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Description: Go wild. All I'll request is keep the flat chest, everything else can be whatever you like...

In which they get a proper Disney Fairies badfic, and Urato can finally start learning to be a gentleman. Maybe.

-Yuki is not an aestheticist, she just likes finding an excuse to gush about beauty and will wax poetic at length about what she considers the most beautiful fantasy setting of all time

I probably won't write much.

Details:

I do a lot of arts and crafts projects and some writing and poetry. Not all of them get finished. I sometimes play Terraria or No Man's Sky. I don't do any other videogames. When I'm not doing things like that, I read sci-fi and fantasy. I am a pretty big Tolkien fan. I love cats, and I am very lucky to have 3 of them. I'm a classical violinist who also likes to play folk music. I also like to sing, and I think I'm decent at it.

Restrictions: Not with Maslab. We're not exactly on speaking terms.

Unless we're waiting until the Wiki thread is done, I believe it is Shipfest time.

-Ls

You've got three different polities - the cohesive Red and Blue, with Black split in two and only held together by treaty-passages through systems like Neshomeh and Huinesoron. Red and Blue are in conflict, with a handful of battlefields along the front lines - the Huinesoron-Delta front, Oracle, Araeph. Black is more of a commercial power, trying to hold it together while the galaxy goes to pot. Some systems are massive hubs of warp lanes; others are trapped out on the edge of things. There's even some Black systems that have been completely blockaded - Red no longer permit access to Ekwy and Milano, after Black helped Blue drive them out of Neshomeh.

...

Captain's Log, stardate... seven. The long run through the Bryn-Maslab Quadrangle always gets the crew's spirits down; it is so empty out there, with nothing but the distant gleam of the Harpy redoubt Novastorme to light our way. Our arrival at Miah was cause for hot anticipation, but the reception we received was muted at best. The Harpy-Gernell war is stirring up again, and Miah has been a Harpy system for many years. The populace are bunkering down against the red tide, and had little time for trading.

Things are somewhat better here in Caddy-Shack, where there is only a light blue presence. I have been able to send the crew groundside on shore leave, and fully expect a spate of bleepka-induced amnesia incidents when they return. For myself, I am studying my charts, and wishing once again for a direct route from Caddy-Shack to galactic north. But all warp-lanes here point south, with the primary axis being the triple highway to Miah, Pretzel, and the Guvnorate of Space.

What's that? Computer, accept message. Hmm. I... no. What? No, they can't. We're supposed to be going home, we...

Resume log. I have just received orders from Thorntree itself. How they got here I don't know - the shortest route follows the triple highway and then cuts through Neshomeh to reach kippur, but that lane is now a front line in the war. I almost wish the courier had been set upon, cut down by Gernell bandits or Harpy raiders. Anything other than what lurks beneath that official Koright seal...

We have been ordered to Huinesoron, the flashpoint of the most recent war. The Powers That Be have decreed that the conflict is an opportunity: while we would never violate the Gernell sanctions on the Huinesoron-Ekwy lane, there is always a chance to discover new warp lanes. We are to explore the nearby systems, Vemi and bjam and Fawkes, searching for any route to Ekwy and Milano, or long-lost Teena and WyldeHorse. It will take us deep into red territory, and there is no knowing when we will return.

It is a noble endeavour. I made the run to Milano once - the people there are good Koright citizens, they do not deserve to be cut off like this. But I wish to Legal it had fallen to anyone but me.

I must get to work. My orders are to stay as far from both the Harpies and Gernell as possible, so the direct route through Neshomeh is out. I only hope I can plot us a course that doesn't lead right back around the Maslab-Bryn Quadrant in reverse...

~

(You could also use red and blue as literal star colours, with black representing standard yellow stars. But that doesn't produce such an immediate story.)

hS

Phil Kelly is pretty much the only game in town right now when it comes to the creation and exploration of T'au lore and stories. However, he seems to delight in retconning stuff that had already been established for no reason (it seems) other than "he didn't know about it or forgot it existed". The "T'au blood is red" thing was a meme for a bit precisely because of the Farsight books. Not my favourite. But then, I've not read the Farsight series in a while, so Phobos is one up on me there. =]

Life gets busy; fic can wait! I always look forward to reading your feedback, no matter how belated it might feel to you. :)

I reckon it was a mix of "keep Harry out of trouble", "help Madam Pomfrey deal with her incredible workload", "give Harry a chance to uncover the truth", and "punish Harry by having him clean bedpans". Severina certainly knows how to make her help feel like torture :'D

The line about trusting sapient objects comes from Arthur Weasley, but yes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And yeah, blood magic isn't really something you want the kids to read about for school, haha.

You'll find out next chapter what her motives are. I think she's still a bit sympathetic even if she's doing terrible things. I do plan for her to live for a while yet! She also has a character arc to go through, even if it's not as dramatic as other people (read: Draco)'s!

Thank you again for taking the time to review!

It's Farsight something or other. Looks like there are a couple of them, and I'm not sure which one he's on.

He mentioned the Scar Lords Space Marine chapter, which sounds just incredibly messed up and makes the T'au look very good by comparison! {= D Apparently there's a saying that "the Emperor judges you not by your medals, but by your scars," and these dudes decided to take it literally—not only do they prevent their wounds from fully healing, they allow themselves to be horrifically disfigured. Also they have a ship called Scabbard of Flesh. Which. Um. Well, Phobos speculates they might be descended from the Emperor's Children. {X D

He also mentioned a bit where one of the T'au touches a broken Gellar drive (having never seen one before and not knowing better), and basically gets Black Oil'd by demons. Whoops.

I don't think he's quite convinced they're all sweetness and light, I'm afraid. Apparently their caste rigidity is pretty extreme; like, if you're a scribe (i.e. not a mechanic) and you dare to take an interest in the mechanical data pad or whatever that you're scribing on, you can get beat up for not staying in your lane? And then there's that whole fifth caste nobody talks about. Pretty shady!

~Neshomeh

Charlotte's Web, anyone? I loved the animated film as a kid—but I especially loved listening to the audiobook, performed by E.B. White himself, at bedtime. He has such a rich, mellow voice. You can hear a remastered sample here. {= )

Anyway, I actually think I'm in the middle of the chart because I've dabbled in a bit of everything, with multiple generations of Boarders. It's a feature of longevity more than prolificacy.

~Neshomeh

...Actually, much more than a spider can.

-Ls

... to see myself as the spider at the center of the web. {X D

Actually, the whole thing looks a bit spider-shaped at the moment. Funny!

~Neshomeh

I think we've got most of the published RPs now, and all of the big-name character journals. But cowrites? I've mostly just followed chains of cowriters around. The most obvious example of that is Miah - Bryn - Maslab - firemagic, forming a big square on the graph where you can see me just jumping through agent pages to find cowrites.

At a quick look, Astral Void's main agent had five main appearances: three solo written, one cowrite with you, and one the Hallowe'en Cowrite. I'm excluding that because what we actually did was all post separate stories; it's more like an anthology.

Then there's the MSTs, and I don't know about that. Agent Ally did an MST with Laburnum, which is the name of a PPC agent written by the MST co-author Laburnum. It takes place in the PPC MST Theatre. But... Laburnum also talks about her other username, and seems to be implying that she hangs out with canon characters. So is this Agent Laburnum being weird, or Author Laburnum in an OOC RP space?

For the moment, I'm ignoring MSTs wholesale, which means yes, you seem to be Astral Void's only link to the graph.

hS

Seems an odd detention choice for Snape. I wonder if he actually wanted to get the trio near the victims, so they would have a chance to search for clues, since they were the only ones actually making any progress? Or maybe just to redirect their investigation to an area less populated by gigantic spiders?

Wooooooow, I’m generally not a fan of creating censored/dumbed down versions of books for kids, but uh. Wowee wow wow, I think I can see why the school library edition of the Tome of Avalon has some, uh. Redacted content! Children don’t need to be thinking about cutting hands or exchanging blood! I really hope St. Mungo’s has a good way of treating HIV! Wow, this frigging society, man. Oh, I did like the detail that Molly Weasley’s admonishment from Chamber, about not trusting things that shouldn’t be speaking, has wound up inside the Tome in this timeline! It’s definitely the only sensible line we’ve seen from the book so far . . .

Man. Man. It really was Astoria all along . . . and I didn’t suspect her until this previous chapter! You really had me fooled this time. Not that I tend to be good at solving mysteries as I read them . . . I want to feel sympathetic towards Astoria, with how sick she is, so I hope there was a bit more motive behind all this beyond framing Harry and removing Dumbledore. Much as I want to read the next chapter right away, it’s getting close to work time, so I’ll have to hold off until another meal . . . Sorry I fell behind reading these, but last week got very busy towards the end, and I really wasn’t home at all!

—doctorlit hopes Astoria gets to live at least as long as her canon counterpart

Much like with the Fenrykan Heresy, I wanted to post this here so that you specifically got to engage with it and not miss out. You always provide really valuable input. =]

Fun fact about the Kroot morphs: the only one that's original is actually the Greater Knarloc in the Lords Of War section, and that's an adaptation of the old Forge World Great Knarloc that used to be a Heavy Support unit in 8th edition. The Vultures, Stalkers, Headhunters, and suchlike all come from the 3rd edition Kroot army list from an ancient Chapter Approved article in an old issue of White Dwarf. This was shortly after the T'au were first introduced as a faction, back in the year I'm Not Old Shut Up No I'm Not.

The Kroot are mostly adapted from old Geedubs stuff. This is not the case for almost every other client race in the faction, because Games Workshop kind of decided to ignore the T'au Empire's pluralistic approach in favour of designing more big shooty jetpack robots. I've invented basically everything about the units for those races, simply because they never come up! That all said, every alien species that makes an appearance in the army list has appeared somewhere in an official Games Workshop product before, even if they were just a fleeting reference in a bit of wargear backstory. I've expanded on them out of necessity but I have included zero original species. That was a point of principle; I've seen a few fandexes for the Auxiliaries floating around, and rather than explore and fill out the client races that already exist, they just went full Original Character Donut Steel instead, and I was left entirely unfulfilled. =]

Finally, thank you for your kind comment about the wry remarks in the lore snippets. My personal favourite is the name of one of the Warlord Traits, "Coalition of the Mostly Willing". I do intend on adding lore paragraphs to each unit listing and having that as the 1.1 PDF release, so watch this space. =]

The document is here, the Imgur version of the current full file is here. It's a huge daft blob of PPCers!

I've taken some time to draw the Thorntree Number Contours onto the plot, here. Now you can see your own number at a glance! There are only five people with a Thorntree Number greater than 6 - four on 7, and Specs still out by himself on 8. Poor Specs. :(

Apologies for the terrifying shape of the 3-4 boundary: the Journal and RP zones are pretty randomly divided between those who journalled with kippur/RP'd with Leto and those who didn't.

hS

While not a meat pie, I had quiche once. It was delicious.

The Trio confront the culprit in the Chamber of Secrets.

Warning for blood, knives, kids getting injured, and a character using some gross & racially-charged terms to address Hermione. Please read at your own discretion.

That sounds awesome. I think I would like to be in on that, if it happens.

Looks at irl craziness and other stuff going on Drat. At least you can borrow Rebecca, who has expressed interest in joining HQ's thearer group as of this thing from the Mailbox game we did a while ago.

From the reply thread to the original, excerpts from the dress rehearsal, which didn't exactly stay on task.

ANTONY. Friends, Time Lords, Gallifreyans, lend me your ears!

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise her.

I mean, honestly, why would I ever do so?

PINDARUS. Seriously? What's with the burying?

I only regenerated; I'm standing right here.

SECOND CITIZEN. Weren't we going for 'peace'?

PINDARUS. Yes,

But then people started throwing insults around.

ANTONY. It's as I said: no praising here.

The evil that men do lives after them,

And continues ever to annoy their fellows;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Caesar. Particularly

The part about internment.

PINDARUS. Oh, come on!

(I still want to either write more of this, or write A Midsummer Night's Dream in the First Age of Middle-earth. She-nan-i-gans.)

hS

Like Nesh, I don't exactly know the gameplay side of 40K (I have, uh... one Chaos Marine somewhere, or did 20 years ago), but I can see this would be a very easy-to-use codex if I understood it. The layout is great, very tidy and readable. (For purely online purposes, a linked contents list to the major sections would be handy; I know there's one down in the middle but it's only for the one section.)

I mostly read the lore sections, and loved the wry humour speckled through them. The warlord so covered in medals that they're hard to hit stood out, as did the Imperial commentary on "abominable weapons", and the various nudges that maybe the T'au aren't actually sweetness and light that everybody loves - "this doctrine of the Fire Caste is well known among the auxiliaries, sometimes even by choice". (I see there's no mention of telepathic mind control in here. [Ducks])

How much of what you've written about is original? A quick look at Lexicanum shows that the Kroot are relatively well fleshed out in the canon, for instance, but it looks like the detailed variant morphs are mostly yours? How about the other auxiliaries, and things like the artefacts and vehicles?

hS

Yeah, turns out just sending people a link to a Google Doc and going "HERE IS THING! READ THING! DO NOW! DOOOOOO!" is not the best mechanism for acquiring feedback. =]

I'm really glad you're gonna be dipping into it again. I admit to not having written much lore for the Codex, as I was more focused on getting it to be a usable gaming book; I do, however, intend to backfill the lore in later, once I've done some more reading and I've got more time to do it properly. There's a reason this Codex is 1.0, after all.

Which book's Phobos reading, if you don't mind my asking? I don't own very many BL books, because... well, because poor, but I'm eager to find out what he thinks about my sweet blue angel children who have done nothing wrong. =]

It was a ton of work! But the work wasn't just in writing the rules; a surprising amount was in getting the Codex set out so that it was a readable document and not just scraps of rules held together with duct tape. Making it look like an actual Codex would be impossible for me. Graphic design is not my passion. =]