But what about vampire history teachers. Vampires who read something from a text book then proceed to light the book on fire and throw it out the window because “No. that’s not even close to what really happened. Listen up nerds I’m about to teach you what really happened in France during the revolution”
I need this as a series
Vampires sharing the recipe for Greek fire.
Vampires speaking in dead languages.
Vampires being able to translate untranslatable scripts.
Vampires who react to straightwashing historical figures like “Are you kidding me everyone knew that man was queer!”
Vampires from cultures who were once antagonistic towards each other stubbornly maintaining a friendship that’s lasted longer than their civilizations.
Vampires who honour forgotten deities you won’t find in mythology books.
Also, vampires who secretly saved stuff from the Library of Alexandra.
A vampire show that does not revolve all around sex and eternal cursed love.
nerd vampire whose knowledge of current events is terrible but they can always remember everything that’s considered “history” so they have a super-detailed knowledge of everything up to about thirty years ago and then ?????
vampire who couldn’t tell you what caravaggio was known for but duelled with him at least three times and slept with him at least ten. “cara-who OH YOU MEAN MICHAEL yeah he was cool”
vampire who spent 100 years in a convent and is still so bitter that in all that time they never made her mother superior “GODDAMMIT I HAD SENIORITY! I HAD SENIORITY!” “okay so first off janet, that was six hundred years ago, but more importantly, maybe if you didn’t always start those complaints off with blasphemy…”
vampire professor who just sort of showed up at oxford when it was founded and is still there (and nobody’s noticed because he still never actually shows up to his lectures)
vampire politician who lifts all their campaign speeches wholesale from speeches given 200 years ago and just waits for someone to catch them out (nobody ever does they’re prime minister and their approval ratings are through the roof)
WAIT I HAVE MORE
queer vampire who constantly talks about the fashion for straightness and you need to be really careful because if you tell them straight is default they WILL scream at you for five days straight about what a modern concept heterosexuality is
vampire hoarder who has an entire town where they just kept having to buy new houses to keep their stuff in and some of it’s probably worth tens of millions by now but you’ll never find it in among the 1950s kitschy kitten sculptures and boxes of newspaper (the newspaper is a wonderful mix of yesterday’s guardian and daily courants from 1725)
vampire sailor from manderville’s time who just has so many stories and some of them might even be true
vampire bluestocking girl who took to the internet like a fish to water and spends her whole unlife engaging reddit antifeminists about women’s rights because that’s one fight she’s determined to see through. also with the advent of cheap dyes she literally wears blue socks every day and hopes one day someone gets the joke
vampire doctor who just gets SO CONFUSED about the literature because do you know how hard it is to keep up with medicine kevin? when i got my doctorate we thought leeches were good and then they were bad and now they’re good again? i was published in issue one of the lancet kevin that is 387 lancets kevin how the hell am i meant to remember which one’s current kevin why are they saying cannabis is good for pain like this is news??? (but also lives in a state of wonderment every day in hospital because wow look at all this stuff we can do now look at it kevin!)
entire coven of vampires constantly quibbling over manners because they’re all from different periods: “HATS OFF AT TABLE” “SCREW YOU LEONARD ONLY PEASANTS EAT BAREHEADED” “TABITHA THAT HASN’T BEEN GOOD MANNERS SINCE THE 1500S NOBODY HAS LICE ANY MORE” “IT ISN’T ABOUT LICE LEONARD IT’S ABOUT GOOD MANNERS YOU NEED TO HAVE GOOD MANNERS WHEN YOU HAVE PEOPLE OVER FOR DINNER” “I SWEAR TO GOD TABITHA IF YOU MAKE THAT PUN ONE MORE TIME I WILL SHOVE YOUR STUPID HAT DOWN YOUR THROAT”
Tag: story
Story idea. Dudes name is just yelling for like 5 seconds. Think of the possibilities. They’re sneaking in. One person tries to whisper “aaaaa” in order to get dudes attention. Eventually it works. Dude goes “hey ok but you’re pronouncing it wrong. It’s not (quietly) aaaaa, it’s AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” and he just starts bellowing out this yell. The bad guys hear. Everybody sighs and looks at each other. 7 seasons of this dude whose name is just yelling.
“we need a code name when were on missions where secrecy is an asset”
“I was named AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA in honour of my father’s last words, I will not turn my back on his legacy.”
regional differences
“oh hey,” she said, “it’s a really touristy area, but since you’re gonna be passing through anyway, you might as well stop by pier 29, see the dragons. also, there’s a—”
“hold on,” i said. “i knew your city had mountains, but. dragons? uh, actual living dragons?”
“dude, it’s not a big deal. they’re there all the time. of course they’re majestic and everything, but they’re loud and cranky and mostly they lie around eating garbage. now and then the city council will talk about trying to make them roost somewhere else, but—”
“dragons,” i repeated. i knew it was making me sound like a rube, but it was a lot to take in. “you live in a city that has dragons.”
“no, it’s cool, we used to go see them when i was a little kid. it’s worth doing. but that whole area is mostly dragon-themed gift shops, and the commercialization is kind of a bummer. also, sometimes a dragon will melt somebody’s car and it’s a whole problem.”
“fairytale-style, giant scaly fire-breathing dragons.”
“honestly, i forget other cities don’t have them?” she said. “there’s a few other sites on the west coast where they gather. portland calls them wyverns, but that’s a portland thing.”
“chicago’s got, like, bunnies and songbirds,” i told her, “but otherwise it’s just your typical vermin. pigeons, rats, sphinxes—”
“sphinxes? what the hell.”
“oh, yeah, they nest in the el tunnels. sometimes a fucking sphinx will flap down out of nowhere, bring the whole train to a halt until the front car answers a riddle.”
“that sounds exciting,” she said.
“it’s the worst. your train winds up being twenty minutes late, and you just have to hang out hoping somebody up there read their mythology. there’s supposed to be a program where the conductors get trained in riddling, but i don’t know. rahm emmanuel keeps saying it’s not a budget priority.”
“huh,” she said. “guess the grass is always greener and all that. but on some level, it’s nice to remember that even with all these big box stores, the country still has some variety left in it.”
“yeah, did you know that in rhode island they call water fountains ‘bubblers’?” i said.
“whoa, seriously?”
“i read it somewhere. crazy, right?”
“crazy.”
i am here for urbanized mythological creatures
Switzerland has a lot of dragons, but dragons have long since moved on from collecting gold. There’s a purply-scaley one that roosts behind the Mad Mex that refuses to stop hoarding signposts. The city uses banners for the main roads and sells a lot of maps.
Golems love cities–with their stone buildings and sidewalks. There are strict laws about what one is allowed to say to them, because golems tend to be rather literal and very obedient. There’s always one kid who thinks he knows better. He doesn’t.
OH MY GOD THE CHICAGO SPHINXES, DON’T GET ME STARTED. Here’s the thing. When you buy your Ventra card at the machine – which is another one of Rahm’s scams, leasing that out to a private company, wtf was he thinking – it’s supposed to have the answer to the riddle on it, right? The sphinx is supposed to scan the bar code and let the train through.
that never fucking happens. Especially on the Blue Line which is down for maintenance all the time and constantly switching tracks and running shuttles, which means half the time you’ve got a sphinx that came over from the fucking Orange Line or some shit and is full of riddles that only the Irish mooks from Bridgeport understand. Or it’s in Polish only. Or it’s got a glitch that makes it stutter and if you interrupt it, it’ll get snippy and bite your head off. LITERALLY. They hush it up but it happens. Businesses lose millions from sphinx-related tardiness every year.
And then there’s a case back in ‘96 when it was proven after the fact that the “wrong” answer the Red Line Sphinx got was actually A PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE REGIONAL VARIATION but by then, the Sphinx had already eaten half a car full of drunken Cubs fans. I know, not much of value was lost there, BUT STILL.
You think SPHINXES are bad? Detroit has imps, thousands of them, and you know what they love? Buses. You know the major form of public transit in Detroit is? BUSES. So the drivers have to literally shoo away imps at every fucking stop, making them 30 minutes late, an HOUR late, and it’s not like there’s anything you can DO, because they’re all leftover from when the car companies were big, and ALL OF THOSE FUCKERS CLOSED.
So of course there were hundreds of orphaned imps, and they kept SAYING they were going to reopen the factories, or at least get some good junkyards, but nooooooooo, they never did, so the imps just bred and bred, and now they’re all over every bus and it’s not like you can ever count on getting anywhere on time and long story short, I’d take a sphinx over imps ANY day.
yeah as someone who did high school and college in michigan and now lives in chicago, i have to say that as far as the age-old sphinxes vs imps debate goes, they’re both terrible in different ways. the imps are way more common and they probably have a wider total reach, and oh my god nothing like trying to board a bus already covered in those little suckers when said bus is already forty minutes late—
(sidenote: ugh people from bloomfield hills saying stuff like “well if i lived in detroit, i’d have the sense to carry around a nice heavy club or walking stick—” yeah dude good luck with your walking stick against two dozen imps)
but the sphinxes. let’s not, uh, sugar coat this: the sphinxes don’t just slow commuters, they kill people. and yes, if you know the riddle, you’re fine. but what if someone else offers their answer first? what if you get some overly cocky freshman philosophy major who takes it upon himself to answer for the whole car?
i think in the back of our minds, all chicagoans know that rahm emmanuel’s administration isn’t gonna lift a finger until one of the sphinxes goes after a wealthy tourist and it makes national news. and even then, we’ll get, like, flashy riddle-solving software installed in all the red line trains, and maybe the brown line, but no way is it gonna cover the whole infrastructure.
basically if you ever need to take the green line or the pink line, you wanna start studying your classical mythology and folklore fucking yesterday.
@copperbadge do puns work on Sphinxes as well as riddles?
You bet your sphinxter they do.
(Sphinxes hate that one but they’re obliged to honor it.)
Everyone complains about Boston’s insanely confusing street layout and nightmarish traffic. No one dares speak the name of the Good Folk responsible.
Bostonians have been trying to get you idiots to take the hint for the longest time. Seriously, what did you think the purpose of the Big Dig was? There was no purpose. The Gentry don’t need purpose, you fools. All is for Their amusement.
The old legend about how Boston’s streets were just tracing the paths of where cows wandered? You should pay closer attention to legend. Cows know the Fair Folk better than you; they know instinctively where the ley lines are. Never stray from their path. You really don’t want Them to take a shine to you.
And the song of Charlie on the MBTA, forced to ride a never-ending train for all of eternity because he had no extra coin to pay his fare? That was a warning, in code, for those of you who carry no iron in your pockets. Charlie is far, far away, and yet so close, seven years out of time. Never go down into the T tunnels without iron on you. The tracks are not iron enough; they will not save you.
The Fair Folk have been here for a long, long time. Fear of them is in our bones, in our blood, in the way we speak. We are so used to calling the wicked good that we call the good “wicked”.
And is it any wonder we’re really, really shitty drivers?
Jesus, this sounds awful. In Seattle we only have to worry about the Kraken, but if you live further inland you’re pretty much fine. It’s not even here year-round, it migrates up to Alaska during the summer and that’s when people really hit the beach.
Every once in a while it’ll come up-river and that’s always a huge production with the Coast Guard, but again, mostly a non-issue unless you’re really into fishing.
I guess there’s the mermaids too but they mostly hang out down at the pier and steal people’s Starbucks rewards cards.
what if medusa was a real woman. i mean: what if the woman with snakes in her hair was once a tiny girl with beautiful braids in her black hair.
what if the stories came from her smooth hands. when she was six she could make pottery that looked like flowers blooming in your palms. could carefully create replicas of any plant she saw.
and medusa was smart. ran from home, tucked up her hair so it looked short, made herself into a little boy. besides, they liked pretty boys. medusa at school with top grades, sending her unknowable stares at the other men. because the whole time she’s learning the planes of their faces, the way they look while they’re thinking, the slight twist of their hand that meant they were lying.
medusa going home to sketch every little figure. comes to school in the morning with her hands caked in pottery clay. medusa learns. scrubs dirt on her face to mimic their planes. tilts her head the right way when she’s thinking. doesn’t twist her hand when she’s lying.
in her back yard, a little garden grows. statues of ceramic boys only three feet tall. at first, she can’t quite get the faces right. men are not the same as plants. there is something weird about the proportions she uses. medusa frowns.
she starts making animals instead for a bit, annoyed and disheartened. she’d always just been naturally good at it, and the fact she couldn’t just make something felt as if she’d lost her gift.
she makes cats and dogs and her neighbor’s birds and keeps going.
the snake wasn’t her favorite. he just wouldn’t leave her alone, so she gave up and let him sleep on her in the cold nights. besides, he was a small garden snake, couldn’t even bite her hard, just wanted a place of warmth. she let him rest on the angles of her shoulders, right near her neck, even if he sometimes forgot and held her too hard. that was okay. when she was little, she forgot too, sometimes, and shattered the slim walls of her pottery. the snake had a lot of growing up to do.
she loved no one. not because she was cold-hearted. just because it wasn’t something she wanted. she was busy with her artwork.
she chose an apprenticeship under a master craftsman. his sculptures made her breath stop. she was careful in the workshop, kept her things simple, kept her mouth shut. he called her stupid often. she would duck her head. sometimes she would make mistakes on purpose. all the while he only made sculptures of men. said there was no beauty in women. often made savage remarks about those they saw in the market.
and all the while, she watched him. she watched him and she went home and sketched. this is how his hands were when he made a vine. this is how they were when shaping a nose.
and her back yard garden would grow. little boys became her master, over and over and over, until she could get his jaw right. ceramic became sculpture.
he was who took her to athena’s temple. who shouted at her about how beautiful the statues were against her own. every week he’d come back and shame her. asked how the women there were smarter than the man she was supposed to be. medusa ducked her head and grit her teeth.
in her back yard, she made them. she made every god and goddess she’d seen in the city. her favorite was athena. she ached over her features. had spent so long in the world of men, was blinded by the beauty of women.
it was a black night. and medusa thought her master had left the temple before her. she loosened all the bindings that kept her from breathing. took her hair out. worshiped in peace. placed on athena’s alter a small and beautiful thing. the goddess, head tilted, thinking.
when he found medusa, what made him angry was not her small frame. it was the statute. a delicate thing. much better than the ones he had ever made.
he took it and snapped it in half. threw it deep in the temple’s well to rot. pulled her by her hair. demanded to know where it had come from.
medusa, angry, tired of hiding, tired of late nights and being a boy and pretending: medusa, athena-mad, spat on him. “I did it,” her voice is strong and full of hatred, “A woman made something better than a man could.”
He meant to kill her. To bash her head into the temple steps, claim it was an accident – or better yet, the spite of a god made flesh.
when he grabs her hair, the goddess bites back. athena, patron of creators, patron of the arts, patron of girls and those who are smart – she turns medusa’s hair into snakes.
it is a quick little thing, darts out and draws blood, almost falls from her hair as a result. she catches the creature and runs, runs until she feels numb.
and what if – while her master is explaining her back yard full of frozen men as being evidence of her evilness – what if medusa finds friends in blind women. and they teach her how to feel what she is seeing. how to use her hands with her eyes closed to make maps of whatever she holds. she starts with plants again. her snake is big now, and has babies. she moves on to their little wiggling forms, amused when they make tiny rings around her fingers. she does not live in a cave. she dresses as a man again, goes to market, sells her roses and vines and beautiful (simple) things. buys herself and the women a nice house out beyond all the noise of it. fills their garden with frozen men.
when the men come to kill her – because now her name is known, it is whispered, sticks in the throat – they don’t find her. they find a tall man who tells them: look in the mountains. when they don’t come back, it’s no fault of medusa’s. frankly, she thinks they should have brought more supplies than their swords into the deep woods. she’s not cruel. when they leave, she makes a statue of them, as her version of a memorial.
but one man is not like the others. he finds her with her hair down, humming, dancing around a marble stone. her snakes are warming in the sun.
medusa? he asks her. it’s a name she hasn’t heard in a long while.
she is tired of being hunted. she just wants to make art. she waits for the sword point. but he hesitates. looks at her full in her face.
strikes a bargain. if she makes him a head for his shield, he will tell the others that she is good and dead. and he will sell her art to better patrons when he could – although he suggests at least hiding the signature she has with maybe a little less snake-like scrawl – he would make her name known.
but medusa knows men. knows they will chomp down on a horror story faster than that of the artist. she is already permanent. she says: no, here’s what happens.
after many months, he has his shield. she wouldn’t let him leave with the first nine hundred versions, always found something wrong with them. he grows fond of her in this time, agrees to her terms. even he can’t really look at the shield head-on. she has captured a scream, a rage, too much. it is so utterly human and at once not that it makes his skin crawl.
where medusa’s blood drops, serpents sprawl. or at least, that’s the code she uses. when he finds little girls who can make art, he sends them to her.
medusa does not expect to be known for the school that she starts. she is a women artist in a time of men, and her name is already dead to them. but i know medusa. i know her. she is known for her work.
after all, who can speak about medusa without mentioning how she froze the world?
Love love love this.
But what if the princess was in the tower because she was the dragon?
Like the queen gives birth and oops it’s this adorable little scaley lizard with tiny wings that she can never quite seem to fold right
None of the King’s advisors or doctors can explain it, no one can remember anyone who might have cursed the royal family, plus sire she’s clearly yours still I mean look at those eyes
They just kind of accept it and keep her in a tower so no one tries to slay her
The queen or castle servants reading bedtime stories to the toddler princess, who’s made a nest of her favorite toys and some jewelery she stole off her mother, and when she laughs little puffs of smoke come out of her mouth
The king being so proud when she flies across the room for the first time
And once the princess comes of age, confused knights breaking into the tower to find a twenty foot long dragon sitting at the vanity getting her horns polished by her handmaidens
and the “kidnapped” princess is her girlfriend?
this feels like a minotaur myth gone amazingly right.
Okay, who brought this back? Because I haven’t seen notes on this thing in literally months.
She goes flying around the surrounding kingdoms, just watching and listening.
And pretty soon she has a dozen girls sharing the tower with her.
Some were being pushed to marry, or promised in marriage to someone they hated. Some were already married.
Some were poor, or hunted, or enslaved.
Some were thrown out, abandoned, banished.
There’s a princess there, yes, one who would rather sit in the solar and read books than marry a boorish prince and interact with her subjects all day.
There’s a wizard-student who fled her university after one of the professors tried to curse her for disagreeing with him.
There’s a girl who ran away to be a knight, and a girl who was thrown out for being pregnant, and a wife who ran out the door with her toddler carried in her broken arms, her belly swollen and unwieldy, and stories circulate from the bar the next day about how the dragon swooped down and stole away a man’s wife.
Probably ate her, he says. Good riddance.
There’s a formerly-wealthy merchant wife, cast out by her husband in middle age so he can wed someone young and pretty.
There’s an elderly grandmother who’s outlived her family and her usefulness.
A street child, rag-clad and starving. A baby, left abandoned on a hillside.
It begins to filter through the land, spoken from fathers to daughter, husbands to wives, employers to servants: if you are bad, the dragon will take you. if you are stubborn, or willful, or refuse to marry, the dragon will find you. if you are useless, or slovenly, or disobedient, you will be thrown out and the dragon will pluck you up in its claws and take you back to its lair filled with bones.
They do not understand that this is not a threat but a promise.
They do not know that the version their servants tell each other, their wives tell their daughters, their mothers tell circles of friends, is “if you are desperate, the dragon will find you. if you want out, the dragon will rescue you. if you pause outside, and tell your fears to the soft beating of wings somewhere in the sky, you will fly, and the dragon will carry you home.”
There are bones, but they are surrounded by living flesh.
The tower, the Princess’s Tower in the central kingdom, is hidden by the finest spells and left alone by longstanding tradition. The nature of the Princess’s curse is a matter of speculation, but most likely, people say, she is under some fairy’s enchantment, and she will sleep for a hundred years until the right prince finds the way in.
The wizard-student was fairly advanced in her studies, and is quite good at teaching the runaway scullery-maid and the young unmarried mother turned out when her belly showed. The gates to the far reaches of the tower grounds open to a hillside two kingdoms away, and to an alleyway in a major city, and to a deep tideswept cave near a fishing village and a harbor, and to a storage room in the oldest wing of the Princess’s home palace.
The rich former merchant’s wife sorts through the dragon’s hoard of gold and gems, and delivers instructions to the runaway postulant and the worn old farm wife; dressed as a young clerk and a common tradesman, they go to call on this merchant who sets the best prices, and that factor who has misplaced goods available for a low price, and this manufacturer of looms and that seller of books.
The farm wife knows the best sheep to buy at market, the ewes who will bear twins and the lambs which will have the finest wool. Another country over, this time in the company of “his” elderly “father,” she buys cows that will give good milk, and chickens that will lay good eggs.
An elderly wizard visits a university, and inquires after their library; she is let in, and watched as she pages through books filled with arcane topics in languages she can’t understand; back at the tower, the wizard girl and her students capture the pages in a scrying crystal.
A pretty young fishwife smiles at the vegetable-seller as her daughter clings to her skirts, and soon the girls and women of the tower have seeds to plant. Looms hum, and dyestuffs are boiled, and even the poorest in their former lives wear bright dresses, or breeches and tunics if they prefer.
The dragon brings back a pirate woman from the harbor, stolen from the hangman’s noose while the crowd cheers; she knows where there is treasure stored, and soon the young girls have gems to play with, and the girl who ran away to be a knight has someone to learn proper swordwork from.
The little girl whose first flight was in her mother’s broken arms wants to be a blacksmith; when a swordblade breaks, the dragon breathes on it, as long as needed, while the child determinedly hammers it back together.
The dragon princess surveys her kingdom with approval. It is small, and tonight she will fly over a small town, where she heard breaking crockery and yelling last night, to see if someone steps out into the darkness and wishes for a better life, and tomorrow there may be one more.
queerhomestuck 