Caring for Llamacorns

A character who goes full Eldritch horror mode only to immediately revert back to kind and sweet the moment the danger passes. They proceed to go on with their day like normal, meanwhile their companions are standing there like

1-8: The town is slowly rising up out of the earth; right now, the village ground hovers a few feet above the crater it left behind.

9-12: The town’s punishment for all crimes, big and small, is the Silent Treatment.

13-17: The town hosts a “farmer’s market” where black market goods are exchanged, and all the members of the town council turn a blind eye.

18-20: The town is under a perpetual bubble of silence, and the population communicates in a dialect of Sign Language.

21-24: The town was involved in a deal with a devil many centuries ago, which has resulted in the last 2 generations of children being born as tieflings.

25-27: The town’s biggest industry is a dragon “conservation rangeland;” most of their “dragons” are just big normal lizards.

28-31: The local inn is a singles’ resort; local tourism reflects the matchmaking atmosphere, and they are enthusiastic with single adventurers.

32-38: The town was cursed to be perpetually blanketed by snow, but that was millennia ago; thanks to climate change, it has become a tropical paradise.

39-41: The town started off as a queer commune for exploring sexuality, but has since become just super gay. These days it has a yearly festival send-off for all the young adults who come out as straight.

42-43: The town is led by a newt. Not even a magic newt, just a newt. Someone is appointed to interpret the will of the newt. Newt election years are extremely divisive.

44-50: The town has an intense rivalry with a neighboring village, caused by duelling claims to being the birthplace of a goddess of trickery. The prank war has been going on for 300 years.

51-54: The town is home to a reclusive clown monastery.

55-57: The town is built over a portal to the Nine Hells, and is trying to build a reputation for its hot springs and bathhouses.

58-63: The town runs a municipal rune network; spells that normally cost huge fees are now covered by local tax dollars.

64-67: The town’s fishing hole is infested with aboleths. Everyone wears tinfoil hats to prevent psychic intrusions.

68-72: The town’s only nice restaurant is run by a mage who enchants the food to taste good but is a terrible host.

73-74: The town is completely deserted. There are no signs of where everyone went or why. Repeat visitors notice that it seems like people do live here–just not when strangers come to town.

75-78: The town has regular 5am marching band practice–in the town square. The general store sells noise-cancelling headphones and earplugs at a premium.

79-83: The mayor has an ongoing vendetta against the local healer because they seem a little too “new age-y,” and won’t allow anyone to go there or give directions to strangers on how to find her.

84-86: The town guard is made up of psionic warriors who have never actually thrown a punch or held a weapon in their lives.

87-90: Everyone in town works for a local factory, lives in company housing, and gets paid in scrip. Absolutely no one questions the ethics or legality of this.

91-93: The townsfolk are constantly bickering and airing each others’ dirty laundry and gossiping to newcomers.

94-98: The town has been overrun by a multi-level-marketing scam selling an anti-fungal cream.

This is Arwen, she’s a Husky/Kelpie mix and a little Asshole:

“I wonder if she can jump?” my dad asks the first five minutes we have her.  She perks up at the word, and clears a six-foot fence form sitting on the ground. “Oh.”  Says dad. “Shit.” Later that night she got up on the counter and ate three pounds of corned beef in roughtly 68 seconds but this was considered part of the learning curve of having a new dog.

I wake up at 4 AM to the sound of the toilet being flushed repeatedly in the hall bathroom, and assume plumbing is now posessed by angry and wasteful ghosts.   I get up to disconnet it and find her in the Bathroom, standing to flush the bowl, then shoving her head in to drink the running water.   I’m not totally awake, so I stand there like an idiot trying to understand this, and my sister gets up to see what the noise is, sees the same thing and also stands there.  Fiance notices my absence and does the same.   Mom eventually wakes up and finds us standing around like very confused zombies and almost joins the parade of baffled zombies before shreiking “THE WATER BILL!” We got her a circulating water bowl after that.

My parent’s don’t have AC, but they haveone of those “fridge on top, pull-out-freezer below” fridges.  Last summer, we were remarking that we might need to shave her so she didn’t get heatstroke, to which she looked up and made a disgusted noise at us. …Then got up, used the dishrag to pull open the freezer and climbed on top of the frozen vegetables, stretching out and sighing contentedly.  “Arwen,” Mom began, but was interrupted by a loud ‘WHAAAaaaaarrr?” from Arwen.  “Ok you can stay there for now but we’re getting you a kiddie pool so you have to get out when we get back.  Don’t eat anything.” She ate a bag of frozen green beans and farted for three days straight.

Took her walking along the lake with the long lead so she could sniff things to her hearts content.  She went about shoving her head in the undergrowth, usually coming up with her head covered in leaves and pollen. Except for the bush where she came back out with a 7-foot Bull Snake wrapping itself around her ehad and neck, trying it’s best to strangle her before she can eat it.   She immediately ran back to me, the parts of her face not occupied with the snake arranged in a gleeful expression of “Look!  I found Snacks!” I screamed, not immediately regognizing that it wasn’t a rattler, and fell, splitting my knee on a rock.  The screaming made her let go of the snake, but I still had to grab her and wrestle the snake off her because it lacked the sense to just scuttle away.  I finaly got it lose from her (Despite her best effort to continue trying to eat it and turned around to fling it off the trail-  -And directly into the face of one of my 90-year-old neighbors who’d come out to see what the screaming and profanity was, making her collapse. I’m pretty sure being told “I accidentally threw a snake at my neighbor.” was the highlight of that EMT’s day.  Dottie was unharmed but she still doesn’t speak to me.

One day, we left her in a Harness and overhead tether in the (at the time) unfanced back yard so she could enjoy some relatively free-range outdoors time.  I walked by the window not a minute later to find her completely GONE, and race out to the yard to find her.  It took me a good heart-pounding five minutes to realize the overhead tether was goign UP into the ancient silver maple and realized that  1. Arwen can apparently do something really weird with her shoulders where they pop out sideways, allowing her to bear-hug the tree and  2. climb a good 40 feet into the three to fight 3. A porcupine, which i didn’t even know LIVED out here. Fortunately, Porcupines weigh considerably less than Awen and she couldn’t get a good enough foothold to get all the way up to it, but I still had to climb up there and lower her down, barking dog profanities at the porcupine the whole way.

My parents recently acquired a mechanized recliner which has been instumental inmom’s hip surgery recovery.  Execpt that Awen Also likes lounging on the furniture, and is more than capable of hitting a large, elder-friendly button with her paw.  So now when she gets back from a walk or the dog park she makes a beeline for the living room, get in the recliner and pushes the button until it’s flat and stretches out in it.  My parents didn’t have a problem with this because she gets out of the chair when they ask her (Mom even tells her “Go get my chair ready” in winter because she does a good job pre-warming it), until last winter when Arwen taught my dog Charlie, another devoted couch animal how to do this. One afternoon there was a tremendous outburst fo barkign and snarling from the living room and we rished in to find both dogs in the recliner, Charlie on the fully-reclined back and Arwen on the elevated seat and foot rest, bellowing at eachother for control of the recliner, thier movments having pitched it back to it’s two hind feet, the device swaying to and fro like a leather covered boat upon the high seas, a furry mutiny on board.  Neither dog was willing to yeild the plush throne, nor to listen to the humans yelling at them to knock it the hell off, until Arwen tackled the usurper, kocking him off and managing to cantaleiver the recliner clean over, flipping it into the hall, both dogs and all humand miraculously unharmed. She still doesn’t let him sit in it.

I love her so much.

One of the regulars at the dog park was an unfixed basset hound with an obnoxiously indifferent owner.  “Brad” shows up pretty much to smoke weed and let “Bojangles” harass the other dogs, in spite of regular complaints about Bo starting fights and trying to mount every dog, leg, and toddler in sight. 

One evening, Bo was particularly interested in Arwen, aggressively following her, nipping her heels and trying to mount her, even after her usual wolverine-like Snap’n’Snarl, which has tended to discourage unwanted suitors before.  Brad was Too Damn High to notice, as usual, but mom knew that if Arwen actually bit Bo, Arwen would be the one in trouble and was trying to call her when Bo made yet another attempt and Arwen finally had it.

Instead of rightfully tearing his face off, Arwen instead did what Mom described as “A Judo-style front-flip” that pulled Bo clean off the ground and threw him on his back, Arwen landing on her feet like a cat.  Bo’s stubby little legs didn’t allow him to right himself before Arwen  jumped on him, front paws slamming into his saggy basset balls, squatted over his face, and peed on him.

“ARWEN NO!!” howled my mother as nearly everyone else present laughed, but having made her point, Arwen daintily got off Bo, and trotted to the gate, ready to go home. Bo yelped but got up and skulked away, only moderately bruised, cowering under the bench by Brad, who finally noticed something might be amiss.

…ninja’d her way onto the vet’s roof despite there being three people in the yard watching the dogs and no clear way up there. She had a pleasant hour of watching the vet staff try to figure out how she did that and how they were going to get her down before mom came to pick her up.

“Arwen, get your furry butt down here!”

At which point Arwen obidently got down by jumping into a nearby tree that’s technically inside a neighboring house’s yard, shimmied down that like a bear, then walked out of their side yard and back around the block to come sit at Mom’s feet, putting her paws up like she expected a treat.

That tree is not accessible from the daycare yard. We still have no idea how she got up there.

I have fostered doggos for a good majority of my life and my brain simply cannot process half of the bullshit in this post…

1. She’s a mix of two extremely smart breeds 2. She’s a mix of two extremely energetic breeds 3. The inmates trained her to do lots of “Extracirriculars” like veritcal leaps, how to climb chain-link fence, agility courses, physical-comedy type tricks becuase they finished teaching her the regular Service Dog Cirriculum and wanted to keep working with her.   4. Due to said Extrcirriculars, she doesn’t have any fear of heights, strangers, animals, or the nonsense of other dogs.

She ate a four inch hole in the carpet because someone dropped a pork chop there. She’s completely fine, it all passed without so much as an upset stomach on her part.

-also ate the garden hose because we weren’t spraying her with it.

-conned one of the guys that installed the AC out of his sandwich by pretending to bark at something on the other side of the house, and doubling back when he came to investigate.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you see one on the street,

For decorum is essential when a lobster you must greet.

You may comment on the weather, compliment his choice of hat,

But crustaceans like their space if one should stop them for a chat.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you’re strolling down the coast,

Simply nod and give a greeting, or a handshake at the most,

For a lobster’s first priority is formal social graces,

And one seemes over-familiar if a lobster one embraces.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you meet one in the sea,

For a lobster’s spines and chitin make it difficult, you see,

And he might become self-conscious if you bring that fact to light,

UH WHAT

This might have been the bit that hit me hardest, actually:

it would be easy to misinterpret the following scenario as a standoff between two partners: Imagine that your partner asks you to pay the electric bill, and you say to yourself, “OK, I have time to do that today.” But when you sit down to do it, you keep getting distracted. The ADHD brain needs higher stimulation in order to complete this rote task with minimal payoff. Your ADHD brain says, “That task is way too boring, and I refuse to focus on it. Find something that interests me more, which offers me a bigger dopamine reward, and I’ll work with you.” It doesn’t matter that you know you should pay the bill as promised; if your brain won’t engage, it’s an ugly standoff. Perhaps, after a day of procrastination — when your partner will be home in 20 minutes and the bill is still unpaid — there may be enough of an adrenaline rush from a sense of crisis that your brain will engage and you pay the bill.

The ADHD brain and its owner are at odds with one another. It’s difficult to compel a disengaged brain to engage by force of will. In fact, much of the treatment for ADHD involves learning to psych out the brain, so that it will attend to necessary, low-stimulation tasks.

Appreciating the tug-of-war within that pits intellect against neurobiology increases compassion and acceptance for one’s hidden struggle.

I feel SEEN. OTZ