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Latest Posts by unkajosh - Page 7
I would so PAY TO SEE THIS AS A WEBCOMIC OR ANIMATION
The goblin looked at the orc. The orc looked at the goblin. They both looked down at the crumpled shape of the Overlord, His Unholy Majesty, in his obsidian armor.
His final spasms had been mesmerizingly acrobatic. The fall down the steps leading up to his iron throne had pretzelled his body quite impressively, both arms folded behind his back and one leg bent at a jaunty angle.
The goblin looked at the orc. The orc looked at the goblin.
"Shit," said the goblin.
"Shit," said the orc.
"We're likely to get blamed for this," the goblin said. She walked over to the head of the glittering mangled heap and started pulling the helmet off.
"It's not our fault," the orc said. "It's hard to help someone choking when they wear two-hundred pounds of spiked armor at all times."
"Yeah, well," the goblin grunted. The helmet came free, and the bald head of the Overlord bounced on the stone with a hollow, coconut noise. "You know how it is in this bloody country - thieves get their heads cut off so they can't think about thieving, and all that." She fished in the Overlord's mouth with a finger and pulled out the obstructing olive on the end of her claw.
She popped it into her mouth and chewed. "What do you reckon they do for a regicide?" she said.
"We should run," the orc said. She had started bouncing her leg. "I hear that there's some places in the Alliance where they just kill you and let you stay dead. That's got to be nicer than what'll happen if we stay here."
The goblin started to nod - and then her gaze fell on the helmet.
It looked like a pineapple designed by a deranged blacksmith. It was all thorns and spikes and hard edges, as though the maker had been very determined to not let pigeons roost on it. The only bits that weren't solid iron were eyeholes. Nobody had ever seen the Overlord's face.
She held up the helmet and squinted from it to the orc. One of the thorns had been bent badly in the fall.
Nobody had ever seen the Overlord's face...
"Right," she muttered. "Right. Could work - or."
The orc had a sudden vision of the immediate future. "No," she said.
"I mean you're about his height-"
"No."
"It would just be for a-"
"Absolutely not."
"Just hear me out," the goblin said. "Outside of this room are two-thousand men and orcs and goblins who are absolutely gonzo about this man, and there's a whole country of them outside of the castle, and at any moment someone's going to walk in that door and see one dead tit in black armor and two unbelievably dead idiots next to him.
"Or." She tossed the helmet up like a basketball to the orc, who fumbled and tried to find somewhere to hold it that wasn't a knife's edge. "We chuck him out the window now, walk out the door in the armor, and ditch the armor as soon as nobody sees us."
The orc had started bouncing her leg again. "They'll know something's up the second I walk out of the room."
"No worries," said the goblin. "Leave that to me."
---
It had been a very strange year for the Empire.
Change had rolled across the land as slow and inevitable as a glacier. Roads and bridges carved the gray, blasted wildlands, and a number of social reforms had made the country a place where you could be miserable, yes, but miserable in comfort and safety, and that was an improvement.
Barely anyone got boiled alive in molten metal, and even if the disgusted sun never rose to light the Empire, at least you had a roof over your head to protect yourself from the acid rain.
"Your empire flourishes, Your Unholy Majesty," the magician said over her wine glass. She looked down from the tower's balcony over the gleaming stone battlements. Some work had been done to line the castle and surrounding city with sizzling, crackling alchemical lights at night. The whole thing glowed like something dangerously radioactive.
The suit of armor waved a languid, glittering gauntlet over to the goblin, who bowed.
"His Abominable Gloriousness Thanks You," the goblin recited. "The Prosperity Of His Empire Can Only Be Achieved Through The Prosperity Of His People."
"If I may be so bold, I am quite pleased that you had chosen to take my counsel under consideration," said the magician. "We have accomplished many things together."
Another wave. Another bow. "The Overlord, May His Presence Swallow The Sun And Stars, Thanks You As Well."
"It was quite gratifying to see you change your mind, after so many centuries of denial." The wine was swirled. "Tell me, what was it that finally gave you cause to listen to me?"
There was the slightest hesitation. The goblin's eyes flicked to the armor, then to the magician. She puffed out her chest. "Do you question the wisdom of His Austere Lugubriousness?" she asked.
The magician looked at the goblin. She looked at the armor. She tipped her head back and drank the wine too quickly.
She looked back at the armor. "I know you're the orc, you moron," she said.
The room went deathly still. An alchemical light fizzled.
The orc pulled off the helmet, sending long, untied hair down tangling, and said: "How could you possibly-"
"Because you're both idiots!" the magician said. The goblin jumped. The orc jumped with a noise like a dropped stove. "What kind of a plan was this?! If it wasn't for me, you would have been turned into fertilizer months ago."
She closed her eyes. She took a long, dramatic breath. She set the wine glass down on the balcony rail.
"How did the Overlord die?" she asked when she seemed like she had gotten a hold over herself.
"Choked on an olive," said the goblin.
"Threw his body out the window," said the orc.
"You don't have to mention the window," said the goblin.
"Right," said the orc. "Sorry."
The magician looked out over the city, hand curled thoughtfully under her nose. "Who knows about this?"
"Just us. And, uh. You. Apparently."
"And why did you accept my counsel?"
The orc blinked. "Sorry?"
"Why did you accept my counsel?" the magician repeated.
"Well," the orc said. "Well - you seemed like you had good ideas-"
"Great ideas!" the goblin said with an edge of desperation. "Don't know why the old bastard didn't listen to you!"
"Right - right," said the orc. "And when we figured we were stuck doing this - well, it just made sense, really."
The magician seemed to absorb this. She nodded. "All right," she said, striding between the two and grabbing the crystal decanter.
"Um," said the orc. "Sorry. What happens now?"
"What happens is that you two will continue to serve as Overlord," said the magician. "You will continue to take my counsel. We will continue to reform this bloody country, and gods willing, we will turn it into the crown jewel of the world by next Midwinter."
The orc looked at the goblin. The goblin looked at the orc.
"Really?" the goblin asked.
"Oh yes," said the magician. "I've worked hard to be counsel to the Overlord, and I have no reason to stop now. And besides-"
She looked the orc up and down with a deliberate slowness, poring over every microscopic detail, eyes tracing over every jagged line, and grinned like a panther.
"You look much better in the armor than he ever did," she said. Dark robes swirled like a becleavaged thundercloud, and she strode out through the high iron doors, decanter in hand.
The goblin looked at the orc. The orc looked at the goblin.
"Shit," said the goblin.
"Shit," said the orc.
I, too, reblog because this must be known.
Reblogged for the tags!
whoops
The time I was mistaken for a visiting minster
So I was in the hospital today, and a patient said something to me, and we talked. (I stayed in the entryway to her room, not going in.) She told me about her conflicts with one of the nurses, and the guilt that she felt over having to call the techs in so often for help with pain management, and to adjust how she was sitting in her bed (she was a fall risk and wasn't allowed to move around on her own) and how her daughter had been in to see her, up from a small town nearby, and her daughter was very happy that she'd been eating-- chicken broth and Jell-O, but this was a big improvement from what she had been eating. She explained how she'd fallen at her house, and when she falls, she can't get up on her own, and she called for help, and here it was, four days later and she was still in the hospital, to her frustration. She mentioned her arthritis. And also how the doctors had told her that she had pneumonia. She showed me all the bruises on her arms, and told me how they'd had to bring in a special machine to find the veins in her arms so they could get an IV in her. And she told me about how scared she was that she would never be able to just swing her legs over the side of the bed again and get out of it. I told her that she needed to make sure that she kept eating; I wasn't sure what would happen, but she'd never heal if she didn't eat. And some time in there, it came up that she'd mistaken me for a visitation minister. I told her that I was there for another reason, but I was going to be back tomorrow, and I'd say hi. She was clearly uncomfortable, and a bit scared (if not wanting to show it), and wanted someone to talk to. And sometime in there, I had to explain that no, my wife and I were in the hospital visiting the room next to hers. The one my mother is in. I was in the hallway while my wife was talking to mom; she has a bacterial infection, and may be septic, so she's only allowed one visitor at a time, and there are rules that we have to follow to go in at all. So I was waiting outside her room. And maybe talking to a stranger turned out to be easier than worrying. My mother has autoimmune diseases. Not an autoimmune disease, not something as simple and well-known as lupus, but flocks of them-- the rheumatoid arthritis that crippled her older sister, and Sjogren's Syndrome, and obscure ones that only doctors in the Mayo Clinic have even heard of. She's had congestive heart failure, gastric MALT (a form of lymphoma in the stomach), and just had to have all of her teeth removed. She now has a bacterial infection; there could be sepsis. Her memory isn't great, and her husband is a wreck, dealing with this. And I'm keeping it together as best as best I can, somehow. She knows it's medically inadvisable, but that would not stop her from grabbing my hand. She craves touch. She needs contact with people, but feels isolated, now that she can't get around without a walker or a wheelchair. Her hands are so swollen with arthritis, I wonder how much it hurts her to use them. This is the thing about getting older. Everyone else does, too, with all the things that that entails. I guess it's something we all go through, if we're lucky. If we made it this far. If our parents did. If our friends did. But the great truth of life is that it doesn't last forever, and the longer we live, the more we see death around us. The more the people we love die. We're all scared of that. We use indirect language -- James Lacy passed on. The late Doug Atkinson. The fondly remembered Gil Pettigrew. The dearly departed Bonnie Kaufmann. But it's death, and it awaits us all. And it scares me. But we're all going to have to deal with that, sooner or later. I don't know. I'm rambling. But this is the story of how I was mistaken for a visiting minster, anyway. Maybe I should look into that line. I hear it's really rough work, but people need it.
I mean, I’d buy the fiction compilation.
I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.
Very nice!
Nice.
This is really obvious, and yet...
Small sea creatures want to kill you. Respect their space, please.
Yeah, it’s honestly crazy. I know maybe one other couple of my generation that’s been married anywhere near as long as we have.
“what if people transition and then regret it?” ok. let’s do that with everything. no more straight marriages until the heterosexual divorce rate is below the detransition rates
They need to be better known! And if they’re predators, can we train them to hunt creationists? (I don’t mean for them to HURT anybody. Just track them down, and skim in front of them holding up signs that say “I got your transitional form RIGHT HERE BUDDY”)
THDI IS FUCKING KILLING MEEEE
This is how we got here, yeah.
My cartoon for the latest issue of New Scientist.
Serves the landlords right, keeping places out of the price range of ordinary people. Investment properties are a plague.
Under the new rules, homes that are not occupied for at least six months of the year are subject to a tax of one per cent of the property’s assessed value. The deadline to rent out empty dwellings was July 1.
Fazli said many of the people he has talked to are thinking of renting or selling their properties. He recently met with a woman who owns three empty properties in Vancouver — and says one of them is now listed for rent, another will be listed shortly and she is thinking of selling the third.
“This is a scenario of someone who is kind of in a panic now and needs to rent them out,” he said. […]
amazing
Yeah, GET Kate Bush stuck in my head, why don’t you?
Perhaps I shouldn't be allowed to use Photoshop, but since I am I might as well share.
Tardigrades are already cool; it’s neat to get human insight out of them.
Journey to the Microcosmos: Tardigrades: Chubby, Misunderstood, & Not Immortal
Images originally captured by Jam’s Germs
Thank you @airyearthgirl for inspiring me to gif these amazing lines
I mean, I’m in.
It’s just me
Hi. I’m Josh. I’m fairly old. I sometimes write games, and sometimes I talk about them.