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...around 1900, though they'd apparently existed in​ Britain as early as 1875. The design hasn't changed much since.

Before that, there were the metal bedwarmers with coals in them (had to be taken out before going to bed, as they could cause burns; if you've seen the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the maid puts one at the foot of Elizabeth's bed in...I think it's the night scene after she meets Jack Sparrow). However, in between these two, which I didn't know, there were earthenware ones (hardened clay). They were oblong, with a stopper at one end, and would frequently shatter if dropped.

~Z

PS: all that comes from an article on the history of hot water bottles, which I could probably find again. I got curious two days ago and looked this up.

>Attack paradox with footbal

(football of right angles)
The football absorbs the paradox, becoming the football version of an impossible cube. It hurts your eyes to look at it for too long, and trying to wrap your head around its existence is already giving you a headache. Hastily, you shove the impossible cube football into the middling back of your inventory, where you hope it will remain tolerably unobtrusive for the time being.

> Be Mozart.
> Compose opera in German.
> ...
> Profit?

~Neshomeh

Are you sure DOGA is a good choice for this place and not, say, the Catholic church?

If time, and therefore the very concept of youth even exists, of course.

Longswords, hand-and-a-half swords, and bastard swords are the same thing. A sword with a handle meant for a one-handed grip is more properly called an arming sword.

Tom checked and re-checked his math, scanning frantically through the forms and papers arrayed around him. He’d run the calculations, but if he forgot anything… well, that didn’t bear thinking about. Not now.

He checked the clock again. Seven minutes left. His figures were right. He was good to go. He just had to… what was that?

He stared in shock at the screen of his computer. “Damn program…” he swore under his breath. His heart raced. A crash, now… he restarted the program, fingers racing across the keyboard as he struggled to re-enter all the lost data. “Come on, come on…”

Three minutes left. Two minutes. One minute… Tom pressed the final button, letting out a whoop of sheer, exhausted joy. It was done. Over. He would be okay.

“Tom, what are you doing?”

Tom turned around. Al was poking his head through the doorway, his expression intense, and slightly irritated. Namely, the expression of someone who had just been roused from a wonderfully restful sleep by their incredibly loud flatmate.

“Oh, I was just… saving the world from a horrifying disaster, is all,” said Tom. “Y’know. The usual.”

“So… not what you just said, then.” Al looked over to Tom’s monitor and groaned, for he had seen the website’s logo, and now he knew what Tom had been doing. “Tom, Just do it ahead of time.”

“I always forget,” sighed Tom, huffing defensively. “The point is, it’s done. We’re all safe. For now, anyways…”

Al rolled his eyes, pulling his head out of the room. As he walked down the hall, Tom heard him muttering to himself: “The most dramatic I’ve ever heard someone get about their sodding tax returns."

If your quest is successful, then you will find that Germany exists. In that case, Nietzsche must also have existed, and as he said, everything is meaningless.

In contrast, if your quest fails, and Germany doesn't exist, your actions will have been futile and, ultimately, meaningless.

There seems little hope of resolving this paradox. The mysterious voice (if it exists) speaks again from elsewhere in the maze (if it exists): Sie haben wenig Hoffnung, dieses Paradox zu lösen.

hS

Obvious flaws in this cunning plan:

1) Digital animation – no ink involved.
2) People made of ink don’t exist in Real Life; they shouldn’t be able to survive a Reality Room – no Dip necessary.
3) That’s not how Reality Rooms work. (RemnantShadow is right: unless their canon says otherwise, fictional characters are supposed to be made of flesh and blood, and the Reality Room doesn't change that.)

HG

Achievement complete: Follow the rules regarding Fashion.

Looking for exists is, of course, your whole purpose: to confirm the existence or lack thereof of Germany. But now you are heading deeper into the quagmire of philosophy: does the maze exist? Does the voice exist? Do you exist?

You attempt to take solace in the words of Kierkegaard, but he was Danish, and so irrelevant to your mission. Instead, you find yourself trying to find meaning in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche (who was, or claimed to be, German, if there is such a thing as Germany), but you run into a problem: there is no meaning.

You have gained: +1 to nihilism.

((Sooo I guess GermanyQuest is built on the Dungeons and Discourse engine... at least for now.))

hS

> Take off second lederhosen
> Look for exists

You are now wearing two pairs of lederhosen. Things are likely to get quite hot for you.

Somewhere in the maze, a mysterious voice speaks. It says: Irgendwo im Labyrinth spricht eine mysteriöse Stimme.

hS

(Actually, it took me a while to think of something I figured might be suitable to post. Hopefully this is alright...)

Our fingernails and hair are both made out of keratin—the same substance that forms a rhino's horn.

Your inventory contains:

-Sauerkraut
-Lederhosen
-A football made entirely of right angles.
-Cookie-flavoured Kuchen
-Cake-flavoured Kekse
-The rules (which must be followed)
-The aforementioned lantern, which sports a label saying Das ist keine Laterne

hS

"I'm gonna getcha!"

"You'll have to catch me first!"

"That's the whole point, stupid!"

Two girls went sprinting down the street, giggling and waving sticks at each other. From a distance, they could have been mistaken for twins, with identical long brown hair tied up in matching ribbons by request to their respective mothers.

"Stupefy! You're dead!" the girl in front yelled.

"Nuh-uh!" the girl chasing after her yelled back. "You said that one only stuns people!"

"Well, now you're dead! So there!"

"Am not!"

"Are too!"

"Am not!"

"Caitlyn! Faolan!" Mrs. Rosenberger appeared in her front door, drying her hands on a towel and giving the two girls a disapproving look. "Come inside, you're causing a ruckus."

Caitlyn sighed and trudged back to her mother, but Faolan happily skipped after her, sticking her arm through her friend's.

"Caitlyn, you know I told you to stop pretending magic was real," Mrs. Rosenberger said, putting a hand on her daughter's back and steering the girls inside. "You'll give Fwai the wrong ideas."

"Yes, Mummy," Caitlyn said. She and Faolan shared an impish smile, and they giggled. "Hey, wanna go play dolls?"

"Sure! Race you!" With a rush of pounding footsteps, the two girls disappeared upstairs and slammed the door shut.

Mrs. Rosenberger shook her head. Hopefully, when Caitlyn went to Hogwarts and she and Faolan inevitably grew apart, the Muggle girl would just imagine her friend's stories were just childish games.

There was a loud crack in the kitchen and Mrs. Rosenberger hurried in to see her husband hanging up his traveling cloak. "Faolan is over, so wands away," she warned. "And you'll need to change into Muggle things so—" She got a good look at his face, she felt her stomach drop. "What happened?"

"Fenrir Greyback," Mr. Rosenberger said darkly. He was shaking, she realized, and she put her hands on his shoulders, hoping to steady him somehow. "My team ran into him and some of his goons today. We took down two of them, but he escaped, and..." He ran a hand over his haggard face. "You know what he's like, Kelly..."

Mrs. Rosenberger's hands flew to her mouth. "Oh no..."

"I won't let it happen, I swear," her husband said. "I'll be setting up wards as soon as I get changed." He gave her a gentle kiss and went to do just that.

At the top of the stairs, the two girls scrambled back into Caitlyn's bedroom and quietly closed the door.

They looked at each other.

"Who's Fenrir Greyback?" Faolan whispered.

Caitlyn just shrugged.


"Fwai?"

Ix looked up from her arms, startled. "Hm?"

"You looked like you were zoning out there." Charlotte plunked herself down on the sofa next to Ix, swinging a foot idly. "Thinking hard about something?"

"Oh, no," Ix said, tugging her jacket's sleeves down a little further to hide the scars on her wrists. "Just dress measurements, that's all."

IIRC, regular chocolate uses Dutch-processed cocoa, whereas the chocolate in red velvet does not. Unless it's the other way around. But, one method results in cocoa that is lighter and more reddish than the other. This is then heightened with food coloring.

Whether or not this makes much of a difference to the flavor, I don't know.

~Neshomeh doesn't have time to look up the details right now, sorry.

And actually, the ramble was fine. I dunno why that story in particular got to me... :-(

Also, I think I'm glad you bucked the stereotypes? As a rule, that tends to be a good thing.

But anyways, yeah. ALL THE HYPE for your next prompt.

Errant responses:

- Thoth, go to bed, you clearly need more sleep. {= P

- Yep, V'ranen is gay. I decided to buck other stereotypes with him. He didn't really exist as more than a name before this (that I can remember), so I had some fun. In particular, I'd like to highlight that the greenrider is the one taking charge of the slightly younger, somewhat vulnerable bronzerider, the roles/ranks of their dragons notwithstanding.

Incidentally, if anyone thought Derik was on top, think again—nobody was. That's a terrible idea. ... Unless you know your dragon's cycles well enough to prepare, I guess, which is not something I ever intended to think about but there it is. Gah, logic, why you do this to me?

- ... That ramble probably didn't help, did it? {= (

- I am intrigued and a little frightened to know that naked racing might appear in future entries.

- My next one will involve Henry and Ilraen getting into shenanigans and being bros!

~Neshomeh

"The [player of the] female chooses" is how we did things in Pern RPs on Neopets, back when I was heavily involved with that. OTOH, in Dragonflight, there's a wonderful line from R'gul, IIRC, explaining to Lessa that the strongest male doesn't always win—sometimes it's whoever the Weyr most wants to win. And sometimes it's who the dragon's rider wants to win. Also, FYI, in Dragonseye a.k.a. Red Star Rising, there's a conversation between women greenriders about what happens if a blue whose rider is not at all interested in women catches their green, and the answer is that both parties can have their preferred partner standing by, so everyone wins. We fans of a more progressive mindset make the most of that sort of thing. {= )

But I also like the idea that dragonriders, when properly acclimated to Weyr life, just aren't generally as fussed about sexuality and the expression thereof as we are in our woefully backward society. Really, why should they be? Holders are because they have to worry about bloodlines and succession, and because the population has been decimated a couple times due to Thread and plague, so reproduction is considered a vital duty to keep the human population from dying out. Dragonriders, on the other hand, have to be more concerned with the draconic population, so they're exempt from obligations about breeding themselves. Plus, they have to fight Thread, so being pregnant all the time isn't really an option for lady dragonriders. They can have kids if they want to—werybred kids are always valued—but they can take a short ride between if they don't.

It's also worth bearing in mind that, the weird ideas of the author aside, everything is extremely effed up at the start of the Ninth Pass. Nobody is doing anything the way they were really intended.

... Oh look, I've accidentally written an essay about Pern in response to a four-sentence post. You'd think I was deeply immersed in this fandom for years or something. >.>

Ahem. Anyway. Trust me, the angst is deliberate. I'm evil enough that the narrative irony of then vs. now makes writing these backstory pieces more fun. (And resurrecting some of my horde of Pern OCs is nice, too.)

And thanks!

~Neshomeh