star practice from last night :o)

collection of fuckass qantoine sketches/drawings over the months i never got to posting for x reason

Iskall is very fun to draw :)

A last life ethubs comic that isn’t really about last life ethubs

That was the seventh ravager skeleton he’d seen in the past two days.

Jimmy turned his head slowly as the train rattled past, squinting into the sunset and trying to figure out if this one looked like it had been hunted, or had just… died that way.

Probably hunted. Most of the wild ravagers had been hunted at this point—you had to go deep into new generation to find the herds that used to cover this area of the plains. 

But the further he rode, the wilder things got. It had been two days since the train had passed through an actual town—and no, that hotel-and-pub at the last station didn’t count. That was a waystation, even if they were insisting on calling it Oakville. 

“Have to have a village to earn the ville,” he muttered to himself, resting his chin on his hand and staring out the window at the passing countryside. “Didn't even have an oak.” 

The setting sun cast bruising shadows from the scrubby trees and the tall, jagged boulders that broke up the flat landscape. Some of the formations were as tall as houses, and for a moment Jimmy let himself consider what it might be like to build on one of them. Use it as the foundation for a house, terraform around it—make an oasis of green in the dusty plain.

Then he shook his head and sat back from the window with a sigh. Not far enough, yet. He still had days—maybe weeks—of travel ahead of him.

The train gave a sudden jolt, and Jimmy winced as his head bounced off the hard wooden edge of the seatback. “Ow—” He touched his head gingerly. “What the—”

There was another jolt, harder this time, and the sudden high-pitched whine Jimmy had learned to associate with the brakes. The train was stopping.

But… here? They were nowhere near the next station. Wouldn’t be for hours yet.

The pit of Jimmy’s stomach flipped, and he stood, grabbing for his duster to slip it on over his suit. The bone-handled revolver hiding in his pocket was a comforting weight against his side, and he took a deep breath to slow the sudden racing of his heart.

Nothing good came of trains stopping suddenly in the middle of nowhere. Newsreels he’d seen in theaters back spawnwards flickered through his memories: desperate vigilantes, settlers who’d turned to crime… There were stories of entire trains being dismantled while the passengers sat for days in captivity, abandoned when the robbers had stripped the vessels of anything of value or use.

Jimmy quickly flipped through the people he’d interacted with while on the train. No faces stood out, no one had given him special notice. This was probably just a fluke occurrence: nothing to do with him.

Which meant he might be in real danger. 

He’d bought a cabin ticket, content to sleep on the flat horsehair mattresses on the train rather than risk a dodgy hotel or boarding house every night. It also gave him a private space on the train—no risk of a seatmate getting too friendly. 

The downside was that he was isolated from the rest of the train by surprisingly noise-resistant walls. Which meant he had no idea what was going on further up the line.

As the clacking sounds of the wheels on the tracks continued to slow, Jimmy drew out his revolver, checking the barrel with a practiced glance. Then, thumb on the hammer, he slid open the cabin door and leaned cautiously into the narrow hall.

A shout, half-muffled, echoed from the direction of the engine. Another voice yelled something back, and then there was a loud pop, like someone breaking a board.

Even over the sound of the train, Jimmy knew that sound, and he rubbed his thumb against the recoil shield of his revolver. Someone just taken a shot—hopefully not at another person. 

For half of a heartbeat, the smell of spent gunpowder and blood flooded his memories, and Jimmy swore. He pulled back into the cabin, pressing the heel of his free hand against the bridge of his nose, eyes squeezed shut. 

Deep breaths, you gump, he chided himself, sweeping the flashback away into the depths of his brain. His hand was trembling and that was not what he needed in the middle of a… whatever this was. Train robbery, most likely. 

There was another shot in the distance, followed by two more in quick succession. Nearer, too. 

Jimmy gritted his teeth and forced himself back toward the door. 

I gotta get out of here, he thought. His cabin was near the forward end of the cabin—if he could get to the outer door, he might be able to jump from the car while it was still moving, get away from the train before anyone noticed him gone.

Or you could help the people stuck here, a spiteful voice in his mind suggested. But you won’t. Coward.

It’s not cowardice to try and keep a situation from getting worse, he told himself. The only problem was that heading for the outer door also meant heading toward the gunshots. He took a deep breath and started for the door.

He’d taken only a single step when the outer door burst open and a red-headed man in a battered derby came running full-tilt into the car. Jimmy had barely time to move his finger away from his revolver’s trigger before he was bowled over, both of them tumbling half into the sleeper cabin.

The stranger swore, his elbow going into Jimmy’s gut as he scrambled to his feet. 

“Watch it, greenhorn!” he snapped. His eyes went to the revolver, and narrowed. “Can you use that thing?”

Jimmy gasped for air. “When—when I can breathe, yeah,” he managed. 

Another shot and the scream of a woman in terror sliced the air. The train was barely moving now—maybe as fast as a horse at a trot, and Jimmy shoved himself to his feet.

“What’s going on?” Oof, his side ached sharply when he moved. If this idiot had broken something—

“It’s the Greysides gang,” the stranger said. He glanced outside the cabin, then slammed the door shut, whirling to look around the tiny space. “They’re harmless, mostly—”

A shot, a shout, and a crashing sound put doubt to that statement, and the stranger winced. “Emphasis on mostly. They just want diamonds. And, uh… me.”

“What?” Jimmy’s skin was itching with the need to run. From the criminals sacking the train or the stranger talking to him more directly than anyone had in weeks, he wasn’t sure. Toss up, really. But the sounds of altercations were getting closer, and they were running out of time.

“Nevermind,” the man in the bowler said. He glanced at the window. “Does that open?”

“Probably?” Jimmy hadn’t tried it. “But it’s at least a four block drop—”

The sound of the door to their car splintering open cut him off, and the stranger sprang to the window, flinging it open with deft fingers. He glanced back at Jimmy, and there was a glint of something in his eyes that wasn’t fear—something that almost looked like he was having fun.

“Coming?” he asked, and then he was gone, jumping from the window and vanishing into the dusk outside. 

Jimmy hesitated exactly two seconds—long enough to hear heavy boots tramping toward his cabin—and then with a gritted dammit he decocked his revolver, shoved it into his pocket, and leaped out the window. 

For an instant, the world was a silent riot of sunset shadows and the flash of lit windows passing him so quickly they blurred into one long line of golden light. And then he was slamming into the rocky ground, the wind knocked from his lungs, and rolling through the dirt and scrub.

He pitched to a stop in the low branches of a scraggly bush, gaping up at the emerging stars as his chest spasmed, desperately trying to figure out how to breathe again. The world was still spinning. Or he was still spinning. He was going to be sick.

With a heaving gasp, air came rushing back, and with it a whole host of new bruises and cuts and if he was lucky he was dying because every inch of him hurt like he’d been stomped by a ravager and there was a hand grabbing his arm and pulling him out of the bush and—

“Get off, get off—” he groaned, smacking weakly at his attacker. 

“Hey, you’re alive, good.” The red-headed man leaned over him, blocking the stars. He was smudged and his hat had a brand new dent, but his face was split with a wide grin. “First time jumping a train?”

Jimmy just groaned, and closed his eyes. The world would stop spinning in a minute. Probably. 

“No time for that, bucko.” There was a hand gripping his wrist and pulling him upright, shouldering under his arm and helping Jimmy stand. “Those pillagers are gonna notice I’m not on the train soon enough, and then they're gonna come looking.”

“So get going,” Jimmy said. He squinched his eyes half-open, testing to see if the horizon had gone back to staying in one place. “I’ll find my own way.”

“I’d love to, really I would.” The stranger started walking, and Jimmy was forced to stagger along with him or fall over again. “But I don’t like the idea of getting a kid killed, and if anyone saw you follow me—”

Bad cess, Jimmy grimaced, and pulled away from the stranger’s grip. “Killed?” he said. “You said they were harmless!”

“Yeah, well—” the stranger stepped back and gave him a rakish grin. “That doesn't really go for bounty hunters that infiltrate their gang and wire their location to the authorities right before a big diamond heist.”

“Bounty hunter?” Jimmy kept his voice level, but his hand twitched toward the gun in his pocket. He didn’t think the man noticed, not in this light. He wondered if he could draw fast enough.

“Tango Tek,” the man said, doffing his bowler. “Bounty hunter, trail boss, and occasional inventor—at your service.”

Jimmy hesitated a moment. Then: “James,” he offered, watching this "Tango" person's face closely. “James Solidarity.”

There was no flicker of recognition in the man’s expression, and Jimmy allowed himself to relax, just the smallest bit. 

“Nice to meet you, James Solidarity.” Tango glanced back at the train, which looked like it had all but slowed to a stop maybe three hundred blocks down the track. “Now, I say we head off before those goons get the idea to look outside for us.”

“For you,” Jimmy reminded him.

Tango flashed a big grin. “You’re stuck with me for now, Jim,” he said. “Leastaways until we hit a town. No offense, but you don’t look like you’d last long out here on your own.”

Stuck with me for now. The words stuck in Jimmy’s throat like gristle, and he swallowed past them.

“Right,” he said. “Lead the way.”

Barnevelder oc that's been in my wips forever

The story both starts and ends with the exact same sentence, the last in a sad way. “She smiled at me, like any stranger would.”

She smiles at me, like any stranger would.

Which, you know, fair. Totally fair. I am a stranger to her, so it makes sense.

But to me, it feels as though I have known her my whole life.

The smile she flashes me is brief and polite. The kind of thing one does out of instinct upon making momentary eye contact with a stranger on the other side of the coffee shop before returning to your book. The smile, for her, is likely forgotten in an instant. For me, it is everything.

I watch her for a moment longer. Watch her soft brown fingers trace the lid of her coffee cup that still has steam drifting out of the opening. Watch her dark brown eyes scanning back and forth across the pages of the only book I have ever seen her read.

I have been coming to this coffee shop every morning for the last 3,642 mornings in a row. And she is always here. And so is everybody else. Everybody is exactly where I expect them to be. Because, for me, every single one of the last 7,597 mornings has been exactly the same.

I stand up, make a futile attempt to fix my hair without the aid of a mirror, and walk over to her.

She glances up at me when I sit down, but waits for me to speak first. She always does. And, after my first 81 attempts, I had finally landed on the most reliable opening line I have been able to find.

“Hi. My name is Abigail. Your name is Tessa. And I’m stuck in a time loop.”

Keep reading

Little mumbo pen sketch :)

Hermittober days 3 and 4 :o

one of the reasons why "what if people went on a road trip and it was weird" is one of the oldest story types is that a lot of sense of personhood has been, historically, tied to place. the weird road trip says "what if we went somewhere else, where no one knows us, and tried out being a different person".

Odysseus, the famous liar, goes on a weird road trip & over the course of it becomes several different people, and then comes home & is all those people as well as himself, wearing the echoes of those other people

What’s that quote? There are only two kinds of stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.

I’ve seen a LOT of different - all very cool - ideas for what Martyn’s winner thing should be and naturally I’m going to make it worse

Martyn design by @cherrifire !

(Explanation and version with blood under the cut)

enjoy <:]

YouTube:

okay but imagine a cave-world Life series.

No surface world. They'd almost have to give everyone a bit of wood at the beginning just to keep things from being too slow but technically you could get planks from abandoned mineshafts or azalea logs from a lush cave.

Basing in caves. Battles playing out in massive caverns. Subsisting on rotten flesh and tropical fish until someone finds a chicken jockey or a zombie drops a carrot or someone heals a zombie villager and somehow trades up to golden carrots. Going to the nether for FOOD and wood of all things.

It would be such a challenge and introduce some completely new concerns to the game and I'd love to see how they'd manage to address them.

LIMITED LIFE SESSION 6 SPOILERS

The gurlzzz are fighting :)

P.s. Funny how a season that was very much about close allies and trust in your partner ended with a winner who was ostracized from the start

something about getting comfortable at home 

Glass Onion