Thomas Parrott

Maybe I want you to be spooky, Jenny. Secretly. Maybe I'm luring you deeper into it. Skeet by skeet. Spookier and spookier.

I did specify that turkey day may not apply in all localities. I was sensitive to your needs as a kangaroo puncher. I'm just kind like that.

Completely unacceptable behavior. I simply have no words. Spooky season is OVER. It is now Turkey Season. Or you may move on to a more locally appropriate equivalent. 😤

a young man in a striped shirt is pointing at the camera and saying stop that ALT: a young man in a striped shirt is pointing at the camera and saying stop that

JENNY STRATH

bloorp

Alright! That's it. Time's up. Everybody stop being spooky right now.

DOST THOU BLORP AT ME SIR

I feel like I encouraged this and I'm honestly not sorry about it

Will do! I'm kind of a sucker for the Predator franchise and I like Elle Fanning, so I imagine I'll have fun at worst.

What a pity. It looked interesting. I'm going to see Predator Badlands on the 9th. Excited for it.

Sometimes busy is good! I hope it's the good kind. And I'm fine.

No, no, honestly what good does social media do anyone. I am glad to see you, though. I hope you're well.

Good God Carrie Harris I thought you were dead. How fitting to reappear tonight watching the Crow.

Sapient species of Weapons Tight™:

Humans (+ gorillas, chimps, octopods, & dolphins)
Hruhlak -- ageless tyrannosharks
Qurong -- dinosaur cheetahs
Talina -- eight-legged primates
Sruta -- acid-adapted molluscoids
Oma -- icthyoid schoolers
Tili -- pterosaurlikes
Churug -- animal/fungal shapeshifters

If only you had, you would have gotten my top secret Eldar dictionary. I've disposed of it long since, of course.

Ha! I literally know where you live, so try again!

No, not you. You'll need very direct methods to be rid of me at this stage, I fear. Fumigation, maybe.

I need to just... stop trying to be friends with people who clearly don't want to be friends with me. Come on Tom! Listen to the silence. Absorb the context cues.

Funny enough, that's the Stratocracy's response to the fact that the Terrans uplifted the gorillas et al. They don't trust humans -- especially the Terrans are too much like the Hruhlak for their taste, but they've opened their borders to any uplifts seeking refuge during the Terran-Solarian War.

Stratocracy is a human word, of course. The etymology of the actual Churug name for their government roughly translates as "The Reforging of Their Tools into Our Weapons".

Because to the Hruhlak, all life is either a tool, a food, or waste. And the Churug were tools.

Alone amongst the Freed Peoples, they have no pre-conquest culture to fall back on. The only thing that's ever been truly theirs is the war that freed them. Even their name, Churug, is a Hruhlak word.

So they have embraced militancy. Their polity, the Stratocracy, awards citizenship for service.

They used them as prestige messengers, because their reshaping ability makes them uniquely able to reproduce the phonemes and languages of other species.

They also used them as decoration. Living sculptures. The more exotic, improbable shapes you could twist your Churug into, the more prestigious.

They were clever but non sapient when the Hruhlak discovered them. Their unique biology captured the Hruhlak imagination, and they uplifted and enslaved them. Encouraged the traits they found most interesting, honing the shapeshiftijg qualities to new levels of protean responsiveness.

I love all my babies, but I am fond of the Churug. They're a form of life that simply doesn't exist on Earth, layers of fungus-like outer tissue around a core of animal-esque organs. The fungal layers include chromatophores and the ability to gradually restructure to adapt to environ needs.

Okay, yeah, that's not so bad if you're running. I think 12C and lower might be about to where I'd be getting chilly. Definitely 10, haha

Sapient species of Weapons Tight™:

Humans (+ gorillas, chimps, octopods, & dolphins)
Hruhlak -- ageless tyrannosharks
Qurong -- dinosaur cheetahs
Talina -- eight-legged primates
Sruta -- acid-adapted molluscoids
Oma -- icthyoid schoolers
Tili -- pterosaurlikes
Churug -- animal/fungal shapeshifters

People are complaining about the power scaling of IT and I just kind of hate everything right now.

Was it not cold? I guess the running warms you up, but even so. We had a high of 9C today, and I guess I always assumed Romania was cold.

The truth will set you free.

Newbies are customarily called Headwound until they earn their own callsign in action, with the notion being their neural jack surgery hasn't healed yet.