#askdisaster

daily joel #258 - hi, thanks for the request and apologies for taking so long!! have literally not had a spare minute this past week... anyway thanks for the opportunity to practise my colouring!

That's an excellent question, but a little hard to answer since most Great Kingdoms have territory spanning across different climates and biomes. So, you will find that each kingdom is affected by multiple problems, some of which seem to contradict eachother (Blizzards and wildfires? Evangeline's got both!)

Folkvar Kingdom: Blizzards and earthquakes in the Shrieking Mountains. Windstorms in Everwatch Forest. Flooding in the Forest of Refuge and along the eastern coast.

Matuzu Kingdom: Matuzu gets a little of everything...Tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes along some of the coasts, monsoon flooding in the Midland Jungle and Emerald Wetland, thunderstorms and wildfires in the Midland Savannah. Few places are safe from disaster in this kingdom, but fortunately, Matuzu is known for its resilient infrastructure and top-notch disaster response. You'll get hit for sure, but you'll most likely survive and your community will recover quickly.

Lamai Nation: The Jungle of Scales is prone to severe flooding. The Lamaish built their underground labyrinths in a very smart way, by creating drainage systems for the flood water. But sometimes these systems fail or just can't keep up, and the results are devastating. Wildfires are rare in the jungle, but when they do happen they are really bad due to the density of vegetation. They are impossible to put out and can burn for months on end. The Lamaish are mostly safe from the smoke and flames underground, but they can't stay there forever. They rely on resources from above, and when supply chains get interrupted, society suffers.

The coasts of Wokina also suffer a unique natural disaster called "gull swarms". This occurs every year in late spring when seabird populations explode, and wherever there are seabirds, there are gull-snatchers not far behind. This time of year, these vicious dragons show up in massive swarms to feed on the seabirds. But their diet isn't limited to birds, they will snatch up anything in this feeding frenzy, including people. This event lasts for two or three weeks before the seabird population declines and the dragons dissipate.

Yerim-Mor Kingdom: Winter doesn't bring snow, but instead intense thunderstorms all throughout the region. Sandstorms are frequent in the Serkel Desert at all times of year. Drought hits all regions each summer. Earthquakes are extremely rare, but when they do happen they tend to be horrific (Example: the Gold River War was triggered by an earthquake that almost collapsed the capital city...) Wildfires can also be a problem along the Gold River. Mosquito swarms and the resulting plagues aren't unique to Yerim-Mor lands, but they do tend to devastate them more because Yerim-Mor lacks the resources to deal with it properly (vaccines, clinics, education, etc.)

The good news: no blizzards, floods, or tsunamis in any Morite territory! Their coasts are mostly shielded by the Crystalline Islands to the east, and waters stay calm in the bay to the west, so coastal-dwelling peoples don't have to worry about the sea acting up.

Zareen Empire: If you count nymph attacks as natural disasters, then these happen frequently year-round. Sometimes it's hydriads lobbing trash at the ports or causing tidal waves, sometimes it's aurae casting lightning spells and causing violent storms, sometimes it's oreads causing earthquakes, and so on...the empire has high-tech weapons to deal with these nymphs though, so their chaos tends to be short-lived.

Other than that, some of the industrial cities experience toxic acid-rain. Wind speed and temperatures get extreme in the Stonehammer Mountains, especially in the fall and winter. There are also frequent earthquakes in these mountains. The Arcadian Plains region never sees Earthquakes, but it does get severe storms and brutally cold winters. The snow tends to be weird colors due to all the pollution in the air and soil.

Evangeline Kingdom: Tornadoes aren't super common, but the Blue Valley does see them once every few years or so. Siege dragons are a problem in this region too...again, not super common, but when they do show up they can cause a cascade of other problems. Siege dragons can show up any time between spring and fall, but their arrival is particularly dangerous in summer because fire-breathing beast + dry plains = raging wildfires. Attacks on people are rare, but the dragons will take dozens of livestock while they're prowling, and if two happen to show up in the same area at the same time, just go ahead and kiss your city goodbye. They WILL fight to the death over food, meaning you have two castle-sized titans spewing fire everywhere and slamming eachother around with no regard for anything around them. Entire towns have been destroyed this way, but at least this is a very rare event that only happens in the Blue Valley. Luckily when it does happen, it's almost always in rural areas where there aren't many buildings around, because this is where the dragons' prey (livestock) is.

Evangeline's other regions don't get tornadoes or dragon attacks, but ice storms are common in Winterwood and Frozenwind Pass. Frozenwind Pass, like its name suggests, also experiences severe wind storms that can blow a house apart. The Timberland Forest sees wildfires almost every summer. The sea can be volatile along the northeastern coast, but gets calmer to the south, meaning chance of flooding and tsunamis varies.

Mogdir Kingdom: Waterwalk floods like a motherfucker. Every year, all times of year, but especially in spring. It doesn't matter where you build your house, if it's not on stilts, you are screwed. The Arcadian Forest has the potential to get nasty wildfires, but the Mogdiri government is competent enough to prevent it...most of the time. The northeast sees lots of little earthquakes, but big ones are a very rare event. The sea can get nasty on the eastern coast, with a hurricane hitting the region every few years. Mosquito-related plagues are a problem in the rural island community of Longmaw, which the Modiri government doesn't really give a crap about.

Etios Nation: Intense hurricane-force winds hit the Olive Plains only once a decade or so, but dry thunderstorms are a yearly problem which often leads to wildfires. Alpine ridge gets blizzards every winter. The Southern Sea likes to act up once in a blue moon and hit Etios' southwestern coast with a tsunami. Overall Etios' disasters are pretty mild and less frequent compared to other lands, but the problem is that this kingdom does not have the technology or infrastructure to deal with them, so the devastation ends up just as bad anyway.

Empire of Damijana: Damijana never experiences wildfires, drought, hurricanes, flooding, tsunamis, blizzards, or tornadoes. It doesn't even snow here! You might think this is some kind of safe haven, but you'd be wrong...Damijana has a unique set of natural disasters, most of which are caused by its own destruction of its surrounding environment. Nymph attacks are frequent, but swiftly intercepted by the government's high-tech military, so any damage done is usually just to ports and industry, rarely civilian structures.

Hey, you know what's worse than toxic acid-rain? A toxic acid-rain monsoon. Damijana suffers frequent bouts of caustic, carcinogenic rainfall. Worse yet, the climate around Damijana is so screwed up that there is no particular "monsoon season", this just happens whenever. Middle of summer? Doesn't matter, liquid cancer is pouring from the sky in violent bursts for a week straight, because fuck you.

Damijana's utility systems are impressive from a technological standpoint, but they are not perfect. This dense, iron megalopolis produces heat so intense that that it can kill people and damage structures if it's not mitigated, so it cools itself with a complex system of pipes that pump water from the sea. Sometimes these pipes burst, leading to local flooding and mass-scalding incidents. Not a super common thing, but it's a problem unique to this Great Kingdom.

Damijana does see earthquakes on occasion. The city is sturdy enough to withstand all but the worst ones, but when those really bad ones do occur, the result is collapsed high-rises, long electrical blackouts, and lots of those bursting pipes I mentioned earlier. Heatwaves are also a huge issue year-round, not because of the sun but because of all the concrete surfaces and smog hovering over the city, which traps heat below. Heat doesn't affect red elves much, but any non-red elves in the city will need to stay indoors with the AC on or else they can literally die of heatstroke within minutes. Along with this problem is poor air quality due to pollution. At certain times the toxins build up in the air and can become deadly, even to red elves. Citizens must wear respirators outdoors during this time, and sometimes even indoors. The city was designed with elaborate ventilation systems to mitigate this, and the building code dictates that every building must have some kind of air purification system, but like everything else, these things aren't perfect solutions. Why do so many Damijani citizens suffer from lung cancer and brain tumors? The government says, "Idk, but it's definitely not the air quality and is totally Zareen's fault somehow ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

Seelie Court: Winter snowstorms and intense winds from time to time. Otherwise not many disasters, except a phenomenon that is unique to Umory-Ond, and that is "arcane flares". It's believed that Gaia's "skin" is thinnest around this continent, meaning magical energy naturally leaks through the land into the atmosphere. This is only a theory, but it's the only way researchers can explain the weird shit that happens here. During an arcane flare, the land buzzes with magical energy that can be felt by magic users. The sensation is exciting to some, unpleasant to others. It causes strange apparitions to appear, like flashes of light, odd sounds and smells, and even a weird taste in the mouth for everyone nearby, even commoners. The land seems to be spitting out random spells like lightning strikes. In the rare chance you get hit by one, there's no telling what effect it will have on you. Maybe something benign and temporary, or maybe permanent and debilitating. Depends on how severe the arcane flare is. This event is basically a magical storm. It's best to head inside when it's happening and close all windows and doors until it passes. They can last anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. The Umory Steppe experiences these about once a year, and the time of year doesn't seem to matter, but they are more likely to happen on the full moon for some reason.

Unseelie Court: Like the Seelie regions, Unseelie territories are prone to arcane flares. In addition to this, the Badlands see large earthquakes multiple times per year, along with the occasional volcanic eruption. The eruption, depending on how bad it is, can lead to bad air quality, heat, and flowing rivers of lava. The Unseelie government uses magic to intercept these disasters as much as it can. A huge wave of lava is headed towards the city? Not if a battalion of mages cools it with frost spells!

Aquarian Alliance: Considering most of its territory is underwater or along coastlines, safe to say the this kingdom's biggest problems are tsunamis, floods, and hurricanes. But they face some unexpected issues too, like droughts that dry up bodies of water where Aquarian citizens live. There is also sediment and pollution runoff from landslides that can cause mass-poisonings, suffocation, and death. Unstable climates can have drastic effects on them too, like ocean warming and acidification. If the pH or temperature of the water is just slightly off, it can spell death for newborn Aquarians. Sirenes are particularly sensitive to water pollution, as they are more likely than other species to birth stillborns or deformed offspring when exposed to bad water. Water quality can suffer due to unnatural causes like chemical pollution, but also natural causes like bacterial load, nitrogen content, toxic algae growth, and so on.

*

Questions/Comments?

Gosh dammit 😔

The wonderful moments of the wound

no idea who you're talking about neb sorry. none at all.

/silly

how i feel about this character:

well. you know how i feel about him. i want to feed him into a paper shredder. my brain manages to spit out angst and breakdown scenarios in a geometric progression. i've come up with 30 different characterisations of him and managed to project on all of them. he's responsible for two of my biggest aus. i've got 99 problems and i will make scar experience every single one. he changed my life in so many ways. hyperfixating on him led me to meeting some of the worst and best people and starting to write way more regularly than i used to, thus turning writing into not just a hobby, but my Thing™. all in all, i love goodtimeswithscar, he's my favourite punching bag <3

all the people i ship romantically with this character:

grian and joel are my two top picks, but i'm always down to experiment with other ships as well.

my non-romantic otp for this character:

cub. to me, they're best friends in the truest sense of the word. they've known each other for longer than not. they don't finish each other's sentences only because they've perfected the art of understanding each other without words. whether with queerplatonic undertones or not, "each other's person" is how i would describe them and how i tend to view/write them in my aus.

my unpopular opinion about this character:

last i went on ao3, my kind of scar angst wasn't all that popular. well, in mcyt, characterisation is whatever you make of it, and this is what i remind myself of every time i turn him into a pathetic little bitch in an au for the joy of imagining him crying as i fall asleep. to me, scar's like a barbie. he can be anyone, including a miserable sod <3

one thing i wish would happen/had happened with this character in canon:

i wish scar and joel would have stayed allies for the entirety of last life. i want them to become allies in a future season and for it to last this time. i need a scar/joel duo so bad

Smalletho (boat Boys, etho/joel)?

hi, thanks for the ask!!

i ship it in the way i ship most ships - see them as queerplatonic, don't mind romantic interpretations. so, the three questions:

1. what made you ship it?

the ship burns, everything burns. something about how they're so domestic in double life, joel staying behind to build their base while etho goes out for resources - and then pearl kills them, and then their ship is burning, and everything is burning, but they still have each other and hold hands as they go up in flames as well. they're my favourite unhinged couple <3

2. what are your favourite things about the ship?

i may have already answered that when i answered the first question, but - i love how like. their relationship is complicated, but it's actually going somewhere, has a happy ending in sight, unlike a lot of other ships. it's the difference between "line without a hook" and "my heart is buried in venice" (both songs by ricky montgomery) - the difference between moving towards healing, or dragging out something that's already long gone. i love both, mind you, but i love boat boys specifically because of the first. in short, as a child of two generations of divorce, i love the type of divorced relationship that they have

3. is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

i'm not sure, as i don't know what the popular opinions are when it comes to them. i guess my interpretation of them in limited life and onwards counts, i made a post about it, and about how i feel a lot of people have got them all wrong when it comes to who's chasing after who. other than that, no, can't really think of anything else

I was listening to it again after I got into the life series I feel like the whole "not caring about the past/living in the present" energy if this song really fits him!

(aka i am bored and cannot have access to discord and thus wanted to disturbed you in a way that i could)

oh my god hi bloop

they are always great to see on my dash

daily joel 168 - thank you for the kind words!! here's a joel just for you <3

hi hi hi hi!!! thanks for the ask!!

"now i bend like a willow, thinking of you" is the sequel to my fic silver. the premise of this one is scar and jimmy reuniting in an unnamed different world after the events of the first fic. it's similar to silver in that it's non-chronological, but rather than being different iterations of the same event it's just a collection scenes of scar and jimmy being all lovey and it's implied that, one way or another, every ending in the first fic left its imprints.

i shared a small snippet back in 2023, so here's another:

At the end of it all, it's the two of them and Scar's back is warm to the touch as they lie together, limbs interwoven, in Jimmy's bed. Across from them, little hares made of sunlight and flickering stars chase after each other atop the wall. Head in the crook of Scar's shoulder, Jimmy imagines joining them, running in circles forever, only to inevitably come back to his rightful place between every curve of the scars under his palms. Water rises in his legs, pins them to stillness. This world is quiet, and like this, face tucked away in the one person who ever felt safe, so is his mind.

i'm very excited to get this one done. silver is one of my favourite of my fics and i don't doubt that i'll enjoy writing the sequel to it very much. i do, however, have to ensure that the sequel is just as perfect as the first part, hence why it's taken so long.