scars.

He stroked one gently with her thumb, “This one looks recent.”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even know that he knew what they were. For all he knew they were just normal scars. He had a few.

He kissed it. He then looked back up at her, straight into her eyes, “No more of this, okay? If you feel like this again, you call me instead. I’ll come over until it passes.”

It passes. The feelings. Until the feelings pass.

She burst into tears. She loved him from that second on.

Which is why she didn’t always take him up on it. Especially in the beginning. Because she felt the urge to self harm a lot. And the intensity of the feelings were A LOT. She was A LOT, and even more than that in these moments. It had driven away people that she had really loved. She called once, and once she did, she did it again, and then more and more consistently, until it was a habit.  By middle of the covid lockdown while everyone else was losing their minds she had fully stopped cutting. She was losing her mind too, along with her fiance, along with most of the Western World, but she wasn’t cutting anymore. She didn’t have any privacy to really do it anyway, Her fiance had used lockdown as the perfect excuse to finally convince her to  move in with him. They were engaged but she still had refused to move in with him.

“It’ll blow up the whole relationship,” she would say with a smile.

If we live together I won’t be able to hide all of the ugly parts of myself to you.

But he loved living with her. He loved her, He passed that test of the Goya Panties ™ . They would love each other forever.

In case anyone finds it helpful because mobility aids are horrifically expensive and inaccessible…

And for those people who have access to mobility devices but might benefit from a second chair they can abuse without risking expensive damage…

Erik Kondo has made a website, Open Source Innovations, that details plans for DIY wheelchairs. These wheelchairs can be made from common materials like wood, plastic, and pvc. They are lightweight and can be custom fit to the user allowing from the same degree of movement you would get from a custom chair. And they are durable and easily repairable. (he has been stress testing his latest design by dropping it down stairs, dropping it out of a car, launching it across a driveway, and throwing it off a deck). Its 12lbs and I think he said its was in the $200 ish range for parts.

He also is working on cheap, open source, accessible designs for beach chairs, off road chairs, motorized attachments (think smart drive), and so on. Plus he skateboards in his wheelchair. Cool dude, helpful info, pass it on.

It's incredibly sad people have to resort to this, but it's a damn good resource. Use it. Spread awareness. Maybe one day people with physical disabilities won't need DIYs like this. But until then, reblog and share.

"Some people genuinely deserve death" and "but we cannot allow anyone in power to make that happen, ever, because no government that wants that power can be trusted not to abuse it" are ideas that can absolutely coexist.

Something can be morally wrong and still be a net good in its impact.

I feel like there is also a difference between "should the death penalty be a thing the government can do" and "could I just the one then write down a handful of billionaires names and make everyone a whole lot safer"

in case you don't know me personally

You are often in the park, and there's this old man sitting on the same bench every time. He has some interesting stories to tell, but only after he died you learn his secret: He was a retired crime boss, and he left you a fortune.

"How did he get my information? Like, my contact info and social security number...?"

"He's a crime boss," his attorney said. He cleared his throat. "Or he was anyway. RIP and all of that." He made the signum crucus over his chest. "The point is, he had connections."

I was a bit hesitant to take his money. Lord knows where it came from, and there might be strings attached.

But I had desperately had wanted to upgrade my wheelchair. It would also be nice to pay for a date with my husband FOR ONCE.

I also have always dreamed of paying off my friends's student loans.

I accepted the money. No one has to know it's blood money. I take that secret to my grave.