From the Intergalactic Journal of Mechanics and Biology
They say that a single human once ran for 80 hours 44
minutes without stopping to sleep. He covered a distance of 350m (360km) during
that time. At a relative speed of less than 5 miles an hour, the speed pales in
comparison to other apex predators of their planet. The spotted cheetah can run
up to 76 miles per hour, but can only sustain that for approximately 1,500 feet.
The best bread and trained horses of their planet may be able to run 100 miles
in a day, but many who attempt this feat never finish.
Despite its relative speed, the human can sustain a
relative pace of four miles an hour four a little over three earth solar cycles
without rest (keep in mind that this is not an examination of average ability).
Once thought to be the most endurance evolved species in
the galaxy, the Rundi can run for an hour at the speed of fifteen miles per
hour, but in a long distance race with a human, they find themselves slowly
outmatched.
First, they outpace the human easily, they grow slowly
tired, they fall to a slow walking speed, they try to maintain, but their body
overheats. Eventually the steady footsteps of the approaching human converge
and then pass ahead to recede into the distance.
Compared to most creatures, the human has a few
advantages. Bipedal in nature, they can carry objects with them as they run
like water and food, the arches in their feet act as shocks and springs to
decrease shock. The feet are oriented straight ahead and their toes are
shortened to decrease the mechanical work of the foot. Spring-like tendons and
ligaments aid them as they run. A narrow waist that can pivot allows for the swimming
of arms during running action. A heightened sense of balance and movement keeps
them on a straight course and allows their head to remain steady as they go.
About 20 miles of energy can be stored in the muscles themselves. Additionally,
one of the largest muscles in the body, the gluteus maximus is not engaged
during a brisk walk but during a run. But the biggest factor, is their ability
to cool through sweat.
As far as we know, humans, and some of their earthly
counterparts, are the only creatures in the universe that excrete water to
catalyze cooling.
They were going to die.
They were going to die.
The sun would come up, and burn them to death and they were
going to die.
Krill never thought that his life would end this way.
Surrounded by the strange Humans on a class A death planet waiting for the star
to rise over the horizon and melt them to a crisp.
Humans are one of the most feared species in the galaxy. Not due to superior strength,speed,skill or strategy. In fact, it’s because in comparison to the other species, humans are just batshit crazy enough to try any half-assed plan they come up with.
Ejoc cracked her knuckles in nervousness. Ever since the human crew members had begun to integrate into the system, things had been… interesting to say the least.
The humans had begun integrating with her people first, because biologically they were the most similar. Similar vocal abilities, similar eating patterns, kind of similar coloration even. They needed slightly less oxygen than the Stam people, so could survive just fine on their ships. Perhaps the biggest difference was the human’s short stature and ability to eat meat. And, of course, what appeared to be a near suicidal “survival” instinct.
Her first mate stumbled into the control room, bleary eyed and almost spilling his coffee more than once. Ejoc rubbed the back of her right hand nervously.
“Um, hello Marcus.” She said
Marcus looked up, his green eyes slightly creeping her out. “Oh. G’mornin ma’m. Sorry I’m late. I just got up.”
She stiffened. “You JUST got up? That is incredibly reckless. You are not nearly awake enough to…”
“Captain. Please. I know what I’m doing. I got through military school on coffee and lost dreams.”
Ejoc didn’t know how to respond to that. She stared at him as he took his place behind her seat. Two weeks and she still wasn’t used to this. He constantly made decisions that were reckless at best. Even with simple things such as amount of sleep. Why, in the goddesses’ name did she have to be assigned a human?
A few hours later they were flying through the Buelfe system when came an uncharted asteroid belt.
“We cannot make it, captain!” Cried one of the interns running a control panel. “We need to go another way!”
Hesitantly, the captain turned as her first mate coughed, in an extremely unsanitary and human way to get attention.
“Yes, Marcus Jackson?”
“Well, captain, I’m not sure I’d classify this particular asteroid belt as an obstacle.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well captain, with all due respect, the asteroid belt in the Sol system is much denser than this. Cadets at the Mars academy fly through it as a training exercise.”
Every eye in the room was now on the small pudgy human. A couple of people even let their mouths hang open.
Ejoc looked at him with some fear. “A training exercise, Jackson?”
Marcus looked confused. “Well, yes. It’s really not that difficult. If we don’t reroute, we can still get to Arthenia within the scheduled time frame. However, if we don’t, we’ll be late. And you and I both know how much Arthenians love tardy ambassadors.”
A million thoughts flooded through Ejoc’s brain in a fraction of a second. Humans. Reckless. Horrifying. Yet, they had evolved and built civilization from scratch in the time it took most species to invent tools. Three million years. That’s all it had taken. Three million years. An infant species, already exploring the stars.
A million more thoughts buzzed in the next fraction of a second. She remembered the admiral that had given her the “honor” of being the first Stam captain to see a partially human crew. “Trust them.” He had said. “They look unsettling. They are more reckless than children. But trust them. They know very well what limitations are.”
Ejoc looked forward with determination and gripped her seat as tightly as she dared.
“Do as he says. Find a suitable path.”
Marcus calmly stood as the ship weaved in between asteroids. Most of the other people were either furiously working at their stations or visibly holding back a scream.
He shared a look with the one other human crew member in the control room. An electrical maintenance engineer named Keisha. They both seemed to be thinking the same thing.
“What is up with these aliens and being afraid of everything?”
They made it through the asteroid field “obviously” according to every human anyone asked about it later. Afterwards, the captain was slightly more open to human crew member’s suggestions. Although she drew the line at alcohol. Why humans voluntarily ingested something that made their brain less functional she would never know.
dwarfs evolved in deep subterranean societies, and it shows. their eyesight is shit; their skin is intensely sensitive to the sun. the first human diplomats to come in contact with them mistakenly labeled the dwarfs a war-like people because they were so seldom seen without layers of protective clothing; it was a while before anyone realized that dwarven skin just burns easily and needs to be kept safe under layers.
due to their tendency to stay covered up when aboveground, it was longer much longer before anyone found out that dwarfs also glow.
they’ve since developed much fancier ways of keeping track of each other down in the tunnels, of course, but there’s this fun little holdover, stripes of faint blue or green (think of the way veins look on pale humans) swirling over their entire bodies, each dwarf boasting a pattern that’s entirely unique.
topside they look like nothing more than interesting or possibly puzzling tattoos – why did you need that stripe crossing right over your eye like that? – but get them down in a cavern, let them shed their protective suits, and marvel. they live and work down in the deepest levels, where humans can’t see their own hands in front of themselves but can sure as hell see the familiar lines of their dwarf buddies, shining to show them the way.
or, okay, if we do want to get into fighty dwarfs
nighttime is fine; as soon as the sun goes down they’re free to remove their heavy protective suits (dwarfs going sleeveless to let their skin glow)
and, thus unencumbered, surround their enemies’ little campsite
and the last thing anyone sees before everything goes to hell are ghostly blue and green swirls floating through the night
jesus crust makenzie this is horrifying and i love it
The next two Avatars, from water and earth, live without ever knowing who they are.
Zuko still spoke out at the meeting, he still refused to fight his father in the Agni Kai.
Zuko was banished, and in his search to find the Avatar, earth bends.
He is the Avatar and doesn’t know what to do about it.
Okay but consider:
Zuko, punching the air: “I MUST FIND THE AVATAR!”
*rock goes flying*
Zuko, waving his arms for emphasis: “IT IS THE ONLY WAY”
*strong wind knocks over grunt in the background*
Zuko, stomping dramatically: “TO RESTORE MY HONOR!”
*deck behind zuko becomes covered in ice*
Iroh, stroking his beard: “…. hmmmmmm…”
And Iroh just decides to mess with him and just goes “Well, I suppose we should start searching” and Zuko doesn’t find out until later in the episode
Nah man, gimme a whole season of Zuko and Iroh’s hijinks as they search for the avatar and it’s Zuko the whole time. A whole season of Iroh waffling between goofy uncle and “here let me teach you about balance-” “I DON”T NEED BALANCE I NEED TO RESTORE MY HONOUR” “okay cool you do you kid i bet the avatar’s behind that rock please move it for me”
zuko saying he needs to find the avatar, when actually, he just needs to find himself is his original story arc
Ah, but you’re not thinking the two of them got exiled on their own from the Fire Nation, did you?
Prince Iroh and exiled Prince Zuko left with a contingent of sailors and military men. Said military personnel realize what is happening three days into their trip.
When wacky spirit shenanigans happen and Zuko solves it without knowing, the military lieutenant look at the commander like he’s in the office.
When Admiral Zhao takes Zuko’s ship and all his crew, and questions them, all of the crew say the same thing:
“No, Prince Zuko hasn’t found the Avatar yet.”
They say this with varying ability to keep a straight face. There’s one of them who just breaks down in helpless giggles.
“Nope,” he gets out between the giggles. “Not found. Definitely not found.”
Admiral Zhao’s men come to the conclusion that Zuko’s crew have cracked under the stress of being away from the Fire Nation so long, and especially on a mission that pretty much the whole Nation “knows” is impossible.
hey I don’t think I’ve ever talked here about corn wolves. here let me find a gas station real quick
okay so I’m in the middle of nowhere stopped for gas in a small town in Iowa rn and my Internet is REALLY spotty so I hope this posts but
as people who have followed this blog for longer might know, sometimes I go hang out with this corn genetics lab at school, as in we meet up on friday nights to talk about corn science and stuff. once the corn genetics subject of the week is covered sometimes we go off track and start talking about other stuff. as u may imagine from a corn genetics lab, most of the members grew up on farms here in the midwest, and one night we were talking and a couple of the people started discussing an urban legend that they were taught as kids to keep them from running into their family’s cornfields and getting lost. one of those people was from Nebraska, and the other from rural minnisoda- these were isolated incidents of this urban legend happening, and all of us were deeply engrossed in this. i cannot make this shit up, this is the story:
there are wolves that live inside the corn when it’s full grown. they’re huge, and are camouflaged to hide in the fields. their breathing sounds like the misting of the irrigation systems set up over the corn in these areas for water. if they see small children in the fields, they kill and eat them.
now I’ve lived my whole life in suburban Iowa, and I can vouch that we don’t have irrigation systems like that here; our group came to the conclusion that this must be the reason that from our 7 or 8 person sample size, the corn wolves did not exist in Iowa, the largest producer of corn. I’ve never seen the corn wolves mentioned anywhere else outside that one night with the genetics lab, and it really fascinates me because as a horror/creepypasta person myself, I think it’s a great example of those strange little urban legends that never get written down on paper. the fact that it’s never appeared anywhere else in my life kind of confounds me, because it’s a really cool story. i like to go driving around rural Iowa when I’m home from college, and i always end up thinking about the corn wolves.
neither of the people believed it as kids btw lol
This is a FANTASTIC piece of Americana and cryptic lore. I propose making them a thing immediately.
Fun geography time.
This isn’t an unprecedented or unusual piece of folklore, and I think
there’s a notable demographic reason that this lore shows-up in the
long-grass prairies of the northern Corn Belt of the U.S. This appears
to be a classic telling of “Roggenwolf” folklore, a variation on the
“feldgeister” concept.
Roggenwolf – or sometimes, Kornwolf – specifically refers to the German folk belief in a phantom wolf spirit which hides in tall corn fields and stalks children. Roggenwolf is one of the more popular and widely-known of the feldgeister spirits.
In German folk culture, Feldgeisters, as is probably obvious from the name, are malevolent spirits which dwell in crops and rural agricultural fields. Feldgeisters
are almost always specifically associated with children; that is, they
are said to target children for torment and death. They are not really
associated with naturally-occurring grasslands or woodlands, but instead
are distinctly related to domesticated crops. Sometimes, some rural
residents will make small ritualistic offerings during harvest season as
a gesture to appease the spirit. The spirit is said to be most active
when crops are at their tallest.
Other variations of the crop-dwelling feldgeister include an evil pig (Roggensau); a dog that tickles children to death (Kiddelhunde); a witch-like corn-woman who kidnaps children (Roggenmuhme); and a chicken that pecks-out children’s eyes (Getreidehahn).
I
would say that there are two (2!) very good reasons why feldgeister lore shows-up in some micro-regions of the Midwest, while being absent
in others. Specifically, both the ethnic heritage and the ecology of a
certain part of the Plains/Midwest create good conditions for
replicating this European lore in North America
People familiar with the cultural
geography of the American Midwest are probably well-aware of the strong
ethnic Norwegian presence among rural agricultural cultures in the
glaciated plains of the Red River Valley of western Minnesota, the
northern half of North Dakota, and northeastern Montana. Ecologically,
this landscape is glaciated prairies with pothole lakes, and often hosts
much more barley than corn. Meanwhile, the Heartland region of rural
Illinois and Indiana, though hosting quite a bit of heavy corn industry,
isn’t too much more ethnically German than other parts of America, and
much of the landscape is a mixture of Rust Belt industrial areas
in-between the cornfields (so it’s not exactly desolate and creepy).
However,
there is very strong ethnic German presence in the long-grass prairies
southern Minnesota, South Dakota, south-central North Dakota, parts of
western Wisconsin, and central Nebraska and Kansas away from the urban
areas of Omaha and Kansas City. In most of this land, over 50% of the
population has German ancestry. Aside from this cultural composition,
this region also lends itself better to creepy, eerie stories because it
is more empty and ecologically homogenous than the rest of the Great
Lakes and Heartlands; this is the region where crops run uninterrupted
for miles and rural dirt-roads run in empty grid networks in every
direction. Though the feldgeister concept has a closer association with
cornfields in Europe, the long-grass prairies (roughly centered neared
Sioux Falls) host 1) heavy German influence, and 2) the most expansive
crops in the country. Therefore, the region is probably ripe for a
replication of spooky German lore about haunted cornfields.
Source: Me Map 1 – Cultural Micro-Regions of the Heartland and Great Plains:
I think that this map might help to visualize where both cornfields and
rural lifestyle predominate, opening the door to rural folklore. The two
regions here where corn agriculture is predominant are the orange and
yellow regions. The orange region, the classic “Heartland”, hosts
Indiana Hoosier culture and the cornfields of Illinois and Ohio.
However, the region is marked by smaller farms and a higher population
density, and is not that rural compared to the plains further west; much
of this region also hosts larger cities and a lot of Rust Belt
industrial zones and dairy farms. The yellow region, however, is both
covered in corn and quite rural, where crops can span from horizon to
horizon. That’s where we would look for German folk culture.
Source: An anonymous hero cartographer who’s had their work stolen by Pinterest users Map 2 – German Ancestry in the U.S.
This might help to visualize the places where predominant corn agriculture overlaps with German ancestry. Note that in much of central Wisconsin and central North Dakota, over 50% of people have German ancestry. But this land isn’t really dominated by corn. However, the region roughly from Fargo (on the Minnesota-North Dakota border) to Kansas City is both heavily German and dominated by corn. —
Anyway, feldgeister lore is scary. I’d love to hear more American versions, since a lot of the scholarship on these spooky corn-wolves is based on folk culture in Germany itself, rather than the diaspora in the U.S.
Saw this post about feldgeister’s going around again, so thought I’d make a low-effort re-post for anyone interested in “Midwestern gothic” or how local ecology influences regional folklore.
this an awesome hot take thank you!!
and just in time for halloween and the corn harvest, too 👀
When I was 7 years old and at the optometrist, I was what’s known as a Little Shit. I didn’t sit still. I didn’t want to read the letters. I didn’t want to do anything except go home. Eventually, my mom bribed me with a kitten. A PERSIAN kitten, freshly purchased from the extremely shady pet shop directly across the street. It worked like a charm, I’m sad to say, because I’m extremely vulnerable to kittens. tbh, considering the way my mom was looking at those kittens, she would have bought one anyway.
My dad says that she always did have a weakness for dumb animals. “It’s why she married me,” he always says. Anyway, this is a story about a Very Dumb Cat, not Heterosexual Hilarity Hour.
This kitten weighed about a pound and I suspect 75% of that was fluff. She was smokey grey, had a perfect little nose (she was what’s called a doll-faced or traditional Persian. No pug faces here!), and had the IQ of a hammer.
I mean this with all the love in my heart, but you could just look into those eyes and absolutely KNOW that there was nothing going on in there. It wasn’t even a case of ‘no lights on upstairs’. There wasn’t even an upstairs. There wasn’t even a ground floor. There was just NOTHING going on in there.
Kiki didn’t understand some simple concepts—-stairs, for example. She never figured them out, even after 7 years of living in a house with stairs. Her preferred method of locomotion was to cry very loudly until someone carried her where she wanted to go. One could argue that this was, in fact, very clever of her.
Please don’t give her the credit. It was pretty clear that she was simply confused about how stairs could go up AND down at the same time.
TBH, she never figured out how to get onto furniture either. She was fully capable of jumping and playing like any other cat, but it seemed as soon as she had to THINK about something, everything else shut down. Like… one day, I was playing with her and a piece of string. She was delighted and jumping and playing. Just normal kitten stuff. Then she decided she wanted to sit in my lap instead. I mean, i SAY “decided”, but it could’ve just been a passing air mote depositing the idea in her head.
The point is, she abruptly forgot how to jump onto furniture. She forgot how to JUMP. She just kinda sat there and stared at me for a few seconds before starting to cry. She was actually pretty distressed by it and didn’t stop until I picked her up for a cuddle. Thankfully, she seemed to forget it pretty quickly. No room for anything besides the moment, I guess.
She also never grew very much. Even as an adult, she barely pushed 3 pounds. She also had a serious dental issue. Her canines stuck straight out horizontally. They weren’t very big so they didn’t push past her lips or anything, but it was the most baffling thing her vet had ever seen.
I loved that dumb animal. She was a very good girl and I miss her.
It’s time for another Installment of Family Lore from my wierd-ass childhood!
Story contains: poor childhood decisions, profanity, extremely poor animal handling practices, and a semi-graphic description of an injury. Mind the content warnings, your health comes first. As usual, all names have been changed to protect everyone’s privacy. rest of the story under the cut to avoid a five-mile post.
*
This is the story of the first time I said the word “Fuck” In front of my mother.
When I was a kid, my parents would drive to Ohio from California every other summer of so to visit my Mom’s family, who never figured out that they can escape. Four days is a long ass time to be a small child in the back of an unairconditioned van with a bunch of rotting bananas but it was worth it for being able to more or less run wild through the Ohio woods.
My mother’s family consisted of my grandparents Polly and Bobby, and her younger brother, Bobby. Bobby has a saint of a wife named Stephanie, and three children. My sister was very fond of cousins Samantha and Amanda.
Due to a combination of Ye Olde Misogyny and post-delivery drugs, for about five generations there, the men had been naming all the children, so literally every AMAB person born into the family was named “Robert” and immediately shortened to “Bobby”. Uncle Bobby very nearly did this to his firstborn, wich would have brought the total number of Bobbies to 8 between the miscellaneous cousins and uncles, when Stephanie put her foot down and named him Jonathan Jackson the second she found out what sex he was.
Cousin JonJack is still my favorite cousin- he has a heart big enough to house every creeping and crawling thing on this planet, and a quiet determination to make things right with the world, even if that means doing something completely batshit insane.
We were camping at a place near West Branch State Park, at what is advertised as a “Luxury Campground next to a Private Lake” but is really an RV collection next to a glorified sump. It has the extremely redeeming feature of being smack in the middle of Northeast Ohio’s dense hardwood forest, and since we had parents that grew up in the area and had passed a reasonable amount of scouting knowledge onto us, we were turned lose after breakfast and told to return by dark or if anyone got hurt. This was splendid, as the woods were full of interesting things like nests of day-old rabbits, their hearts visible as they beat against their delicate rib cages, shimmering black rat snakes longer than we were tall, hives of wild bees, intricate in their geometric structure and remarkably patient as long as you didn’t poke them.
The Sump was even better- it had dozens of baby snapping turtles for the catch-and-releasing, catfish twice the size of any cat, a plethora of bugs and worms and crawdads and families of duck and best of all, Arthur, The Swan.
Someone in the Fort Collins Area owes me an explanation
So, I’m up at my parent’s house to return the power tools I borrowed and say hi, and I’m out walking the dogs. Got a leash in each hand, dual-weilding doggos. It’s a bit tricky but they’re used to this and don’t tangle as much and I’m the only person with good enough knees to stop them when they see snackable wildlife.
Anyway, we’re on the North end of the Poudre River trail, by overland, you know where that long bridge is? And I’m disposing of dog waste right before the bridge like a responsible adult when I hear what sounds like an ice cream truck playing “Yankee Doodle” at roughly five times the speed it’s normally played at and see the following:
There is a gentleman rapidly approaching our location who is also dual-weilding doggos, but in his case he’s got a pair of malamutes barreling down the trail at full Iditarod speed, clearly having the time of their lives. They’re hauling thier human behind them, whom I will describe from the top down:
He’s wearing a helmet, which is the only sensible thing going on here. He also has a magnificent handlebar mustache that is flapping joyously in the unusual October rain. He’s wearing a full body Spandex suit of such intensely clashing colors that is physically hurt to look at, but most importantly
He is riding
A unicycle.
It’s not a normal unicycle either this gentleman is towering over us mortals in an unreasonably massive unicycle, like he’d lost the back end of a penny farthing and decided that was an acceptable means of transportation. I see a device attached to the seat that looks like a pedal-powered music box which explains why my ears are being assaulted with the speed core rendition of Yankee Fucking Doodle. I do not see brakes.
I realize I have half a second to grab my own dogs before they decide to join or topple this strange Traveller from wherever Dr.Seuss books are set. I gather each animal under my arms and stand there with a collective hundred pounds of writhing canine under my armpits as the malamutes pick of speed and as they pass the gentleman cheerfully bellows something at me that I don’t hear because Arwen has already partially broken my hold and is attempting to climb on my head, presumably to launch herself at him.
And then he is gone.
We stand there, staring bewildered in the direction of his last known trajectory, listening as speedcore Yankee Doodle fades into the distance. Even after it is gone I still wait, because the trail ends in half a mile from here and I expect to here a crash, possibly even see a fire explosion. But nothing comes, only the sound of October rain and confused dogs.
So if you know of this gentleman and if he’s still alive/on the material plane, can you ask him something for me?
How the hell does he STOP?
Did you ever find out?
This happened an hour ago. I’ve barely had time to put the kettle on and tell y’all.
Mate I was BORN in Colorado, raised near the Realm of the Dread Corn Gods, and I have no idea what in the good god damn you just encountered, but they are not to be trifled with.
1. According to the notes, apparently you BACKPEDAL to make Unicycles stop, and this giant kind is called “Giraffe”, and you dismount it by… falling forwards while holding onto the seat. So I susspose he could backpedal and then make an acrobatics check to land on his feet when the dogs Keep Going. Malamutes, even really well-trained ones, are had to slow from a gallop and from that point the trail ends fairly shortly.
2.
@savethecanteloupe I’m so glad somebody knows who this is. Tell him if he wants to get involved in local protest theater I can make introductions for him.
Story concept: an orphanage/group home for chosen ones whose families were killed by ~destiny~
It’s run by a chosen heroine whose adventure was 2 decades ago and the sweet team-mom healer from her team, who she has since married.
It’s mostly trope comedy with moments of real emotion, here are some ideas for kids:
—two teenaged boys who WERE barreling towards a tragic rivalry that ends in one of them falling to darkness… until one of them confessed that he was just trying to show off because he has a crush on the other one. They’re now dating and the comedy comes from the universe CONSTANTLY trying to get them to fight and failing.
—an eight year old who keeps tattling on the demons who are whispering to her and then getting into sibling fights with them
—a brooding, edgy fire-wielding boy and a brooding, edgy fire-wielding girl who can’t figure out which mystical signs belong to who
—like six kids named Hope who go by names like “Pink Hope”, “Hope the second” and “I’ve been told I’m not allowed to shorten my name to ‘Ho’ so I will now be going by Dick just to spite them”
IDK if I’m going to write this but it’s fun to worldbuild so here’s some more!
The two fire kids have a big age gap, with the girl being 10 and the boy being 17. They spend so much time together trying to untangle their destinies that they wind up developing a brother-sister relationship. The girl is one of the Hopes and the boy’s name is Fox, which results in the following exchange being commonplace.
A: so then Hope—
B: which Hope?
A: oh, baby fox.
Oh, character consolidation idea: Fox is also one of the boys who dodged a fatal rivalry, obviously being the ‘tempted to the dark side’ half of the equation. His full name is Foxglove, and his boyfriend’s name is Raven. Raven is the one to confess and Fox was so shocked he needed to sit down for like 5 minutes to re-evaluate his entire perspective on reality.
Fox is the EPITOME of “oh shit, I didn’t hate him, I was just gay.”
Fox two years ago: Whenever he laughs I get all sweaty and agitated, and that stupid ‘oh look at me I’m so handsome’ grin is so obnoxious it bothers me for hours after I have talk to the guy! God, Raven’s the worst.
Fox now: yeah, turns out the only thing I hated about Raven is that he wasn’t kissing me right that second
The owner’s wife is a subversion on the “cute, sweet, gentle healer love interest who dies in act 2” trope, and her name is Maribelle. She’s just under five feet tall and built like somebody replaced all her bones with toothpicks— she’s TINY.
She is also, as the villain discovered in spectacularly violent fashion when he kidnapped her, the most dangerous member of the party by far.
Because she ISN’T a cleric and she wasn’t using light magic at all. She uses raw magic, which is a rare talent for humans because it’s hard to control and tends to destroy the weirder before their enemies. Maribelle’s love for her friends was LITERALLY the source of her healing magic, because she uses her emotions to shape her spells.
On the other side of that, the emotions associated with trapping her and threatening to kill her girlfriend? She WRECKED him and took the whole hideout down in the process.
OKAY I named the woman who runs the place, her name is Summer!
A lot of people just know her as “the farner’s daughter” because her particular journey of heroics started with a prophecy that said a farmer’s eldest daughter would bring about the death of the tyrannical king. Which, uh, she did, except that it was Maribelle who killed the guy in Summer’s defense.
DarkestElemental616 