Flight of the Tumblr B

mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

Fictional small town in the middle of nowhere in real country: par for the course in any genre

Fictional major city in real country: standard fair, but it's usually clearly based on a real city

Fictional suburb of real major city in real country: strange but I can see the application

Not on accident, mind you, the dragon doesn’t just stumble across a human infant and adopts it. The dragon decides it wants to adopt a human.

The dragon explains this to its lich friend: “I want someone to take care of me in my old age! A human would be great! Imagine how easily it could talk the other humans into leaving me alone! And– and it might decide to grow up and become a goldsmith, right? Some humans become goldsmiths. My human might decide to go into goldsmithing too!”

“I think you’re overestimating the percentage of humans who become goldsmiths,” replies the lich friend, who is not terribly discouraging of the idea, but also not particularly invested in it at this point. It seems like a plan with a lot of potential points of failure.

The dragon is undeterred, mostly because it has a whole hoard of gold coins and goblets and jewelry and trinkets that seem to indicate to it that there must, in fact, be a great number of humans who know goldsmithing to have produced all that.

Anyway, the dragon decides to shapeshift into a humanoid form, go into a city, and adopt a human child. It needs the lich’s help, because it doesn’t know anything about human fashion. The lich’s knowledge on the subject is a few centuries outdated, but they attack a few fancy carriage on the road and reverse-engineer an outfit from what the humans inside them were wearing. (Those humans were nobles, it’s fine, it’s a victimless crime)

The lich fusses a lot with the humanoid appearance of the dragon until everything looks just so.

(“Am I actually doing it wrong, or are you just making me shapeshift into something you find more attractive?” the dragon asks.

“If you want me to pose as your husband, this is the price to pay,” the lich replies.)

They go into the city, anyway, and they find an orphanage on the shady side of town, where the tired, overworked and underpaid matron clearly sees there’s something not right about these two, but not in any obvious way she can put her finger on. She’s just happy to have one less mouth to feed.

Anyway, child get! 

She comes along quietly, and doesn’t even comment when she’s taken to a dragon lair.

The dragon is ecstatic with its new acquisition.

(“Does it know any commands?” the dragon wonders. “Sit! Stay! Roll over?”

“You may be thinking of dogs,” the lich points out. “Children do not perform tricks.”

They both looked at the human child, trying to figure out how to approach her.

“So, what scam are you running here?” the little girl asked suddenly, startling both the dragon and the lich.

Lich: Really. And she made all this gold all by herself?

Dragon: She worked very hard, yes.

Lich: So she made this gold? She made it with her own hands? She didn’t steal it from the king’s tax wagons that rolled through here last week?

I don't think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words for "nosebleed", "humidity", or "stress", I managed to string together: "This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me." And she understood.

And sometimes you just say things weird, but it's better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn't know the spanish word for "hurry", but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english "I have all the time in the world."

“What ho, kind friend! Is it not unfortunate that I cannot simply reply to this post, & most reblog it? What a farce, this blue website! Ah, but I digress: what if perhaps your customers were not asserting not the suitability of the drink for a given gender, but rather indicating some matter of status? Perhaps the coffee is possessing of a high rank in society. This is of course my purely grammatical viewpoint on the subject.”

The first image is a picture of Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey, Book Four:

Then clear-headed Telémakhos addressed him: “My lord marshal, Meneláos, son of Atreus, all the more pity, since these valors could not defend him from annihilation— not if his heart were iron in his breast. But will you not dismiss us for the night now? Sweet sleep will be a pleasure, drifting over us.” He said no more, but Helen called the maids and sent them to make beds, with purple rugs

The lines "all the more pity, since these valors / could not defend him from annihilation" have been underlined and "aw" written next to them.

The second image is Louise Glück's poem "Telemachus' Detachment," which reads in full:

When I was a child looking at my parents' lives, you know what I thought? I thought heartbreaking. Now I think heartbreaking, but also insane. Also very funny.

Cooking Jam  -  Teija Lehto, 2016

Finnish,b.1965-

Image 2: comment by Teija Lehto, “Nice to see my woodcut here [smiling wide emoji]. It is made with reduction technique, just one plate which is carved and rolled a new colour, carved and rolled and so on. Many times, maybe 15. In the end only those areas of dark grey ‘are usable’, other areas have been carved away. Material of the plate is birch plywood. The serie was quite small, four prints. No prints available any more. But I’m glad it is still alive here. [smiling and blushing emoji]”

Image 3: post by @itsc “sometimes I see beautiful art on here and I start scrolling down thinking 'if this caption says it’s a woodcut I have to go throw my phone in the harbor’ and sometimes I get to sign in relief. and sometimes it’s a woodcut.”

“You feel the bulge in his pants” - implies that you are feeling some guy’s penis, may be sexy depending on context

Embrace being a gross and horrid little creature. I could never wrangle myself from "I am a horrible disaster of a person who shouldn't even be here" to "I am normal and do normal things, I have the same right to be here as everyone else", so the only other option was to go with "I am a horrible little menace and I am making my weird shit everybody's problem."

So, yes, I give my creatures top scars. Not as an aesthetic or fad, but as a permanent mark of who I am. And, as a signal to all my peers that we are not alone and we will always exist.