currently wearing the caduceus clay cardigan

What then?

What will my little fangirl heart do then when everything catches up with Occtis during training with Julien and Occtis finally allows himself to grieve; realizing he's never going to get to grow old and complain about his creaky knees and gray hair. How he'll never get to have children and be the father he’d wanted growing up and after it all Julien then tells him that he counted wrong at Obrimus Manor and that in fact as long as Julien draws breath in this world that Occtis will have 3 people who care for him.

Me: *sighs* this is some Jan Vondrák nonsense, isn't it? *Googles* yep, called it.

Ok ok, It's not really nonsense, it's just that Jan has a tendency to publish papers that make my life more complicated as a lichenologist than it already is. He loves breaking the field and introducing new concepts and terms and questions to be asked. He's a really cool, really smart, really nice guy who knows his shit, but he's become a bit of an inside joke in our lab group, to the point that when stuff gets complicated we yell "JAAAAN!!!" in the style of "KAHHHHN!" from Star Trek.

Anyhow, a semilichen (or an alcobiosis as it is sometimes called), is a community of fungi and photosynthesizing organisms like green algae or cyanobacteria that grow together and seem to have some sort of symbiotic association, but are not as like, close? or closed? as a true lichen symbiosis. It is something that falls juuuust short of being a lichen by being less structured and less like, obvious. Usually, it looks like a sort of undifferentiated slime. So where is the line between semilichen and lichen? A lichen has a thallus--a "body" which has specialized structures made up of more-or-less organized fungal hyphae and photobiont cells. Semilichens are more of a general mixture of fungi and photobiont cells without structure or organization. A lichen is a casserole, and a semilichen is a soup. It's not a perfect metaphor but its all I got.

This is all still new, emerging science mostly being done by a small group of researchers, but it is all very exciting and I hope we can watch the development of this field in real time!

Semilichen, an unjustly neglected symbiotic system between green biofilms and true lichens

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Kingsley, a week old with zero context about anything ever: sure, sounds like fun

Fjord:

That flag!! I just love it so much. I imagine it must be Kingsley's flag for The Mollymauk. The twisted handle on the right feels like it resembles Kingsley's own blade a bit, the Fang of the Spire King, and it looks like it's crossed with one of Molly or Lucien's old scimitars.

The eye being crossed out feels very playful, like Kingsley is more or less "playing pirate" and this is just another costume. But it also feels notable because Molly and Lucien have both lost so much to the Eyes of Nine. It feels like Kingsley striking one of the eye sockets out is his way of saying he won't be controlled by anyone anymore.

And I mean, I also can't get over the fact that it's his own skull, a memorial for a past life, but one he still carries the weight of in his present--

"Revelry before death. Cruelty before surrender." I wonder if that's just a motto of the Revelry's, or if it's unique to Wyatt or Kingsley in particular...? (though, given Kingsley's desire to learn from Molly's past and change for the better--trying to, "be a good person, or whatever I think that means," I don't think the notion of always resorting to cruelty fits King.)

There's three blades in all in the poster. Not sure if the one stabbed through the map is supposed to be any weapon in particular, but in tarot, The Three of Swords is very much a sign of betrayal--

(I assume the map itself is of Darktow, but I can't recognize any landmarks in it.)

Now, the coins!! I love how all of the Mighty Nein are included, it's such a neat touch. My only concern is that, while other coins are set in pairs or at least grouped together, Kingsley's feels very much on its own. Cut off from everyone else, alone. Does he feel lonely these days? When the rest of the Nein all have family or partners, a place they can always call home--does Kingsley have anything like that? Is he finally ready to truly open up to the Nein, or still closing himself off? Is any of that self-isolation healthy? Can he carry the mantle of Plank King all alone?

What does it mean, that Kingsley finally breaks and is able to ask the Mighty Nein for help? Did he think he could pull it all off on his own? Is that a matter of pride, of trying to prove himself? Does he feel like he has to do it all on his own, to show that he's done something "worthwhile" with the life he was given? Or was he just terrified of getting too close to the Nein, of what old aches and lingering feelings it would stir up--? I hope that, this time...Kingsley will be able to fully trust the Nein. To finally let his walls down--

There's also the implication that Caduceus and Essek will at least be present or play a role, since their coins are included in the design. Of course I really hope that Taliesin will play Kingsley for the vast majority of the game, and I still think that holds true, considering he's the focus.

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