With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

[Someguy Somewhere]

One alternative to murder is bribery.

He mentions that there is not a rebel or counter culture force within their species to make the changes that others want. The solution would be to foment, or at least provide fertile soil for such a group to grow in.

She can't kill with her ring, but she could harvest supplies and offer a small colony world. Spiders Welcome, BUT only if they follow the 'don't eat people' rules, and other such GL approved actions as required. Spiders are free to immigrate, and if some of the population is more attached to themselves then they are the eating sapients part culture, they move in and get a leg (or several) up on the home clans. You'll likely get the fringe elements and disenfranchised segments of the population first (I don't think even the guild is enough of a mono culture as to lack some degree of social stratification).

After a while, provided that you can keep providing improved conditions to those that moderate themselves, the colony will grow in both population and influence. Even if any one that 'defects' from the guild to join them is exiled, it's a benefit of breaking them further away from that and can have them, much like the queens group, more interdependent with non spider races in the region. And if the Guild has a civil war, the GL can argue for more lanterns in the area to defend them, and gives you access to folks with similar tech base and a good motivation to fight back.

It can go wrong, if you're not honest and up front about it. If you were knocking out pirates and taking them into forced labour and re-education, you'd just breed a population that hates you as well as wanting to eat you.

 

[Handlewithcare]

I see OL is asking the Shadows Question again, But then he is a Orange Lantern.

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I still want an OL in Babylon Verse, damn it.

Imagine talks between him and the Vorlons!

I had to google Reflexive Equilibrium. Did you mean Reflective Equilibrium,Mr. zoat?

 

[Darko]

I still want an OL in Babylon Verse, damn it.

Imagine talks between him and the Vorlons!

I had to google Reflexive Equilibrium. Did you mean Reflective Equilibrium,Mr. zoat?

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Zoat once mentioned something about renegade going to Babylon 5.

 

[Mr Zoat]

I wouldn't be talking... ?

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'covered in'?

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' hundreds '
' Nests '
' and '

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Thank you, corrected.

But "Fuck it, just genocide them." isn't something that a member of the green lantern corps should suggest. That's the sort of thing that gets your ring real

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Don't leave us in suspense, man. Real what?

So Paul didn't just finger-bang a giant spider, he finger-banged a giant teenage girl spider?

Yes officer, this floating, orange, cake man over here!

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It's not illegal in Vega.

 

[Mr Zoat]

instillations -> installations

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I think there should be commas there, making it: Their new ruler, the Queen, was free to culturise the children in any way she wanted, so she left out everything that wasn't helpful and had to leave out everything she didn't know.

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I had to google Reflexive Equilibrium. Did you mean Reflective Equilibrium,Mr. zoat?

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Thank you, corrected.

Why am I getting Mr Morden vibes from Paul?

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The difference is that the Shadows had a thing for violent conflict and the Orange Lantern Corps teaches collaboration.

Zoat once mentioned something about renegade going to Babylon 5.

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I hold up my hand to stop him, though given that Dr. Franklin is in full denunciation mode if takes him a few moments to notice.

"Alright, so you can't cut the skin. Is there a reason why you can't just use a sonic scalpel?"

 

[Darko]

It's not illegal in Vega.

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That still doesn't make it okay.

I hold up my hand to stop him, though given that Dr. Franklin is in full denunciation mode if takes him a few moments to notice.

"Alright, so you can't cut the skin. Is there a reason why you can't just use a sonic scalpel?"

Click to shrink...

Well that's one tragedy averted.

 

[Mr Zoat]

That still doesn't make it okay.

Click to shrink...

She passed the Jack Harkness test.

 

[Senevri]

One of the issues I have with "want the end, want the means" is that one might not know all the means available, so the take the hammer approach to a screw problem.

Now, obviously you gotta go with the means available - an Infinity Gauntlet would solve the issue easily, but that's just not an option in DC. However, there may be a low hanging fruit in the tech tree to develop a new means, even if one isn't presently available.

If your end doesn't justify your means, then you either have a wrong end, or the wrong means.

 

[Steelplaza]

"It wouldn't be your decision because it's not going to happen. But if it was? Hm? Target only warships, known pirates and military installations?"

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I feel the SI is being a little unduly pessimistic on the potential for coercion-based reform. Ships and installations are expensive to build. I have to imagine they're more expensive than whatever value a nest can extract from slaves and whatever else they may steal during a pirate raid.

If Vode-M were in fact able to arrange it so every single act of Nest aggression is met with overwhelming retaliation that destroyed ships and installations, then eventually it's just not going to be economically practical to keep doing it. Nests will have to figure out some other way to exist, and once they've done that for a generation or two there will be less incentive to go back to pirate raids. Actually, he says something like that himself early in the update.

"I don't see a way to stop the Spider Guild that doesn't involve vastly reducing their industrial power as well as their military.

Click to shrink...

 

[iamnuff]

Don't leave us in suspense, man. Real what?

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"recalled" I think it was supposed to be. Autocorrect.

 

[NightmareWarden]

Hmm. Is Vode-M going to access the Red light?

Someone who can match their hatred and rage with Will would be a good Red Lantern. Not the most powerful, but they'd be useful when there is war to be had or problems that are hard to Avarice your way out of. Heh, that'd be funny: Red lanterns becoming scientists, philosophers, and social dynamics experts because of disdain at their culture's ignorance, their flaws.

I wonder how well Vode-M would be able to transfer her feelings to cultures with the same sort of traits as the Spiders. Will she be useful after this campaign, however it ends? Or would she work best as a Red Malvolio- supreme within her domain, but not engaging with the wider universe. I… could see someone (with guidance) facilitating the growth of a new Spider culture over the course of a few generations after wiping out all the adults. If a Red Malvolio could exist, why not "hate the problem" until it stops existing?

Reminds me of Paragon-Paul's mantra about "Want the endstate, then you must Want the solution/path to reach it."

 

[Mr Zoat]

The Ancestor

Spring

Why are we here, grandson? Our people come here at this time each year, following the path-.

No, no child, I was not mocking you. Our people paint the rocks to remember our history and the history of the world. I come here each year to remember when the history of the world painted me.

No, my mother did not bear me here. No, she and my father did not make me here. Here… No, just over there, is where I met The Ancestor.

Ah, now you are interested. Yes, the figure we paint in white and orange clay. No, he was not made of white and orange clay, of course not! Are real kangaroos made of red clay? Yes, his skin was white as bone. No-. Hush, grandson. I cannot explain if you do not listen.

There. And here, you see? This is where I painted it onto the rock, when I was only a little older than you are now. Yes, it does look like a scowling face. I said the same thing to him, many years ago. No, he was not angry. What did he say? He had a strange way of speaking, but as I remember it…

'Everything has to look like something'.

What did he mean? Ah, let me see. That rock, there? What shapes do you see in it? The crack, like a river seen from above? The shadow, like the body of a spider? But it is not a river and it is not a spider. Just like that, and his magic lantern was not angry. It just looked a little like a face that was angry.

The colour? Oh yes. And just as we draw him every year, the orange colour surrounded his bone white skin, and shone from his lantern.

Feel? It didn't really feel like anything. Perhaps it is because our skin is so much darker than his, that makes it harder to see. Or perhaps because it was a very long time ago, and I am very old now.

No, I don't think that happens when you get sick. And he didn't look sick.

Do you want me to tell you what happened?

Well. I came here because I wanted to see what was here. My friends were either busy, or they had their own tasks, or they were simply not interested. I came up… Just over there, because I was young and the steep slope was less of a challenge-.

Yes, you can climb up it later. Yes, I will catch you if you fall off.

And-. Yes, and I saw him sitting just there, with his spear with no point, and the torch which shines orange without fire or heat. It was leaning against the rock, just… There, I think-. No, no, there, he moved it over there later.

No, he wasn't making his own drawings.

No, I wasn't afraid. I was confused, like seeing a picture come to life when it should have stayed a picture. I stood there, there was a tree there at the time, for a few moments. And he didn't look at me, but after those few moments he said, 'do you want to talk with me?'.

I didn't know. I looked around, because perhaps he meant someone else, my father or my mother or one of the elders. But there was no one else there, and… I did want to see what was up here. Meeting the Ancestor certainly would make the short journey worth while.

So I came down, and then he looked at me. No, only the part around the black was orange. He was more a man than a dream. Yes, I touched him, and his skin just felt like skin. A little colder to the touch, but nothing too strange. I asked if he had always been there.

He said, it felt like it.

I didn't understand. Had he been sitting just up this ridge, waiting for someone to find him?

He said no. He wanted to see what our people were doing. I said, 'the same thing as last year'. He said that he wasn't there last year, so he didn't know what that was. I said that it was probably the same as the year before. He nodded his head, and said that it probably was, but he hadn't been there that year, either. He said that he hadn't been here for a very long time, and that it was so long ago that what we did might have changed a little.

No, his hair was not white like his skin. It was brown, and not very long.

I asked him how long it had been. He said… I do not exactly remember, but it was a very large number of-. Yes, more years than I have been alive. I told you, I was not much older than you are now when I spoke with him. More than that. So long that I do not think that my father's father's father would have been born then. He asked me to tell him all about our people, and said that in return he would answer any questions I had about anything I wanted to know.

What did I do? What could I do, where the Ancestor himself asked me about our people? I told him the big things, our people's origin, and where we walk throughout the year. I told him the small things, the pretty stone one of my friends had and the way my brother held his spear when he was hunting. I told him about the foods I liked and the work I did not like. And he nodded, and he smiled, and he listened, until I ran out of things to say.

And then he asked me what I would like to hear him talk about? Did I want to hear how our people first came to this part of the world? Or how they lived, or how they learned to hunt kangaroos and wombats for the first time? I asked-.

Yes, I asked that. Have they not always hunted kangaroos and wombats?

He told me that we live on a very big island, and that most of the animals here don't live anywhere else. So before we came here, we hunted something else.

I asked him if he saw it, and he said that he did. He said that he was not as old as the very first people, but that he had seen more of the world than anyone else.

I looked at the rock, and saw that nothing was drawn upon it. So I asked if the pictures were really part of the dream. Did they really keep the world in the shape that it is. And he said that they did, in part. That it was the picture in the dream and in our dreams that made the world the shape it was, but that since we could not see the dream, we made pictures to remind us of the shape of the dream, so that we could dream it properly.

But I did not understand. So I asked him what the very first people he met hunted. And he told me that the very first people he met had not hunted. The first people he met were very small, and took only the meat left by the cats. And when they were not careful enough, the cats would not run as the animals we hunt run, but would chase them down, play with them, and then slowly eat them.

Yes, I asked that as well. He told me that they are like dingoes, only far larger, with claws on their feet. And they did not like hunting as a pack, but hunted alone as much as possible.

Where? Far from here. He said that there have never been cats here, and that cats in other places are much smaller as the people are much bigger. I asked, 'how that could be?', and he told me that a very long time ago one of those small people had asked him how they could get large enough to fight the cats. He said that he told the one who asked him that it would need every one of his people to dream that the people were mighty and that the cats were weak, To dream that they had always been mighty hunters and fierce warriors while the cats had always been weak and stupid animals.

And that they should dream him having an orange torch on a stick that looked like an angry face.

I think that must have been what he meant. All of our drawings show him with his torch, even the very oldest ones faded into the rock. But if he was so very old, older than the first of our people to live here, then he would be older than all of the pictures.

Coming here? No, he said that can not happen. The man he told that went to every people he could, telling them how to dream, how to change themselves from hiding from the cats to ruling them. And one day so many of them dreamed it so well that it became true.

Yes, he told me that we do not need to worry about cats. Whatever they are. Wherever they are.

And when that happened, he got his strange torch, and he began to travel-.

Yes, I suppose so. If people stopped dreaming that things are so, then they might stop being so. And so-.

Yes, you can paint a picture of yourself if you really want to. But it will not change anything unless everyone in the world dreams the same thing.

Yes, what everyone dreams is what they are shown. But there are many more people than our people, and very few of them have heard of you.

Has he? Perhaps. Or perhaps he will hear about you from your own grandson, next time he visits our people.

Roughly 50000 Years Before I Was Born

I wish.

Bloody cats.

 

[Doru]

Tldr, Paul goes back in time and encounters prehistoric humans. We are told this story by a ancient Australian to his son.

Also something about dream magic effecting the world.

 

[Tbryan]

In case anyone doesn't get the reference

 

[Impatient_Quill]

TLDR; Paul of the Blood Tribe is the oldest Lantern.

 

[The Froggy Ninja]

Tldr, Paul goes back in time and encounters prehistoric humans. We are told this story by a ancient Australian to his son.

Also something about dream magic effecting the world.

Click to shrink...

The Dream does affect the world in DC, though that is also true of many settings. And I think this is an Alt-Paul that started out in the distant past and decided to do a twofer of helping humanity and getting a lantern.

 

[Redhawk]

Also something about dream magic effecting the world.

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I believe that's a reference to a weird issue of Sandman where it's implied that Cats once ruled the world until humanity dreamed otherwise.

 

[crazygrox]

Roughly 50000 Years Before I Was Born

I wish.

Bloody cats.

Click to shrink...

Wait... did he start a continent-sized religion in Australia trying to dream cats smaller because it's the only continent with a human population, yet no cat population?
Is the rest of the planet still occupied by giant intelligent hostile cats?

edit: To be even more clear, I suspect that Paul is lying to these people to exploit their dreams to pursue his geopolitical objectives. Either he only got a lantern out of dreams, or he got a lantern from somewhere completely different and is lying about having gotten it from dreams in order to make his story more convincing, or he's faking having a lantern, so these people will dream him with a lantern based on their memories of him.
This would be why he isn't uplifting these people, he's allowing them to stay at a technological level that will be ignorant of things outside of Australia.

 

[dxdragon]

Huh, neat.

I swear, the more I hear about the Sandman comics, the more I want to give some a shot.

 

[edmantgoog]

Huh, neat.

I swear, the more I hear about the Sandman comics, the more I want to give some a shot.

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Now then I am not one to suggest psychoactive substance wile reading certain comics to make them more fun.

 

[Galler]

This was a good one! It's always fun to see some more Sandman elements and an alt Paul is a good way to explore some of the more mind bending parts.

 

[Vaermina]

The Ancestor

Click to shrink...

Yea... I have no idea what this is supposed to be... Not the least because of "been though a dozen bad translations" way it reads.

 

[Chojin Patriarch]

The Ancestor

Spring

Why are we here, grandson? Our people come here at this time each year, following the path-.

Click to shrink...

Boy, this was an interesting trip. I'm guessing an Australian Aboriginal elder telling a tale, or some other folk, from the context. I get the feeling other cutaways this episode will be similarly esoteric...

Spoiler: Commentary spoilered for length

No, no child, I was not mocking you. Our people paint the rocks to remember our history and the history of the world. I come here each year to remember when the history of the world painted me.

No, my mother did not bear me here. No, she and my father did not make me here. Here… No, just over there, is where I met The Ancestor.

Click to shrink...

And when something is capitalised like that, you know it's Important.

Ah, now you are interested. Yes, the figure we paint in white and orange clay. No, he was not made of white and orange clay, of course not! Are real kangaroos made of red clay? Yes, his skin was white as bone. No-. Hush, grandson. I cannot explain if you do not listen.

There. And here, you see? This is where I painted it onto the rock, when I was only a little older than you are now. Yes, it does look like a scowling face. I said the same thing to him, many years ago. No, he was not angry. What did he say? He had a strange way of speaking, but as I remember it…

Click to shrink...

So, an alternate Paul stuck in - or a future OL visiting - the distant past. And having a chance encounter with a young local boy.

'Everything has to look like something'.

What did he mean? Ah, let me see. That rock, there? What shapes do you see in it? The crack, like a river seen from above? The shadow, like the body of a spider? But it is not a river and it is not a spider. Just like that, and his magic lantern was not angry. It just looked a little like a face that was angry.

Click to shrink...

A reference to the sigil of the Orange Light, of course. Which does look like a face crying for 'more, more, more'.

The colour? Oh yes. And just as we draw him every year, the orange colour surrounded his bone white skin, and shone from his lantern.

Feel? It didn't really feel like anything. Perhaps it is because our skin is so much darker than his, that makes it harder to see. Or perhaps because it was a very long time ago, and I am very old now.

Click to shrink...

Bet that'd be a confusing one for the archaeologists a long time from now. "Ah, yes, clearly some kind of divine figure. A Creator God, possibly..."

No, I don't think that happens when you get sick. And he didn't look sick.

Do you want me to tell you what happened?

Click to shrink...

Heh, the crotchety annoyance of the old talking to the easily distracted young...

Well. I came here because I wanted to see what was here. My friends were either busy, or they had their own tasks, or they were simply not interested. I came up… Just over there, because I was young and the steep slope was less of a challenge-.

Yes, you can climb up it later. Yes, I will catch you if you fall off.

Click to shrink...

"And then tell you off for rushing. Because a climb like this must be done slowly, or you fall."

And-. Yes, and I saw him sitting just there, with his spear with no point, and the torch which shines orange without fire or heat. It was leaning against the rock, just… There, I think-. No, no, there, he move it over there later.

No, he wasn't making his own drawings.

Click to shrink...

Hmm. Carrying a staff? Unusual for OL, but likely for an alternate...

No, I wasn't afraid. I was confused, like seeing a picture come to life when it should have stayed a picture. I stood there, there was a tree there at the time, for a few moments. And he didn't look at me, but after those few moments he said, 'do you want to talk with me?'.

I didn't know. I looked around, because perhaps he meant someone else, my father or my mother or one of the elders. But there was no one else there, and… I did want to see what was up here. Meeting the Ancestor certainly would make the short journey worth while.

Click to shrink...

And give you quite the tale for silly youngsters one day.

So I came down, and then he looked at me. No, only the part around the black was orange. He was more a man than a dream. Yes, I touched him, and his skin just felt like skin. A little colder to the touch, but nothing too strange. I asked if he had always been there.

He said, it felt like it.

Click to shrink...

Heh. The joy of waiting, I suppose.

I didn't understand. Had he been sitting just up this ridge, waiting for someone to find him?

He said no. He wanted to see what our people were doing. I said, 'the same thing as last year'. He said that he wasn't there last year, so he didn't know what that was. I said that it was probably the same as the year before. He nodded his head, and said that it probably was, but he hadn't been there at year, either. He said that he hadn't been here for a very long time, and that it was so long ago that what we did might have changed a little.

Click to shrink...

Hmm... Definitely been around a while, then...

No, his hair was not white like his skin. It was brown, and not very long.

I asked him how long it had been. He said… I do not exactly remember, but it was a very large number of-. Yes, more years than I have been alive. I told you, I was not much older than you are now when I spoke with him. More than that. So long that I do not think that my father's father's father would have been born then. He asked me to tell him all about our people, and said that in return he would answer any questions I had about anything I wanted to know.

Click to shrink...

...And playing the part of the wise old elder in turn.

What did I do? What could I do, where the Ancestor himself asked me about our people? I told him the big things, our people's origin, and where we walk throughout the year. I told him the small things, the pretty stone one of my friends had and the way my brother held his spear when he was hunting. I told him about the foods I liked and the work I did not like. And he nodded, and he smiled, and he listened, until I ran out of things to say.

And then he asked me what I would like to hear him talk about? Did I want to hear how our people first came to this part of the world? Or how they lived, or how they learned to hunt kangaroos and wombats for the first time? I asked-.

Click to shrink...

A very subtle little prompt in those words, I see.

Yes, I asked that. Have they not always hunted kangaroos and wombats?

He told me that we live on a very big island, and that most of the animals here don't live anywhere else. So before we came here, we hunted something else.

Click to shrink...

Definitely Australia, then. More unique species than most other places on Earth.

I asked him if he saw it, and he said that he did. He said that he was not as old as the very first people, but that he had seen more of the world than anyone else.

I looked at the rock, and saw that nothing was drawn upon it. So I asked if the pictures were really part of the dream. Did they really keep the world in the shape that it is. And he said that they did, in part. That it was the picture in the dream and in our dreams that made the world the shape it was, but that since we could not see the dream, we made pictures to remind us of the shape of the dream, so that we could dream it properly.

Click to shrink...

It's not so much the pictures, then, but the story they represent. And presumably, this Paul is more closely tied to the Dreaming, and thus the Endless...

But I did not understand. So I asked him what the very first people he met hunted. And he told me that the very first people he met hand not hunted. The first people he met were very small, and took only the meat left by the cats. And when they were not careful enough, the cats would not run as the animals we hunt run, but would chase them down, play with them, and then slowly eat them.

Yes, I asked that as well. He told me that they are like dingoes, only far larger, with claws on their feet. And they did not like hunting as a pack, but hunted alone as much as possible.

Click to shrink...

Ah, yes, the Dream of A Thousand Cats. Like Thryan linked, a show of what dreams can do when done the right way...

Where? Far from here. He said that there have never been cats here, and that cats in other places are much smaller as the people are much bigger. I asked, 'how that could be?', and he told me that a very long time ago one of those small people had asked him how they could get large enough to fight the cats. He said that he told the one who asked him that it would need every one of his people to dream that the people were mighty and that the cats were weak, To dream that they had always been mighty hunters and fierce warriors while the cats had always been weak and stupid animals.

Click to shrink...

And in this timeline, Paul was the one to suggest the Dream spell? Clever.

And that they should dream him having an orange torch on a stick that looked like a angry face.

I think that must have been what he meant. All of our drawings show him with his torch, even the very oldest ones faded into the rock. But if he was so very old, older than the first of our people to live here, then he would be older than all of the pictures.

Click to shrink...

Ha! So not only freeing people from feline tyranny, but also acquiring a Lantern for himself. Resembling the one from Tangent Green Lantern.

Coming here? No, he said that can not happen. The man he told that went to every people he could telling them how to dream, how to change themselves from hiding from the cats to ruling them And one day so many of them dreamed it so well that it became true.

Yes, he told me that we do not need to worry about cats. Whatever they are. Wherever they are.

Click to shrink...

Because as we saw in the story, convincing even a dozen cats to do something is near-impossible, let alone a thousand, or a million...

And when that happened, he got his strange torch, and he began to travel-.

Yes, I suppose so. If people stopped dreaming that things are so, then they might stop being so. And so-.

Click to shrink...

Which ties into the beliefs of various Australian tribes. No, they don't have one monolithic faith, just like the First Peoples of America didn't.

Yes, you can paint a picture of yourself if you really want to. But it will not change anything unless everyone in the world dreams the same thing.

Yes, what everyone dreams is what they are shown. But there are many more people than our people, and very few of them have heard of you.

Has he? Perhaps. Or perhaps he will hear about you from your own grandson, next time he visits our people.

Click to shrink...

Not unless he decides to go out and see many people, like that man The Ancestor mentioned.

Roughly 50000 Years Before I Was Born

I wish.

Bloody cats.

Click to shrink...

Heh, Ancestor Paul listening in from afar, I see.

Quite the interesting diversion. And oddly, I'm reminded of the prehistoric bits of, what was it, Final Crisis? Where Metron gives primitive mankind a symbol that would eventually ward them from Anti-life. Bet you had fun getting off the beaten track like this, Mr Zoat.

 

[Doccer]

The Dream does affect the world in DC, though that is also true of many settings. And I think this is an Alt-Paul that started out in the distant past and decided to do a twofer of helping humanity and getting a lantern.

Click to shrink...

Shouldn't he have asked them to dream a lantern if Avarice instead?

 

[CTrees]

Yea... I have no idea what this is supposed to be... Not the least because of "been though a dozen bad translations" way it reads.

Click to shrink...

Gotta admit, this was one of those "I'll just skim this and trust the other readers to explain the reference" chapters.

 

[Ciber]

I do really like the idea of UPLIFT paul.

 

[The Froggy Ninja]

Shouldn't he have asked them to dream a lantern if Avarice instead?

Click to shrink...

He did? The orange lantern sigil looks kinda like an angry face and they said the lantern was orange.

 

[moralrelativity]

In case anyone doesn't get the reference

Click to shrink...

Thanks.

 

[iamnuff]

Reminds me very much of The Last
Continent, by pratchett.

 

[m_d]

ruling them And one

Click to shrink...

Missing period at the end of the sentence.

ancient Australian to his son.

Click to shrink...

Why are we here, grandson?

Click to shrink...

Close.

young local boy.

Click to shrink...

Out of curiosity, was there a set of gender markers that I didn't notice? It's not obvious to me that there's anything definitive there for the speaker. Talk of age, yes, and of journeying, and having a friend with a pretty stone, and a brother who hunts with a spear, but none of that pins anything down for me. There's speaking in the form of "father's father's father", for ancestors, but culturally, some speak of forefathers in a way that refers to ancestors generally, regardless of gender of the speaker or indeed the ancestors, much like the gender neutral "he" when speaking of people in general in some cases. Not being critical, genuinely curious, as I pictured a grandmother, even if not consciously noting firm gender markers, so I found the other references a bit jarring because I hadn't noticed I was unconsciously doing that until reading the comments.