Unduh-da-c - Ah

im like if a girl was {undefined variable}. im like if a girl was [fragment missing]. im like if a girl was (editor’s note: the author’s invocation of the word “girl” in this context is idiosyncratic, perhaps metaphorical) im like if a girl was im like if a girl draft deleted! im like if a girl You have reached your free article limit! Subscribe now to continue reading. im like if a girl was [THREAD LOCKED] im like if a girl (ENDING EXPLAINED!) im like if a girl Unusual activity detected, please highlight all the pictures of bicycles. im like if a girl I don’t respond to prompts that could be deemed offensive, and so I am unable to carry out the request. im-like-if-a-girldeactivated03092023. im like if a girl we are unable to take your call at the minute. im like if a girl isn’t registered under that name. im like if a girl could give you her date of birth. im like if a girl oh yes we have you under […]. im like if a girl LOST CONNECTION

woah

What other mythological creatures would be fun in space? If the answer is "most of them?", Then limit the scope of the question to what becomes *more* fun in space?

Still "most of them," unfortunately.

Deep in the bowels of a derelict, drifting hulk, so battered with cosmic rays and space debris all sign of its original function have eroded away, something that could have been human roams the labyrinthine halls. Who knows what terrible crime or tragedy spawned it? It is huge, and hungry, and terribly, terribly alone. All anyone knows is that the drifting hulk that screams to the void in a hundred looping distress calls is to be avoided at all costs, for the maze is deadly and its lone prisoner even deadlier.

An enchanting woman knocks on the porthole with a broad smile, hair flowing in beautiful curls and mouth moving soundlessly in the boiling vacuum. She seems unaware of the inch-thick tempered plasteel, or perhaps unaware of its necessity for the mortal and the fragile within. As she stares unblinking, whispers begin to crackle over the ship radio, half-parseable snatches in many voices - surnames, stardates, coordinates. The knowledge is so, so tempting.

The astronaut is standing just outside the airlock. The sun is starting to sink behind the lunar horizon, cutting razor-sharp shadows across the silvery dust. He's been standing, patiently, for over four hours. The crew in the lander are huddled as far away from the door as possible, unconacipusly avoiding the astronaut's cold and vacant bunk. They had buried him, after all, three rotations ago, the special kind of dead you only get after decompression-induced exsanguination. And yet here he stands, looking better than ever, a healthy blush in his cheeks clearly visible without that bulky reflective helmet in the way. His eyes catch the setting sun strangely, almost red.

Space is an ocean, they say; the analogy is imperfect, and yet persistent in its poetry. The seafarers of old coasted along the surface of a vast and unknowable deep and called it sailing, and the spacefarers of the new frontier do the same. They speed between the stars or cut through wormhole gates for the occasional shortcut, skimming the three-dimensional surface of the vast four-dimensional space that wormholes can only tentatively pierce, and they are satisfied. But there are strange shadows in the stars, twisting and slow - distortions that ripple out from the hyperdepth and mostly pass without incident, barring the sensitive instruments left screaming in their wake. Nobody has ever seen the four-dimensional leviathans that cast these three-dimensional shadows. At least, nobody who's come back.

They call it a dragon because it flies and it's the scariest thing they've ever seen. It doesn't do it justice. If anything, trying to give it a familiar name only highlights its horrible uncategorizability. It flies, yes - or at least it undulates through atmosphere, seemingly irrelevant to its own mass. It has a golden hoard and breathes poison and fire, or rather the nuclear furnace that boils in its sinuous belly vomits out great gouts of poison fire that leaves stone and flesh as glassy slag and metals fused into radioactive gold. The land all around its lair is blackened and sick, a vile caldera of strange-colored swampland and twisted, fungal trees. In the absolute terror and devastation of its wake, the colonists fall back on old, bad superstitions and offer it a girl…

The sorcerer took out his heart long ago, they say. This is true, but inadequate. His true body is shattered in closely guarded pieces to protect himself from a total death; the form he presents is only a projection of his will onto and through the nanite colony his machinations spawned, a body crafted by the immortal mind and will of one who sacrificed everything to be deathless. His heart is concealed in a small life support capsule in a long-forgotten laboratory in a satellite orbiting the moon of a quarantined colony world; his nervous system wires itself through the vast, organic computer that has taken the place of the planet's core. Backups of backups of backups, redundancies laced through every stolen system. He knows there was a purpose to this, once; a goal to all this sacrifice beyond a simple extension of life. He will never remember who he wanted this for. To be truly deathless, one cannot have a heart.

It's retroviral, they think. No other form of infection could've rewired her cells this fundamentally. It's irreversible without gene therapy, but at least she isn't deteriorating, they say. At least she's holding together while they look for a treatment. She can feel it, though, no matter what the medic says; sub-cellular or not, she can feel it boiling under her skin, sharpening her teeth, burning out from the site of the bite on her arm. And she can feel, with absolute certainty, the planet's two satellites slowly shifting into opposition with the sun, right through the windowless walls of the quarantine pod. She doesn't know what she'll become when the moons are full, but she doesn't speak her suspicions. A part of her - perhaps even a part that's always been there - is very, very eager to find out.

A colony was here once, a long, long time ago. Terraformed and everything, but those were the early days, before they realized you needed a magnetosphere to keep all that air and water from being wicked away by the solar wind. The loss was so gradual it didn't make sense until over a century later, and there wasn't anything they could do for them long-term - wrong kind of core for a polarization op. They did evac, of course, but the priority was low - and it was centuries deep into social development. Everybody on that world had been born there, and some of them didn't want to leave. Way I hear it, some of them insisted on staying - strongly and violently - and the folks in charge eventually got tired of losing troops in a dessicating backwater that was gonna solve itself in less than a century, so they just fudged the paperwork and washed their hands of the whole thing. It's near airless now - stopped being a viable colony world nigh on thirty years back when the last of the ice vanished. But that's not why we steer clear. We don't land there because the locals didn't have the decency to die right, and it can be damn unsettling to catch their shadows sneaking across the sand. They're drawn to ships, you know? Poor bastards still think they can leave.

I love this gay ass game so damn much

all lumity kisses in the owl house

some observations on color coding eyewear in ficton and their meanings