So over the past few days I’ve been talking about some minigames that could conceivably take the place of Pastoral XP Actions. I haven’t really gone into when you’d use them, but I mentioned on Patreon comments that I imagine two main reasons:
for pacing—you’ve run out of interesting play somewhere, but you still want it to take time at the table; or
most of your game is working, but one particular kind of Action is falling down for you.
And as kind of the frame story for these posts, you might also use them if you just really want to prep stuff but are frustrated because Chuubo’s is a low-prep game. ^_^
Today I’d like to cover Silver Challenges, and then to observe that Black and Blue Challenges are unchanged.
I’m not sure if anyone has pointed this out but Reaper’s mask isn’t suppose to be a skull. It’s a barn owl.
Reaper is Afro-Lantinx and I’m sure since he was from L.A. he probably grew up with Mexican folklore. And as someone who grew up with those stories and superstitions I can only assume that Reaper adopted a barn owl looking mask to represent death.
The barn owl is an omen of death in a lot of Mexican folklore and superstitions. There’s also La Lechuza which is a witch that takes the form of a black cat or barn owl and stalks it’s victim until their death arrives.
Like I’m so freaking happy. Like Gabriel Reyes grew up with the stories and superstitions of his culture and when he died and took on the personification of death it wasn’t a skull that came to mind for him. It was the owl.
Even in wraith form he looks like an owl flying.
My life is perfect. The over dramatic latino man has come full circle for me. I love it.
Rewrite a classic fairy tale by telling it backwards. The end is now the beginning.
Once upon a time there was a princess who loved so deeply that her heart was worn constantly on her sleeve. She fell in love with a prince, and the next year, her father allowed them to be wed- he remembered his own wife every day, and wished his daughter to be as happy as he had been.
The day of the wedding came, and the girl walked down the aisle in a dress of gentle silver. The Prince took her hand and smiled, and leant in to kiss her.
For luck, he would later say. A kiss for luck, a smile for joy, a laugh for a happy ending. It was a saying his own family had had for years, but it was a saying that failed him.
For the second his lips touched hers, she fell to the floor with a sigh.
Not dead they healers told the prince. not dead but sleeping, not dead but unable to wake.
The prince- so ashamed, so in fear of his life and hers- stole her away from the castle that night, away from her father and her people, so they would never have to watch her waste away.
He hid her in a forest, in a casket of diamond and ice, and he waited. Waited, for he did not even know where to start. He did not even know if the hope for her waking had a point.
He was there for two days when they found him. Seven short folk, small men with beards and axes in their hands, and harsh smiles on their faces.
We can help you they said to him, the six cackling behind the speaker. But, prince, it will come at a price.
I would pay anything. He vowed. Only later, realising he should have asked what it would be.
The Seven disappeared and left him on his own. Alone, other than the silent not-dead princess at his side.
When they returned there was an eighth with them- an old frail woman with a basket in her hands.
We will wake her she said, pulling out an apple and throwing it in their air but you will never look at her, talk to her again, and she will work in the mines with my dwarves here.
He wanted to say no. But knowing she was alive, even out of reach, was better than sleep and near death.
so yes he said. Help her.
The old woman smiled and picked out a knife, cutting the apple into small parts. One, she handed to the prince, the other, she took over to the casket, and opening it, she placed it on the princess’ lips.
A gasp, a flash of her eyes opening, and the prince knew nothing more.
***
The princess woke in a place she did not know, surrounded by people she did not know. An old woman and short men- and her prince, asleep on the ground.
He is not dead the old woman said only sleeping. But around you, he will never wake. He saved you but cursed you both- and now your life is tied to my mines.
The princess tried to fight, to leave.
But the old woman had magic and she did not, and the dwarves were all she knew for many years. Sometimes as friends, sometimes as enemies, often arguing but always allies, they worked side by sides in the underground mines, looking for fairydust and rubies, magic and gold.
They taught her the songs of work and the songs of marches, and soon she forgot that she had even been a princess.
One evening she was walking back to their home alone, when she heard a noise to her left. She looked, expecting a rabbit, a bird, but out stepped a man with a bow in his hands.
You shouldn’t be out in the woods alone he said to her.
This is my home.
Trees are no home for anyone. She wondered if she should tell him of the many people hidden in the forest, each with no where else to go come with me.
Why?
Because I have a place you can go.
She should have said no- but what was there for her in the trees and the mine? So she took his hand and he led her out into the bright daylight, through winding roads intil they arrived at a castle she did not know.
where are we? she asked.
The Huntsman smiled my home, and the home of my queen.
He led her in through the doors, up to a room where a woman was sat on a throne. The woman stood as she saw the princess, staring at her in wide eyed shock.
You look just like her the queen whispered.
Once, the Huntsman said quietly, seeing the question in the princess’ eyes my queen had a child. A daughter who should have been your age. But she was stolen away by the man my queen loved.
You-
I’m not her the princess said- but she had never known her mother. Only her father and an empty throne at his side.
No. the queen said, her tone one of disbelief. But I am in need of an heir, and you in need of care. Stay here a while, and let us see.
So in lore, vampires have this trait that I’ve almost never seen used, and that’s the fact that vampires are OBSESSED with counting things. Like, the Count on Sesame Street was almost certainly created specifically as a vampire because of this piece of lore.
Like, I read this vampire book years and years ago that explained that a surefire way to protect yourself from vampires getting into your house was to spread a ton of seeds on your doorstep–poppy and mustard seeds were particularly recommended for the purpose. Basically, if you suspected someone to be a vampire, all you had to do was drop a sackful of seeds on the ground in front of them.
If they didn’t immediately start counting them, they were not a vampire. However, if they WERE a vampire, they’d be seized with the urge to count all the seeds and they would not budge from that spot until they knew how many seeds there were in total. The point was to keep them there until the sun came up and killed them, because if they hadn’t counted all the seeds by sunrise they wouldn’t be able to leave. Presumably you could just go about the rest of your evening as normal, though no word on whether it’s possible to make them lose count and start over.
Having remembered this piece of lore, I want fewer stories about brooding tortured Edward Cullen-esque vampires. I want to start seeing more stories about math nerd vampires.
Vampire accountants who are an honest company’s best asset and a corrupt company’s bane because they are frighteningly accurate with the accounts and will not hesitate to blow the whistle on a CEO scamming money because fuck you for making the numbers wrong.
Vampire cashiers that don’t need to look at the register screen because they already mentally calculated your total. 10-items-or-less vampires who know goddamn well you have 20 items in that basket and NO, you cannot just slip in with the rest.
Vampire math tutors who are constantly in high demand and have to hold lotteries to see who gets to be tutored by them.
MATH NERD VAMPIRES
If anyone would like the term for this, it’s arithmomania.
Hi, I’m Bob and this is my wife Gretchen, and my wife’s wife Christine, and Christine’s boyfriend George, who’s also Gretchen’s boyfriend. And this is Ron, George’s boyfriend who’s also my boyfriend. And that’s Larry, Ron’s third boyfriend, Christine’s second boyfriend and Gretchen’s second husband. And this is Dave, he’s a friend of the family.
What rhe fuck is this and why do i love it so much.
It’s a happy and healthy nuclear family. And their friend Dave.
#somebody draw the family please #and dave
@charlesoberonn I combined it with a ‘’draw the squad’ and I have no regrets
I illustrated a relationship diagram
Canon identities
Bob is bisexual. Gretchen is pansexual. Larry is polysexual. Christine is transgender and pansexual. Ron is homosexual. George is asexual. And Dave is Aromantic.
RIGHT. THIS IS GONNA BE A MIXTURE OF A FEW OF EM COS THEY START ALL BLENDING TOGETHER AFTER A WHILE.
it’s a bluebeard variation, and it’s in norway and italy, but i know the german version, so this story will hew closest to that.
so there’s three sisters, right, and one day a man comes along to their house. the eldest sister answers the door. he says, you’re coming to my house to marry me, and trips her into his sack and carries her off to his house.
eldest sister is not particularly fussed, is pretty jazzed about this situation actually; the dude is mad rich and not too bad-looking and also pretty nice and she likes him. the man gives her a full set of keys and an egg, says, “yo, this egg is mad important. you gotta bring it everywhere. condition of having this rad house and all my riches.” “okay,” the eldest sister thinks. “this is fine.”
anyway, then the usual spiel, go in all the rooms but Do Not Use This Key Or Go In This Room, and obviously once he’s gone she takes the key and goes in the room and it’s obviously FULL OF BLOOD AND DISMEMBERED BODY BITS, so she drops the egg
and it gets covered with blood, which is what HAPPENS when you don’t take CARE of your EGG. so when the dude comes back he’s like “this egg is COVERED WITH BLOOD” and dismembers her and sticks her in the room.
then he goes back to the house (why??? why would a serial killer strike the same place twice???? I DUNNO HE’S NOT GOOD AT HIS JOB) and gets the middle sister and i’m sure you guess how it goes from there, sack, key, egg, bloody chamber, and she ends up dismembered too.
now sister number three, she’s the cleverest. (youngest always are.) she gets thrown in the sack, brought to the house, given the key and the egg, and she says, “o-kay, this egg is obviously very important, so i will… definitely not bring it everywhere with me.” puts it aside in her room, grabs the key, opens the door, sees her sisters in pieces
freaks the fuck out, but calms down immediately; puts her sisters back together and they spring up alive again (this works in fairy tales but perhaps do not try it at home.) and tells em to hide; they do, the murder husband comes back and goes “holy shit! an unstained egg! u truly are my destined bride.” (MEN: NOT EVEN ONCE)
“okay,” says the youngest sister, “great, i’ll marry you, but you gotta bring a basket of gold and a basket of jewels to my family. i’ll pack the baskets. you can’t look inside them because of reasons. if you do, i will scream at you from this window in your house.” the dude accepts this, because he did after all put this same condition on her for about a month.
of course the baskets are full of her sisters, and whenever the dude tries to peek, they yell “YO, THIS IS YOUR FIANCEE, DON’T DO THAT!!” which fools him because he is not good at things that aren’t murder
and meanwhile, back at the ranch, youngest sister a.k.a. mensa member of the year is like “I’M GOING TO DRESS UP IN HONEY AND COVER MYSELF WITH FEATHERS, this is a CRUCIAL PART OF MY PLAN.”
along the way everyone is like “who the FUCK are you” and she’s like “i’m the magic bird belonging to this weirdo murderer!!” and everyone is like “this makes complete sense! where is his beloved fiancee” and she’s like “back at the house, where fiancees are. i am not his fiancee. i am a magical bird and my word is trustworthy”
SPOILER ALERT it’s not but it’s fine. because the murderer bro comes back to the house with all his terrible friends and is like “YO OK LET’S GET HELLA MARRIED” and this chick covered in honey and feathers is like “ha ha ha ha it’s funny you should say ‘hella’ because i am about to set fire to your entire house”
and then she bars the doors and grabs a match and murders him right the FUCK back and goes home and chills with her sisters. well done team. good work
Humans quickly get a reputation among the interplanetry alliance and the reputation is this: when going somewhere dangerous, take a human.
Humans are tough. Humans can last days without food. Humans heal so fast they pierce holes in themselves or inject ink for fun. Humans will walk for days on broken bones in order to make it to safety. Humans will literally cut off bits of themselves if trapped by a disaster.
You would be amazed what humans will do to survive. Or to ensure the survival of others they feel responsible for.
That’s the other thing. Humans pack-bond, and they spill their pack-bonding instincts everywhere. Sure it’s weird when they talk sympathetically to broken spaceships or try to pet every lifeform that scans as non-toxic. It’s even a little weird that just existing in the same place as them for long enough seems to make them care about you. But if you’re hurt, if you’re trapped, if you need someone to fetch help?
You really want a human.
“Looks like someone for you.”
Jon kicked Ginna’s boots, which were currently resting on the table, and she glanced over toward the door. A clump of knee-high aliens, plump and round and covered in golden fur, were lifting their little pink noses into the air – scenting the air in the bar.
Sashrans. Perfect.
Ginna quickly downed the last of her drink and dropped her feet to the floor. The Gentleman of Fortune was full to the gills of professional companions looking for work, she wouldn’t be the only one in here with a fondness for sashrans. She needed to work quickly if she wanted a chance at whatever job these ones were hiring for. The sound and vibration of her boots caught the attention of the group, and Ginna followed it quickly with a greeting in the quiet shushing sounds of their own language.
A universal translator would take care of most of the talking, but by knowing a little of their language Ginna proved she had worked with their kind before and cared enough to learn it. Caring was probably the most important skill a companion could cultivate.
It paid off. The group of sashrans centered quickly on her and darted over, still in their clump.
“I am human Ginna, companion for hire,” Ginna introduced, tapping the side of her visor to activate the display.
“Sala and Rini, with crew. Spice collectors,” the largest of the sashrans introduced, tapping at their own earbud. Their information began to stream onto Ginna’s display, while her own would be playing in their ear. She was proficient in everything from weapons to mechanics to medicine, xenobiology to politics, and of course survival in any kind of situation from atmosphere decompression in space to a tsunami on a planet. The more varied the knowledge they had the better a companion a human could make, and Ginna prided herself on being one of the best.
As for the sashrans, they’d found a jungle planet with a plant that was delicious to their senses. Cultivation efforts had failed thus far, so the price was high enough to support the risk of hunting for it on its home range. A six-month tour was on offer. It seemed they’d contracted with another professional companion a few times, a man named Drix, and Ginna quickly switched over to the guild’s internal records to see what he had to say of these sashrans and the planet they were harvesting from.
The sashrans themselves would be able to check what Ginna’s former employers had to say about her too.
Drix had enjoyed working with Sala and Rini’s crew, it dripped out of every line of his reports. He’d included good detail about life aboard their ship and the risks of the planet, that Ginna would have to look into closer later to be prepared.
All she needed to know at the moment was that they paid well, the risks were not unacceptably high, and that they treated their human companions well. It sounded like a job for her.
“Sala and Rini and crew, I would take this job,” Ginna told them.
The sashrans shushed and buzzed together, their tones sounding happy to Ginna’s relatively untrained ear, and she hoped she was reading them right. They were such beautiful little creatures, and she’d always enjoyed working for their kind before. They were close enough she could have reached out to touch them, pet their soft velvet fur, but she resisted. Touching them uninvited would be rude.
Finally they turned back to her. “Sala and Rini and crew will, with joy, contract to hire companion Ginna,” the lead one answered.
Contract negotiations went quickly enough, using the standard guild template and modifying it here or there as both parties preferred and agreed upon. Sashrans were easy to haggle with, not like the argumentative akskar. Soon enough Ginna had a contract and three days to prepare her effects for travel.
“It has been a pleasure,” Ginna told the sashrans. “I look forward to being your companion.”
She would have expected them to leave, then, go get their own things ready for launch. Instead the smallest one pushed forward – all wrapped in pale gold velvet fur and their sweet little pink forepaws resting on Ginna’s knee.
“Companion Ginna will now engage in petting for promotion of pack bonding?” they asked hopefully.
“Of course,” Ginna reached out toward the sashran, let them smell her palm, but it seemed this sashran wasn’t shy at all. They immediately pushed their head into her hand. There was nothing in the galaxy so soft as a sashran’s fur. Ginna dug her fingers in around the ruff of the sashran’s neck, gently scratching, and then smoothed the fur all the way down their back.
The sashran made a dreamy-soft pleasure sound, and Ginna mimicked it back. “Oh you sweetheart,” she murmured. Already she could feel that little melting tug in her heart, that protective urge that set some humans on the path to professional companionship.
Come hell or high water, Ginna was going to keep these sashrans safe.
Aw, yes. Look at the adorable scifi! I’m proud to have inspired it.
(I’m so glad you enjoyed it!)
Six months was just about right for a jungle planet tour with a group of sashrans. Ginna loved Sala and Rini and the crew to distraction, and there was still nothing in the galaxy softer than sashran fur, but she was ready to move on. Being regarded as furniture a lot of the time, once they were used to her presence, got tiring after a while. Sala and Rini weren’t looking for a permanent companion, and Ginna wasn’t looking for that either. She’d joined the guild because she wanted to see the universe and meet all the peoples in it, after all.
The spice expedition had been a great success. The sashrans’ hold was full to bursting of dried twigs and leaves, and Ginna had gotten a healthy bonus on top of her already generous pay. There’s only been the one incident with a large angry herbivore who decided the sashrans were infringing too close on its breeding grounds. Still, Ginna had thwacked it in the face with a dead branch and distracted it long enough for the sashrans to make their escape, and only gotten the one cracked rib for her trouble when it tried to run her down.
Ginna hugged and kissed each sashran on the crew one last time. “If you ever need me, don’t hesitate to call,” Ginna told them, wiping a stray tear. Sala and Rini and crew endured this human foible, and were off to sell their goods.
The Gentleman of Fortune was the same as ever, serving interesting foods and drinks from across the galaxy and full of professional companions between tours. Her friend Jon had shipped out with a hunting pack of akskar, but May was finally back from er three-year stint in a lintran colony and they had a lot of catching up to do.
It was great to be back among humans, it really was. Ginna sent some money home and laughed and drank and celebrated with people who had the same base template and urges she did. For about two weeks, it was great. Then Ginna got that itch again and started watching the door of the Gentleman of Fortune, scoping out her options.
Vivid jehes, stolid orhides, hovering mellisugans – none of them felt quite right, and Ginna didn’t approach any of them. Other companions gladly worked up contracts and left for exploration expeditions and disaster relief efforts and new colonies.
Then a big bull barbax pushed into the bar, weight resting on xir heavy knuckles and ducking far far down to fit but still scraping xir cracked and weathered shoulder-spikes on the frame. The barbax swung xir heavy head from side to side, small beady eyes – well protected under a heavy brow – sweeping the space.
Perfect.
Ginna jumped up to stand on top of her chair and screamed as loud as she possibly could. The barbax rocked back, then sprang forward toward her, slamming xir knuckles hard against the floor in pleased approval.
.
Three days later Ginna was shipping out for a nine month tour with a crew of barbax miners. The desert planet they were headed for would be a nice change of pace from the muggy humidity of her last tour, and the barbax being so much bigger and heavier-armored than she was meant she didn’t have to worry about being a body guard on this trip. Much more relaxing.
Barbax liked shiny things, and already they’d bought Ginna a cute cropped jacket with imitation shoulder spikes to match them, and several bracelets and necklaces. It would have been rude not to wear them, and Ginna had to admit she looked good even if it wasn’t her usual style.
The bull barbax, Zab, absently grabbed Ginna by the waist and settled her on xir shoulder. Ginna easily settled in between the big spikes – they made good handholds as she was carried onward to the ship.
“Twisted xeno freak!” some human snarled after Ginna and the barbax crew. “You’re a traitor to human-kind. You make me sick!”
Gina laughed. “Jealous you lack the emotional capacity to cut it as a companion?” she mocked.
The xenophobe’s embarrassed and angry expression was the last thing Ginna saw of the station. Then the ship doors closed behind them, and she turned to face her next adventure with a smile.
Ginna returned to her home base at the Gentleman of Fortune absolutely glittering with platinum and rough citrine.
A fact – For all their strength, a barbax is not fast enough to evade a nest of sand snakes. For all their armor, a sand snake’s teeth can still pierce them.
A human companion, fueled by adrenaline, is more than fast enough to evade. But they might instead dive in between the panicking barbax and destroy the sand snakes attacking them.
Another fact – a sand snake’s venom is deadly to a barbax. Their blood coagulants are destroyed and they bleed out from even such a tiny wound. Their armored hide is too strong for the tourniquet that might save them. A human, bitten by a sand snake, gets off with a painful wound and some bruising.
Ginna tied her bandana around the bleeding wound on her thigh and got to work. Zeb and Gnar and Agi were bitten. The crew, their family, piled around them, drumming against their hides in mourning. They had two hours to live, according to the barbax medic.
Ginna delivered a cure in 30 minutes. Thirty minutes with the clock racing. Thirty minutes far too long, with death creeping up on her friends. She drew a liter of her own blood, repurposed a mining centrifuge to separate it, and filled three big syringes with plasma. Her red blood cells would be toxic, foreign to the barbaxes bodies. She could only hope her plasma was less so.
They might die of it; but they would die if she didn’t try.
Facts – the only place a barbax is tender enough to be injected by even the strongest medical needle is in the vein along their gumline.
– it takes five minutes for blood to circulate all the way through a barbax’s body.
– it takes another minute after that for a sand snake wound to clot, and the blood loss to cease.
The barbax crew trumpeted and pounded their knuckles against the floor with surprised joy. And only then, only when the slow bleeding had finally stopped, did Ginna sit down and cry with relief. She was shaky and dizzy from drawing so much blood, and badly bruised from getting jostled by the panicking barbaxes, and the wound on her own thigh was very painful now that she had nothing else to focus her mind away from it, but she’d done her companion’s duty and saved her friends.
She was fussed over, tended to and praised. She explained what she had done, and was given far more sweets and water than she could possibly consume to replenish herself when she explained that’s what she needed to recover.
Zeb and Gnar and Agi were sick for a week, with the aftereffects of the sand snake poison and purging their bodies of her alien plasma, but they lived. That was the important part.
It turned out that having given a part of herself into the barbax (nevermind that it was just plasma and their bodies purged it afterward) Ginna had done literally what was done symbolically for a barbax crew-bond. She was now crew-bond to the barbax she’d saved, and since Zeb was the senior bull and crew-bond to the entire crew, that meant she was too. She was family – married to the whole lot of them, in essence.
Ginna was not exactly sure how she was going to break that to her moms.
Thankfully the barbax had a laze faire concept of marriage. None of them thought it odd that Ginna planned to leave still at the end of her contract. They would have gladly kept her if she wanted to stay, but she didn’t.
They would have weighed her down with a quarter ton of jewelry, to be decorated the same as one of them, but thankfully Ginna talked them out of it. Her crew were miners by trade, but they were craftspeople by inclination, and they made her beautiful sets from the platinum they were mining that weren’t too heavy for her fragile human limbs. The style was armor-like and spiky and set with beautiful rough citrine that would have been discarded as mining waste otherwise.
Ginna wore it proudly. She spent one last evening drumming with the barbax crew, and then she was back among humans, back at the good old Gentleman of Fortune. Elizabeth was fresh back from the jungles of Shur with a lathan colony, and they had a lot of catching up to do.
Ginna was in no rush to head out again. She took some classes offered through the guild, brushing up on her knowledge base, and pondered her options carefully. She wanted something new, something different.
Late one evening – or maybe it was early morning by that point – a faint high note echoed through the Gentleman of Fortune. There was a collective intake of breath, an uncomfortable quiet, and Ginna looked to where everyone else was looking. A roughly human-sized shimmer was drifting deeper into the bar.
A tintillian. Ginna had never actually met one, she’d only ever heard of the telepathic aliens. They were not strictly corporeal in the same way most contacted species were.
The tintillian chimed again, hopeful, almost plaintive. And no one was answering.
Ginna was singing back the tintillian’s note before she really thought it through. It chimed again, a lower note thankfully or Ginna might not have been able to hit it, and Ginna again mimicked it. As Ginna held the note, it chimed a double note in harmony with her, and drifted closer.
The note Ginna was singing cut off, her heart in her throat, but the tintillian recoiled and drew back before it touched her. Began to drift away.
Metal. Right. They couldn’t abide concentrations of heavy metals and Ginna was encased in platinum. Ginna began ripping all her jewelry off, stacking it in a loose pile on the table. What had possessed her to wear so much of it?
“Help!” Ginna pleaded, turning her other ear toward Elizabeth as she struggled with the earrings. “Liz, please.”
Elizabeth laughed and relented, quick to help her out of all her platinum. Ginna took her boots off too, they had metal eyelets. And her pants had zippers, so they had to go. And her bra had an underwire, so Ginna wrestled that out through her sleeve and finally stepped toward the tintillian in just her shirt and boxers.
No one else was trying to approach the still-chiming tintillian. Telepathy was beyond what most of them were comfortable with. There would be no universal translator for this interaction, it would be direct. Mind to mind.
At least Ginna halfway stripping was far from the weirdest thing that had ever happened in the Gentleman of Fortune.
Ginna sang the note again, and the tintillian harmonized and moved back toward her. It changed as it got closer, until Ginna was almost looking at a mirror – a transparent shining woman. It lifted its hand, and Ginna echoed the motion. Her fingers were shaking, but Ginna cleared her mind and was full of only curiosity and affection when the tintillian merged hands with her. Like a point of golden light.
Suddenly, through it, Ginna was weightless, boundariless, her self wrapped around by the fear and curiosity of the others in the bar. Ginna laughed aloud, that joy echoed, rebounded, and strengthened as the tintillian drifted forward to merge completely.
Ginna’s affections were bare, all the connections she’d made with her contracts exposed, her trainings mulled over, her self weighed and judged and found adequate. The burning curiosity that had made her approach it pushed Ginna to delve into the tintillian in turn. It was all starlight and nebulas, ancient and brand new.
The job on offer was midway between exploration and rescue – a star nursery where an expedition of the tintillian’s mind-mates had disappeared. They had two months to map what they could, and recover the lost mind-mates if possible.
Ginna’s physical and psychological needs would be met, and the terms of her regular contract were seen as acceptable.
The merge faded, and the tintillian winkled out – off back to its vessel to prepare. Ginna dropped back into her own body and sagged into her chair.
“So?” she was asked, people crowding around. She didn’t need the tintillian to practically feel their burning curiosity.
“I got a two-month contract,” Ginna said.
She took a small seated bow for the cheers that echoed through the bar, and accepted the celebratory drinks that were passed her way.
First professional companion to contract with a tintillian. This was definitely going to be one for the history books.
[ THE END ]
I will write no more of these. Thank you! I’ve had a lot of fun in this ‘verse.
If you want to read about Elizabeth, please turn your eyes toward the very cool fill that Chrissy did utilizing the Gentleman of Fortune and companions guild concept. [link]
(if anyone else uses these headcanons please let me know I’d love to read it!)
i am in love with this fiction and this author.
The Gentleman of Fortune stories are the most satisfying fics I have ever had the pleasure to read. I loved every moment.
So if “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” is be believed, you can fiddle duel the devil for your soul. My question is, does it only work with fiddles, or any contest? Saxophone duel? Guitar shred-off? Can you challenge the devil to a rap battle when he comes for you?
Even though I play piano I want to see someone fight for their soul with the tuba.
The Devil went back to Georgia and his thoughts were dark and cold That Johnny kid had screwed him and he still needed a soul. When he came across this young man blowin’ on a tuba and playin’ hits And the devil took one look and said “You know what? Fuck this shit.”
“Kid, I know you won’t believe this, but I play the tuba too “And if you wanna wager, well I’ve got a deal for you “If I’m the better tubist, then I get to take your soul “If you’re the best, you get this horn here, made from solid gold.”
The boy replied, “My name is Hans, and though it may be wrong, “Your bet’s pretty intriguing, so I guess I’ll play along”
Hans, clean out your spit valves, and get ready for a show, Two tubas feudin’ face to face; pick up your horn and blow. ‘Cause if you win, you get a brand new tuba made of gold, And if you lose the Devil gets your soul!
(Oompah music intensifies)
The Devil opened up his case and said, “I’ll start, I guess.” And fire puffed out from the bell as on the valves he pressed He raised the mouthpiece to his lips, it made a wicked BLART And a band of lederhosen demons joined in with him to start
(Roll Out the Barrel plays with extended tuba solo)
Hans looked the Devil in the eye, once he finished his piece, Said “That’s okay, old man, but just you get a load of this!”
The Devil bowed his head, because he knew he can’t compete. He dragged that heavy tuba down; it crashed by Hans’s feet. He turned away from Hans and as he retreated he said, “Forget this crap. I’m gonna try telemarketing instead.”
(Tuba outro)
@hamstergal you are amazing and owe me 1 clean monitor.
:(((
Fiddles are historically associated with the devil not through any Christian imagery, but because older European folk tradition held that several uber powerful water demons, known as nock, nikyr, necks, etc, were insanely good fiddle players.
In Norway, for example, the violin known as the Hardanger fiddle was played initially by the creepy otherwordly beings, like the hulderfolk, the trolls, as well as the nock. There are equivalents in other European cultures.
These beings were known as preternaturally skilled fiddle players, the nocks above all others. So some people would make a deal to learn the fiddle from the nock, or have their children trained. The only problem being nocks usually needed life or blood sacrifices to learn their skills.
So as Christianity was introduced, the water demon nock was conflated with the devil. Because other stories of nykyrs, nocks, etc were generally sacrificing a human to appease treacherous tides, which was the pinnacle of terror.
The devil knows the fiddle, because the ancient tradition is that if you can win your freedom from the nocks, they will honor this pact.
this post is the perfect mix of creativity, historical facts, and folklore/mythology, and above all shitposting.
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