you may be hozier but i am the hoziest

Me? I just got Dark Mage. Honestly, it's pretty rare, but the job opportunities are also limited. You either get into covert assassination or dungeon raiding.

God, just because we're the only two kids in The Village, Emmerich Holyblade automatically assumes this makes us friends. He doesn't even realize I hate him and his stupid smug swordsman ass.

The tank Ferron Shieldson gives me bro fists hard enough to bruise. Sister Savantha Healier has tripped over her habit ten times in the past hour.

Outside of combat, I've done a lot of very invisible low-tier work nobody really needs, such as managing all of our finances and inventory, yet they keep fucking including me and praising my efforts when they're having a drink at the tavern.

Our reputation really soared when we stopped one of the Four Demonic Kings of the East North South and West from destroying Capital City of the Holy Church Kingdom Nation.

Emmerich Holyblade insists my 70% Paralysis Debuff clutched the entire encounter despite dealing the Super Cool Omega Finisher, so everyone's asking me for autographs.

Shouldn't he know I hate social interaction if he claims to be my "childhood friend"?? LEAVE ME ALONE.

He said I'm invaluable to this party both as part of our battle plans, our day-to-day tasks, and as his "dearest companion". GROSS!!!

Doesn't he realize this was the PERFECT chance for me to disappear to another country???

Except Elfsdame Woodsworth might be the Holy Nature Origin Princess, or something. I wasn't really paying attention to her dramatic backstory.

After we killed the Holy Nature Origin King (who was really one of the Four Demonic Kings of the East North South and West in disguise), Elfsdame Woodsworth the beautiful elf archer huntress just kinda gave us the sword.

It's sunset right now, and I climbed a tree to just overlook the forest in peace, ALONE, except Emmerich Holyblade "knew I'd do something like this", so now he's HERE. HE ALWAYS DOES THIS!!!!

Blergh. Now we're watching the sun set over the whole Holy Kingdom Church Nation. It's pretty, but that dumbass Emmerich Holyblade isn't even looking at it. Idiot.

We've reached the Demon Lord of Darkness's Dark Demonic Castle Keep now, and we're striking tomorrow.

It's my last chance to quit if I don't want to beef it tomorrow (I do not trust Ferron Shieldson to shield me), but Emmerich Holyblade said he can't do it without me. HE, singular?? So everybody else can do it without me??

And to make matters worse, he said he'd tell me something after we beat the Demon Lord of Darkness. Why the hell tell me you're gonna tell me something??? Just tell me in the first place so I can ditch.

And besides, as if anyone could actually kill the goddamn Chosen Hero Sword Saint. At the very least, he's gonna survive tomorrow. Doesn't he realize how stupidly contrived his powerset is?? Dude, as IF.

I told him that, and he ran off. I'm never going to understand him.

But mainly I was just standing in the back. Debuffing is a crazy magic drain, so I did get super tired, but the most exciting thing I was involved with was when Sister Savantha Healier's Evil Twin threw her weapon at me in a last ditch attempt to take at least one of us down, but Emmerich Holyblade intercepted it. With his body.

Sister Savantha Healier just healed him after, though, so it's fine. I might've been mincemeat had that hit my squishy self. I'm a proud backliner, okay. But it was still pretty stupid and unnecessary, considering we have Phoenix Blessing Revival Potion Stones.

Everybody weakened the Demon Lord of Darkness with their own strikes, so Emmerich Holyblade could finish him off properly with the holy sword Swordexcaliburn.

Before he did, he looked at me with these fucking... star-filled eyes and bright smile, which made everybody else also look at me, which made the Demon Lord of Darkness laugh, so I just nodded at Emmerich Holyblade to go kill the fucking Demon Lord of Darkness already.

God, that took so long. I'm taking a vacation. I'm disappearing into a forest without any elves in it and never talking to another person ever again.

E-Emmerich Holyblade, well, he.

After a laborious process whittling down hundreds of potential names we settled on another alcohol related term, a popular Australian slang term for wine, as we thought that was in the spirit of "The Chaser" but also uniquely Australian.

Literally the only reason we didn't end up rebranding was the whole company fell into an omnishambles in 2020, and we were all too busy both figuratively and literally putting out fires to even think about doing a full company rebrand.

And that, my friends, is how The Chaser through sheer dumb luck, managed to avoid what would have gone down as possibly one of the worst company rebrands in the history of everything, when that same name came to mean something else VERY different a few years later:

Both come from the Latin "burgus", meaning castle or fortified town. A burglar being someone who bypassed the security of fortifications.

Meanwhile burger comes via Hamburg, the burg of Hamma.

#ohhh fuck that's a really good way of looking at it #it forces the relative nature of it all to the forefront #it *makes* the listener pay attention to the fact that their context isn't THE context #and removes the assumption of Default

He was talking about it in the context of designing robots that would go in and stop nuclear reactor meltdowns, something that would 100% destroy the robot, but they would be designed to keep functioning and fighting the meltdown for as long as possible. He had some designs where over 80% of the robot has died and it was functionally dragging its corpse around by its one working arm because one more minute of functionality might save thousands.

What toxins? Never specified.

Relied upon how? Never elaborated.

Which I find is an odd way to describe allergic reactions to mold in your environment.

Like I get it. I’ve joked that back in the day, I’d be the village witch telling people not to settle the village so close to the willow trees because willow trees are notorious for causing houses built too close to them to rot and mold (not to mention the insects they can attract and the subsequent bacterial and viral illnesses that may follow) and I can seemingly smell mold a hell of a lot quicker than people without MCAS, but it’s not actually a superpower.

I didn’t “sense” shit. My throat closes up.

It’s not magic or “women’s intuition” or however the fuck some of them are phrasing it.

It’s a medical condition, one that is very hard to treat and one that doesn’t react solely to “toxins.” I’m allergic to my own god damn hormones, for Christ’s sake.

And while my genes have clearly made it this far, I have to imagine that most of my ancestors with the same gene defects just fucking died owed to the lack of auto-injector epinephrine and the countless other modern drugs that keep me alive.

(“Oh, but back in the day we were exposed to less toxins.” The Tudors used lead face paint to cover pockmarks. I’m going to go ahead and press X to doubt on that one. People like me just died. That’s why you didn’t hear so much about them.)

And maybe I’m being a hypocrite, but part of me sincerely feels like it’s one thing for people with the illness to joke about being the canaries in the coal mines of certain environments that could eventually make other people sick, but it’s another for “medical professionals” to try to turn around and label it a superpower when people are dying trying to access testing and care, and being labeled as hysterical and attention seeking in the interim.

But don’t worry, girly-pop, maybe if we do a rebrand and give your suffering some sort of purpose, maybe the temporarily abled will stop trying to kill you through malicious neglect.