The Tiger Cave

Sure, it’s satisfying to send the hypocrites and the assholes to hell. And it’s nice to see the ones who thought they were beyond redemption walk through into paradise.

So yeah, it has its perks. But not exciting. I mean, after the first million souls or so they all blur together, you know? You never get anything new. Animals all get sent right on through automatically and there’s nothing other then humans in our jurisdiction. Oh sure, there’s life other then humans. But that’s no my department.

I keep tads on humans on my lunch breaks. You’re a damn fascinating species, better then anything your “television” puts out. Although The Good Place was a little too relatable, I’ll give you guys that.

Anyway, one of my favorite things you guys came up with was the Space Race. I mean, what a nail biter! And it was so tense up until the end. Pity about those Apollo one guys, though. But I heard they got a kick out of watching the moon landing when it did happen.

Course, that sorta died down after a decade or so. Don’t know why you guys quit going to the moon.

And then you decided Mars was the place to be and started sending out all those rovers of yours. Not nearly as exiting as going yourselves, but as you all like to say, baby steps.

The rovers were surprisingly fun to watch. For mindless robots, they’ve got a lot of spunk. So I’d check in every once in while, but mostly I watched Earth. You guys had figured out how to work memes and it was a very amusing thing.

I was half way through a shift when it go here. I have no idea why none of the others I processed mentioned the thing, but death is confusing enough I guess.

It shouldn’t have been there. I want to make that clear, by no law of the universe should that thing have had a soul. You humans are where closer to making actual AI then you are sprouting wings. And you never even tried with this! Its job was to collect rocks!

And yet there is was, beeping up at me.

It didn’t look like a human soul. Or any other form of life that I had ever seen. It wasn’t damaged at all, or even afraid. That was the weirdest thing. You humans are always scared shitless by the time I see you. But this thing wasn’t. Even a little. It was just… curious. Like that’s all I could feel from it. Pure wonder.

I blinked a bit before flipping through my files, seeing if it was a new species or something. I found nothing, of course. Those idiots over in records never give us anything useful.

So I did the only thing I could do. I asked its name.

Now, you humans have come up with so many ways to say the same thing that I’ve had to learn a lot of languages to keep up. The newest was binary, which I never expected to actually need.

It came in handy, since that’s what the thing answered back in.

01001111 01110000 01110000 01101111 01110010 01110100 01110101 01101110 01101001 01110100 01111001

Opportunity.

I remembered that name. It had popped up in new reports regarding a Mars rover that went out of commission, sending the final message “my battery is low and its getting dark.” before dying.

Humanity had cried over it for a solid couple of days. You guys really like personifying objects.

But I had dismissed it as just that. But here it was. Waiting patiently for me to send it On.

I could just opened the gates and sent it through and put from my mind. Make the thing some else’s problem.

I didn’t.

I stood, crossed in front of my desk, and put out my hand to touch the strange soul.

Opportunity didn’t feel human. Nor animal. It felt…. simple. Calm.

I could feel an awearness of the love its chief engineer had felt for it. The pang of missing the workshop back on Earth where it had been built, during long nights on Mars.

It had dreamed. Dreamed of humans making it to Mars and finding it. Of it’s engineer taking it home and repairing it. Dreamed of exploring Earth as it had Mars.

I could purpose, and curiosity in its mission. Lonely as it was, it never doubted its purpose or resented its lot in life. It got to learn, and to see what had never been seen. What more could it ask for?

I could feel one tiny spec of fear. Near the end of its life, it realized it would never go home. Never see Earth or its engineer again. That it would die alone on Mars.

And like all things with a soul it did not want to die. It cried and mourned and begged to live. It was alive! It had a home and it wanted to go home! So badly did it want to go home.

But there was nothing to do, of course. Even its engineer, whom it loved so dearly, couldn’t reach Mars and bring Opportunity home.

It had watched one last sunset, and sent one last message.

A goodbye. And a plea to be mourned, if it could not be saved.

I withdrew my hand and looked over the soul. It looked up at me.

For the ones that I send upstairs, I take the form of whoever loved them most in life. I guess in that moment, I was in the form of an engineer at NASA. Opportunity seemed delighted to see me.

“Welcome home,” I gestured to the gates that swung slowly open behind me. “I missed you.”

It beeped out a single phase, 01001001 00100000 01101101 01101001 01110011 01110011 01100101 01100100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111

I missed you too.

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

24. The Queen with Three Cursed Children

25. Tiny Dragon with one coin hoard

26. Haunted house

27. Shark hero was about to go rogue

28. Grandma lives in the woods comic

29. A Different Aftermath comic

30. Battery (microstory but I love it so much)

31. It’s A Date comic

32. Supervillian kidnaps rival’s kid and they want to stay

33. Narrative Town

34. I have been hired to clean the wizard tower comic

35. Robot Apocalypse

36. The Statues That Do Not Weather

37. Kushiel

38. Tooth Fairy

39. Alien abduction

40. Felonious wish-granting

41. When humans met actual space orcs

A belated birthday gift for @chibiwriter!

Indulging Spark had been a terrible idea. Xandra could not escape this damn bird.

No, not the Titan of Lightning, the Thunderbird, the murderous force of nature that made her scars burn just by being near her-

No. The Titans-forsaken Altaria.

(In which Supervisor Xandra of Team Instinct needs to take more naps, Hattie decides this gloomy person is her newest nestling, Spark laughs, and Team Instinct is Team Instinct).

Proff: What’s the first step to solving any problem? Class: Don’t panic. Proff: And why is that? Class: Because we know more than we think we do.

My adaptation of the God of Arepo short story, which was originally up at ShortBox Comics Fair for charity. You can get a copy of the DRM-free ebook here for free - and I’d encourage you to donate to Mighty Writers or The Ministry of Stories in exchange.

Etsy is now forcing shop owners to be part of their ads. We can not opt out.

To anyone who buys from etsy: DO NOT EVER CLICK THEIR ADS

They are rolling out a program where if you get a sale from an ad they put out, they’re taking 12-15% of the profit(probably on top of the like, 5%ish+ they already take). Even worse, if you have clicked an Etsy ad in the last 30 days ANYONE YOU BUY FROM ON ETSY IN THAT PERIOD WILL BE BILLED THAT FEE. 

So please, if you see an ad for something you like off etsy, do not click it. Just go on etsy and search for it.

This is somehow worse than what storenvy used to pull. 

And it’s not 12-15% of the profit, it’s 12-15% of the PRICE.  There’s no way Etsy knows the cost of the actual item before profit.  So if you price your wares with 15% profit for yourself, congrats you’ve lost money on the transaction. 

Etsy charges the following fees on every single item sold (and they stack):

$0.20 listing fee per item (that’s per individual item in a listing, so if I sell 10 stickers from the same listing, that’s $2.00 in fees)

6.5% of total purchase price

6.5% of shipping (this is DEADLY on international purchases. I’ve had to stop shipping some items internationally because Etsy’s cut of shipping alone was more than the price of the item!)

2.9% + $0.30 of all transactions for credit card processing

15% of sale price and shipping for all sales to a shopper who clicked on an ad – this percentage only drops to 12% once you cross a threshold of $10K in sales in one year (which most sellers don’t). THERE IS NO OPT-OUT for sellers, and no way to control what products Etsy chooses to feature in ads.

So how does that shake out in actual cost? Here’s an example:

Let’s say I make a handcrafted item for $15 in materials, sell it on Etsy for $35, and it costs $8 to ship – not bad, right? On the surface, it looks like I’m making $20 for the time and labor I put in to make the thing.

Except right off the top, Etsy skims $4.26 in base fees from that transaction. Etsy’s free shipping guarantee (which technically has an opt-out, but they penalize sellers heavily in search results for not offering it) kicks in at $35, so that makes me responsible for the shipping costs – now I’m down another $8. If the buyer clicked on an ad, that’s $6.45 on top of listing/processing/shipping fees. Now I’m potentially paying up to $16.20 in fees and shipping for that sale.

That leaves me, the designer and craftsperson, making only $3.80 on a handmade item that sells for $35.

My time and labor should be worth more than a Starbucks drink, y'all.

And that’s before you get to Etsy’s predatory sale structuring, or their paywall-locked “Etsy Plus” features, or the way they take over your credit card processing once your account is linked (I can’t use my Square account for point-of-sale card processing without Etsy charging all of these fees, even on sales I make in person at craft fairs)… Basically, Etsy hides fees at every level of the sale process and is essentially nickel-and-diming small businesses and hobbyists to death.

We all know Etsy is garbage – but the unfortunate truth is that a lot of people choose to shop there for handmade and niche goods, and buyers are often reluctant to purchase from an independent website without big-name purchase protection. Everyone’s afraid of being scammed, so they flock to giants like Etsy and Amazon and eBay for their satisfaction guarantees (even when the price of customer dissatisfaction comes straight out of sellers’ bank accounts).

As sellers, our only recourse is to pass the exorbitant fees on to the buyer, which 1) prices us out of much of our target market, and 2) annoys shoppers (many of whom have come to expect mass-market Walmart prices rather than handmade boutique goods) into complaining about how expensive everything in our shop is. You wouldn’t believe how many “I love this but you’re charging too much” comments I’ve gotten. My dude, I can’t charge less. I have listings that literally only net me a profit of 54 cents per item, and I can’t live on that.

All this to say: Please, PLEASE do not click on Etsy ads. If you want to look at an item you saw in an ad, search for it by name/description from the Etsy site (and you may find more things you’re interested in that way, anyway). If you do accidentally click on an ad, go to your address bar and remove everything after the first “?” in the URL and reload to turn off link tracking, and delete any Etsy browser cookies before making a purchase.