Fiction Addiction

“You’re dying. You know that, right?”

“I do.”

“He used you. But you know that already, too. Don’t you?”

“I do.”

“I can help you, if you’d like.”

“And what do you want in return?”

You can’t see her face, but somehow you know she’s smiling.

“That depends… How much are you willing to give?”

He tried to sacrifice you. You were supposed to die there, feeling the blood slip through your fingers, mind getting hazier, body feeling colder. Nothing more than a bloody offering made in desperation. But things didn’t go according to plan. Whatever your friend tried to summon took a liking to you, and now you’ve found yourself bound to something you don’t have full control over. 

Find a way to prove your innocence and uncover the truth about what really happened to the other Summoners. Ally yourself with a powerful demon, a cynical knight-enchanter, an enigmatic witch, a reluctant bard, a dragon scion, and a half-dragon healer.

Features

Customize your Summoner!

Male, female, non-binary

Hair color/length, eye color, height, etc.

Personality

Woo powerful people!

Uncover the past of the Summoners!

Running from the authorities!

Determine the fate of the world! No pressure

The World, It’s Magic, and You

The Empire of Ludia has stood since the dawn of humankind. Built by the hands of both humans and elves, Ludia has become a unique blend of two cultures. Their most prominent achievement, The Institute of Magic, has served to teach both mages and Gifted to control their powers. However, not everyone sees the Institute as the beacon of hope they portray it as.

While some humans and all elves can use magic, Gifted are more powerful than standard mages. They are born with the ability to draw in Essence from around them, so they never need to replenish their Essence like normal mages who have only their internal reserve to draw from, limiting them on the strength and duration of the spells they can cast. This makes Gifted dangerous, as there’s no limit to their powers and they never tire from a lack of Essence.

You live in the Institute as one of several Gifted. You and your friend Callum are the only two Gifted that have yet to discover what kind of magic you specialize in. This means that the two of you are stuck in the Institute, while the others move on and leave you two behind.

They’ve successfully convinced us that the unions are the greedy monsters. For so many years, the companies have painted unions as “we want you to pay janitors three million dollars a year and if you don’t we’ll set your stores on fire”. 

But it’s more like “We want you to take an almost imperceptible fraction of your bountiful profits and use it to make your employees’ live marginally better, and maybe give them medical benefits, y’know, so they don’t die”.

Big companies did not stop hiring ten year olds to work in coal mines because they just woke up one day and said “my god, we’re monsters”. They did it because their workers stood together and said “really, enough of this crap”.

Companies are not going to give people raises unless it’s economically necessary that they do so. Anything they can do to lower their expenses, and raise their profits, they are going to do. And no one person can stop them.

Just another reminder that Walmart Germany was a spectacular fail because of ver.di (which is a national service trade union that has it’s control over almost all trade and service companies in Germany) among other things.

Like, ver.di essentially came up to the CEO of Walmart Germany and was like “Hi, welcome, we wish you the best and that we can work together well :)” and the dude was like “hahaha no” and tried to pull the american concept here so ver.di pulled out a list of all the breaches of german law that Walmart was doing (underpaying workers, trying to avoid paying health care by using part-timers, trying to be open for more than 80 hours per week, firing people on short notice without warning or exit payments, etc) and long story short, they got some massive hefty fines for it. They also set up a list of demands for the workers and organized national strikes to push them through, making the employees of 85 hypermarkets neatly stand in front of the store doors with signs, whistles and chants (and certainly not the “Wallmart! Wallmart!” chant). In the end, that plus other things caused them to bail after 9 years with a gigantic loss (almost a billion just from sales) from one of the best retail markets in the world.

So all those issues like “no healthcare” or “work full-time and need food stamps” or “work on sundays and holidays” and shit? Unions are there to set their foot down against that for you. They are there to keep you safe from the corps wrath while fighting for your rights.

I think

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies 

Arborists often claim that all-male plants are “litter-free” because they shed no messy seeds, fruits or pods. In the 1949 USDA Yearbook of Agriculture, which focused on trees and forests, this advice was given to readers: “When used for street plantings, only male trees should be selected, to avoid the nuisance from the seed.”  In the years following, the USDA produced and released into the market almost 100 new red maple and hybrid-maple-named clones (cultivars), and every single one of them was male.

It took a number of years for these new trees to mature enough to start to bloom, but eventually they did and with them came more city pollen and the “epidemic of allergy and asthma.” Many of these same trees are still alive and well and getting even larger, and the bigger they get, the more pollen they shed.

Allergies are rarely triggered by small amounts of an allergen; they are initiated by an overdose. Small amounts of pollen exposure are actually good for us, but if we have highly allergenic trees or shrubs in our own yards or lining our streets, we will soon enough be over-exposed. In order to put the brakes on America’s allergy epidemic, we need to reverse the trend toward male-dominated landscapes and stop selling and planting any more of the most allergenic trees, shrubs and grasses in our cities.

and the kicker: