I return after 12 years to expose you to my horrid English skills.
Nah don't worry, I'm mainly contained to The Legendary.

With a beep, Medical Unit Theta awoke from sleep mode, her mind slowly processing to see if anything happened to her form during the night, a left over paranoid habit from her time in Preatoria, as all checks came back green, she opened her eyes and carefully unplugged her charger, before yawning and stretching.

It had been two busy weeks since she left Preatoria.... And technically jumped more than ten years into the future, so many things to do and learn.... But now she had an apartment, a pet Guinea pig and a job, what more could she want? Maybe a girlfriend, but baby steps for now.

As she moved around the apartment, getting dressed and getting breakfast, she hummed to her self.... She did not need to eat, but she enjoyed the texture of food and it could fuel her in a pinch. Finishing up, she gave fluffy the guinea pig a head pat and headed out to her job.

She always enjoyed the walk I to work, King's Row was so different from Peatorian, instead of cream walls it was brick work for the most part, cars putted along the dirty streets, gangers watched from the shadows... It was more dangerous than her home demension, but at the same time more alive. She carefully side stepped some primal earth Clockwork stealing what looked like some sort of music device. She marveled at them, unlike her sleek, humanoid clockwork self, these things where primitive, scrap metal hammered together by psionic will, fascinating.

She eventually made it to the King's Row medical facility and clocked in, met by her coworker Cleo, a black skinned giantess of a woman with glowing eyes who worked the ER. "Hey Theta, got some bad news for ya."

Theta looked up and frowned. "This unit is no longer needed?" She asked with her usual verbal tick of being unable to refer to herself in the first person.

"What? No girl, you got day clinic today... So be good and try not to kill anyone?" She handed Theta a folder.
The clockwork took it and opened it, reading through it. She knew many of her fellow employees hated the day clinic, but had no idea why.

By lunch time, she knew.

She stomped into the lunch room, looked at the disinfectant by the sink and started scrubbing her face with it.
"That bad?" Cleo asked, daintily eating a tiny yoghurt.

Theta threw up her arms. "This unit had four cases of "it's just a cold." That was obviously the seasonal flu, one claiming it was a smokers cough after near coughing out a lung in the waiting room, who knows how many he infected!" She drops into a chair and let's out a sigh like a boiling kettle. "She does not understand why they wait so long for help."

Cleo shrugged. "Sad thing, even though the day clinic is free, many expect the traditional American price gouge... Take it things where better where you came from?"

Theta grumps. "The only work this unit has to do was on the occasion work place injury, which was rare because 90% of the workforce was clockworks."

Cleo reaches over and pats Theta's shoulder. "How about I make it up to you, the girls are having a night out, wanna come?"

Theta thought about this.... She did not have many friends in Paragon.... This could lead to more friends. "This unit would like to.... If she has not offlined herself by the end of the day."

That night Theta was given a girls night out, drinking, dancing, seeing the sights and again marvelling at how different primal earth was from Preatoria, getting home late and a little wobbly after Cleo showed her a drink made to get mechanoids drunk, Theta carefully picked up Fluffy and patted him. "This unit is so sorry, she had so much fun tonight, but left you all alone."

The guinea pig made a werking noise as she gently placed him on the couch and quickly got him some food, changing into a baggy shirt, she sat next to him and turned on the tv to watch crime dramas, another thing Preatoria lacked, television shows with conflict. She passed the evening, patting Fluffy as he ate and watching CSI Paragon reruns until finally putting Fluffy back in his cage, striping down and climbing into bed, plunging in her charger.

   

Actually, McDonald's is doing an anime-themed promotion in conjunction with Studio Pierrot. But it was a fun surprise when I saw the cup they gave me. (The characters running along the side of the logo, according to Google Translate, read "Wak Donalds".)

We rolled over to page 13 without quite noticing, so I'm starting a new thread, and implementing the title change I proposed a while back. And just in time, because this campaign is on Crowdfunding by BackerKit!

Onyx Path Wrote:The Age of Man is long over. Cats – uplifted from our clever feline companions to use tools and language – now rule the world. In the Monarchies of Mau, cats study relics the Old Ones left behind to create new wonders, expand their understanding of the world, and combat the monsters and minions of the Unseen that threaten catkind. Curious cats explore ruins and set sail on the Acid Sea, or participate in games of intrigue against other houses, the dogs of Pugmire, and other rival species.

The world is full of mysteries and dangers, which excellent cats are eager to face.

Welcome to The Curious Cats of Mau. This book details the lives of the cats in the city-states that make up the Monarchies of Mau as they explore the world, plan daring heists and feats of intrigue, learn what they can about the Old Ones, and pounce on the sinister entities called the Unseen. You’ll need Realms of Pugmire to play this game and learn more about the dogs of Pugmire, who have sometimes been the cats’ allies, and often been their rivals.

The cats of the monarchies believe that the Old Ones served them, and the cats’ ancestors granted Man great responsibilities as a reward. Though no one knows what happened to the Old Ones, they left many wonders behind to help the cats in their endeavors. Adventurous cats explore ancient ruins, hoping to discover artifacts they can study — sometimes by breaking them apart to discover how they work.

Several decades ago, the formidable Trillani Persian von Mau united the monarchies at a time when conflict threatened to tear catkind apart. With her clearheaded leadership, she guided the great houses as they worked together, and eventually helped bring about an end to the War of Dogs and Cats. Trillani died recently, and her successor (Threnody von Mau) struggles to keep the hard-earned peace. Cats are expert at schemes and spycraft, and secrets are power. Some plot against other houses, while others seek to renew hostilities between the monarchies and Pugmire. Meanwhile, the threat of the Unseen is ever-present, waiting to strike should the cats’ vigilance waver.

Will you be an excellent cat?

Soooo, *cracks fingers*, the Seraph's in Paragon city... Let's do this.
Seraph is a man in his late thirties from Australia, he came to Paragon after his fiance ditched him when their daughter suffered birth defects, resulting in stunted limbs, heart broken, Seraph took his daughter Neph and traveled the world, looking for aid and ended up in Paragon where doctors fitted the young Neph with cybernetic limbs, it was pricey so Seraph opened a magical workshop to pay his daughters bills.

As they grew, Neph felt some what bitter her birth mother left her and needeled Seraph to try his luck in a new pond, this lead Seraph to a speed dating service where he met the hero Tish Fuego and they clicked, yin and yang, a well noted hero with powers over fire and speed, Tish found Seraph a good anchor while he found her a fresh breath of air, a spunky personality.
Seraph settled to be a stay at home father, working out of his shop while Tish was the bread earner, a system that worked well for them and Neph reluctantly warmed to this new mother figure.

Years later, Seraph and Tish married, but Tish opted to keep her maiden name.

Time passed and one day Seraph caught a street urchin trying to break into his store, rather than report the girl, he took her in and to Tish's initial reluctance, adopted the would be thief named Caroline.

Fast forward to today, Tish has been taking it light on the heroing, so the rest of the Seraph's stepped up to fill the gap, with some hiccups like Neph getting yanked into Pretoria's past to help mend the time line, but other wise all is good.

Hi there! my name is RadiantGV. I have been playing video games for thirty years, and writing fanfiction for over half that time. I'm a transgender woman, I prefer she/they pronouns, and I was introduced to this forum via the Tropes page for "My Apartment Manager is Not An Isekai Character", which I'm rapidly growing in love with on AO3.

Article here, with embedded pic and logo

For those who don't want to bother clicking the link and just want the lowdown: Pedro Pascal as Mister Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Invisible Woman, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as The Thing, and Joseph Quinn as Human Torch.

Thanks to being the biggest and first commonly available part of Drunkard's Walk BGC has a special place for a lot of the people on these boards, so I figured I'd mention this here - the new Transformers Earthspark toy being sold under the name "Prowl" is actually a repainted Bumblebee Cyberverse Adventures Hot Rod, which means it's got almost the exact profile of the ADP car Leon an Daley drive in the early episodes (It gets wrecked by the Griffon IIRC, and the replacements are far more econobox.)

So, while it's more white with blue quarter-panels than the on-screen blue with white below a "belly line" and of course has Aurtobot logos instead of ADP, it is at least plausibly close, to the point it can do double duty as a BGC toy on your desk, and who'd have expected that after all this time?



Amazon USA listing

Earthspark, like BBCA before it, is a "semi-budget" subline, but this was one of the better BBCA molds so it can still stand up with the average War For Cybertron (Siege|Earthrise|Kingdom) or TF Legacy (adjectiveless|Evo|United) Deluxe despite the lower price point, so at $20 MSRP he's already a good deal and if you find him for less I'd call it a priority buy if you're thinking about getting toys at all.

We've had to decide where in history to put Artoria Pendragon, our very own Saber.  From the legends, there are two periods which fit the most: the High Middle Ages, a time of crusaders and chivalry, and sub-Roman Britain, a break in the historical record which can accommodate legendary figures among native Britons.

We're going with the earlier time period, 407-577 AD, largely because it offers some of the other elements of the story -- roughly Welsh/Cornish/Brythonic sounding names, an invasion of pagans taking on the Christian people of Britain (i.e. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who would later win... and then later convert to Christianity), and a more blank slate into which to write.  Romans withdrew their last soldiers from Britain in 407, after the Groans of the Britons, circa 450, they disappear from the historical record completely.  Historian and archaeologists are currently on the peaceful immigration meme, just as they supported the tribal conquest meme before 1950, so it's hard to know what really happened.

This thread is about that time, which I don't think people really have a sense of.  So what is our Artoria older than?

• Chivalry - it's not hard to see why later writers would want to add deeds of chivalry, because the lost kingdom idea is very good romantic literature.  But the idea of a code of knightly ethics largely evolved in the aftermath of Charlemagne's empire, which leads us to...
  
• Charlemagne, Karl the Great - his being crowned emperor happened in 800, which is centuries too late.  She may have lived at the same time as Clovis, the first of the Merovingian dynasty, but certainly not alongside a Carolean.
  
• Crusades - The First Crusade started in 1096!  Crusading was roughly as close in time to her as we are to Columbus' first voyage of discovery.
  
• Islam - And why would you need to crusade, because Mohammed had not yet begun to preach? (He does so in 613 AD.)  The whole of the Mediterranean world was Christian, at least officially.
  
• Turks living in Turkey - outside of perhaps a few merchants, Anatolia was thoroughly Greek, having been ruled by Greeks and Greek Romans for a millennium
  
• The East-West Schism - The Christian church was not divided to Roman and Orthodox -- but there were other sects like Arianism which were very dominant in Western Europe, via the Vandal and Ostrogoth, and early Lombard kings
  
• Hungarians living in Hungary - The Great Migration was in full swing at this period, with the above mentioned people and the Visigoths invading old Roman lands, but the Hungarians didn't come to Europe until the ninth century.
  
• Formal/informal distinction in Latin languages - this seems to have emerged in the Middle Ages from the imperial "royal we" getting extended to more and more petty nobles, finally becoming the tu/vous distinction.
  
• Venice - The most serene city did not yet exist, being founded later (c. 700) by Roman refugees from Lombard invaders, with many leaving from Aquileia on the land).  Nearby Ravenna did exist, and has very lovely mosaics from the same period as our Arthur/Artoria.
  
• Nationalism - This one is obvious, but just a reminder that there was no concept of a British nation back then, or a nation of all of the Gaelic-speaking peoples -- in fact invaders from the north were just as feared as Germanic people from across the seas.  Religious identity played a much larger role (on the Christian side anyway; pagans were rarely concerned with orthodoxy).
  
• Jadwiga of Poland - Okay, this one is pretty distant, but in 1382 Hedwig was crowned King of Poland, because there wasn't a rule in the student handbook that women can't be kings.  She was canonized as a Catholic saint in 1997, but is an early example of women ruling as a king.
  

Old thread is here