Quests & Challenges

[center][b][size=5]Day 15[/size][/b] [item=stuffed pincushion] [b]Trinket[/b][/center] [center][img]https://i.imgur.com/zftqnSL.png[/img][/center] [rule] [b]Commentary:[/b] For a change of pace, I decided to do a size comparison of our four current dragons! [i]Derechos[/i] is a big imperial, and approaching the weight to match it. His wings, however, are on the short side of average: aerial endurance is not this dragon's strong suit. While he is fully capable of powered flight, Derechos usually relies on his wind magic when flying. He is quite an impressive sight in flight, wending through the wind like a rippling rope, only occasionally using his wings for course-correction. [i]Gharial[/i] is on the small side of standard on all measures except for wingspan, where he is dead-on average. His slightly longer wingspan gives him better soaring endurance, though his agility is decreased somewhat in the air. As a result, Gharial much prefers hunting on the ground to any attacks that require aerial assaults - and like many mirrors, he prefers running to flying, anyhow. [i]Polemos[/i] is a perfectly average skydancer, without much to alter her flight capabilities. Like most skydancers, she is at home in the air, and takes and maintains flight with ease. Her preference for movement is typically flying or gliding, and she is happiest at altitude, with the air all around her. Given her druthers, Polemos would be living on a cliffside scrape, rather than in the tangled, dense forest of the Shrieking Wilds. [i]Qogir[/i] is a lanky tundra, with a longer body than would be expected for his wingspan. Nevertheless, since he is also a bit of a lightweight, his flight endurance isn't negatively affected by his body length. Rather, he is whippy in the air, with surprising agility coming both from his shorter wings and his long tail. He's happy in the air - though drag from his fluff makes him prefer flight for attacks or short, swift movements, rather than long-distance ones. @Leopardmask @Reyfairchild @Aliciawonderland @Heirless @Buffykiev @Foxe

No wonder Polemos is so intimidated by Derechos.

@Karrikut could you add me to the pinglist, please? Your writing is lovely!

Thank you!

[center][b][size=5]Day 16[/size][/b] [item=sage shell] [b]Material[/b][/center] [center][b][size=5]Day 17[/size][/b] [item=bleak birdskull wingpiece] [b]Apparel[/b][/center] As Polemos was caught up in caring for Qogir (and, as he found out, with a sulky sense of jealousy, their clutch), and Gharial was hardly a pleasant companion, Derechos was spending more of his time alone, and abroad. Their encampment was stripped bare of game, from insects to the great hulking, many-legged browsers, and equally stripped of edible plant life, and he was not willing to forgo eating for the sake of remaining close. And -- well, he was bitter, though it was foolish to be so: bitter that Polemos had chosen Qogir for a mate, though there had been nothing even approaching civility between them, bitter that only Gharial would help with the hunt... he even, in his darker moments, found himself blaming Qogir for being such an idiot and getting himself hurt, forcing them to stay here. Derechos loathed himself for feeling such things. How could he possibly blame Qogir for not trusting Gharial? They obviously had some sort of past, though Gharial denied it, and it was something terrible enough to leave an impression in the tundra's memory. The imperial was lying in one of the swift-moving rivers of water that abounded in the realms of nature, catching huge fish as they moved slowly upstream, when he heard the sound of someone humming. He poked his head out of the water, startling a laugh from the lovely coatl fishing on the shore. She looked like a princess - all gold and pastel - with wide and happy eyes. [center][img]http://www1.flightrising.com/dgen/dressing-room/dragon?did=42158071&skin=0&apparel=21226,17134,26274,22845,16235,22844,22851,331,26547&xt=dressing.png[/img][/center] "So you are a dragon," she said with a teasing laugh. "I thought those river-weeds flowed a bit too freely to be rooted in the river-bottom." Her voice was lilting, almost trilling, with the same sing-song tone as her humming. Derechos was - not quite - entranced, and hauled himself up, dripping and gleaming, from the water. She rolled to her side, exposing her pale belly, and blinked up at him, slow and decorous. Later he could not, or would not say, what had come over him. He should have known better - known not to be so trusting, known not to be so foolish, known not to be taken in by a cuckoo. But he was caught as helplessly as a child, caught and ensnared, and he rolled with her in the grass, caught up in her, lost in her. The haze of her clouded his mind, and he found himself licking, kissing, loving her, everything driven from him but her -- curled around her now, around her and around the eggs... the eggs? He moaned, tried to lift his head. He was tired, exhausted, drained. Derechos blinked, muzzily, trying to push away the eggs for a moment, before the spell wrapping around him sank its teeth into him, and then he felt with an all-consuming force, the need to protect these eggs, to raise them. He needed them, like he needed her, and the force of that need pushed out all other thoughts. His body lay half in the river, limp and exhausted; she had taken everything from him. He tried to blink away the haze from his vision, from his mind. The eggs. His eggs. He loved them. He needed them. He hadn't noticed the humming until it stopped, and he managed to clear his vision enough to see the coatl, looking at him with her veils dropped and her face unmasked. "Good boy," she purred, looking him over. She walked over and rubbed her face affectionately on his, and he whimpered, straining for a moment against the geas to try and touch her, to be with her, to be hers. She stepped back, and it dropped down on him, and he gasped again with the sheer [i]need[/i] of it, the consuming possessive needy love for the things the cuckoo wanted him to tend. Derechos curled up around his eggs, and shivered. He did not see it when she left. [center][img]http://www1.flightrising.com/dgen/dressing-room/dragon?did=42158071&skin=0&apparel=1630,15273,6531,16234,15271,18811,10882&xt=dressing.png[/img][/center] [rule] @Leopardmask @Reyfairchild @Aliciawonderland @Heirless @Buffykiev @Foxe @arboretumm

[center][b][size=5]Day 18[/size][/b] [item=malachite agate] [b]Material[/b][/center] [i]From the journals of Emora Razortooth, reprinted as "Strangers Among Us: The Clans and Other Sentient Beasts"[/i] [quote][size=5][font=mistral]...but despite this, I think the most dangerous of the sirens must be the cuckoo. No other siren has the ability to weave a permanent allure in the way a cuckoo does with her eggs, and few have the innate allure of a cuckoo. Once an egg - or, in some cases, a full clutch - has been attached to a clan, it can be all but impossible to rescue it, for the cuckoos are innately greedy creatures, and their natural aura will prevent the clan from recognizing the danger they are in... Though I've never had the dubious pleasure of encountering a cuckoo myself, I have spent time in the wreckage left in their wake, and pieced together a reasonable life-history of the creatures... The cuckoo wears the form of a dragon, based, so far as I can tell, on the dragon which cared for its egg, and are solely female. Despite their appearance, they are not related to dragonkind, save the relationship of a parasite and its host. Whether this is an illusory appearance or a true one is difficult to say; I have gathered several case reports that suggest that they are capable of changing the appearance of their apparel and even their eyes. Either way, the cuckoo may either leave an egg in an existing nest, or use its natural allure to weave a spell on a dragon, leaving them with a full clutch. Either the adult cuckoo places a spell, or the eggs themselves have the same innate allure of a living cuckoo, for any dragon in care of a cuckoo's egg will obsess over it, to the point of sickness. Many describe themselves as loving "their" egg or "their" chick, though they will neglect their own eggs and chicks in favor for the cuckoo, often leading to the deaths of the entire clutch, save for the cuckoo itself. Cuckoo chicks are no better than the eggs, for they are extremely demanding offspring to tend for, and their allure is such that any dragon who tends them will soon become obsessed with them. Most will remain with their caretaker long into adulthood, though cuckoos seem prone to vanishing for long spans of time when adults, only to return and sap more resources from their hapless thralls... ...My only advice for avoiding a cuckoo is that of the birds who deal with their own parasite of the same name. Trust no stranger who dazes you with love, and abandon any nest with more eggs than you remember counting...[/font][/size][/quote] [rule] @Leopardmask @Reyfairchild @Aliciawonderland @Heirless @Buffykiev @Foxe @arboretumm

[center][b][size=5]Day 19[/size][/b] [item=gloomy highnoon vest] [b]Apparel[/b] [i](The following was written by @styracosaurus in a fatefully-timed egg bomb!)[/i][/center] Dusk is falling over the lands of Sornieth as the sun sinks lower into the sky, casting a purple haze across the horizon. Crickets and other insects begin their nightly rituals, and their chirps can now be heard all across the Viridian Labyrinth. Suddenly, the rhythmic beating of wings disrupts their chorus. A female Pearlcatcher, dressed in wrappings embroidered with golden runic symbols, lands quietly in a small clearing. Though her eyes are also completely covered in these wrappings, she appears to search feverishly for something, moving back and forth around the clearing. She stops at two large stones, which are surrounded by tall grass. A second pair of arms unfurls from around her waist to reveal an egg. “I’m sorry, little one. But if my visions are correct, you will be much safer here.” [img]https://i.imgur.com/1WfeZVR.png[/img] She gently places the egg between the stones, and drapes a beautifully embroidered cloth on top of it. “Good luck” she whispers, before flying off into the night sky. It does not appear as though she will be returning. [rule][rule] It was misty on the day the clutch hatched, and Polemos was loathe to leave her three eggs in the drizzling fog. Her nervousness eventually drove Qogir to distraction, and the injured tundra snapped at her. Polemos draped an oiled canvas over the eggs to keep them from getting wet, and took her nerves off into the woods. Hunting insects took the edge off of the frission of anxiety, and once she stopped being quite so concerned for her nest (which would hatch, or not, without her worrying over them), she heard the sound of weak cheeping. That was... odd, she thought, and followed the sound. Had one of the beasts Gharial brought down last night been a dam, maybe, and left a litter out here? That would be sad, but young birds made as good a meal as old ones, and if they would die anyway... Polemos pushed aside a cluster of sawgrass, careful not to hook her skin on it, and froze for a moment. Beneath a sodden, beautifully crafted drape of cloth, a small shape moved. Not a bird, she realized, and reached over to pull the cloth back. It clung to the creature underneath, but peeled off to reveal a small yellow-and-blue form, with pieces of the dull-violet shell of a nocturne dragon still clinging to its hide. The young dragon looked up, blinking pale light's eyes so like her own, and Polemos made a swift decision. With as much care as she could give the chick, given the sawgrass, eggshell, and wet, Polemos picked up the young nocturne, tucking her inside her knapsack before taking wing and heading home through the misting rain. [rule] The arrival of the young nocturne - who Polemos had already started to think of as Kismet, for the luck of her finding - was paired with the arrival of two chicks from the nest Polemos had left behind. She returned to find Qogir, looking happy, albeit tired, with two tundra chicks tucked into his mane; in the nest in the clearing was left only three rapidly-disintegrating husks, and two rooted seedlings, their glow faded and their leaves stretching out to join the many trees of the forest. "I'm sorry you missed it--" Qogir started, having the grace to look bashful, but Polemos shook her head. "No, it was worth it," she said, and pulled down her knapsack, opening it to reveal the sleeping nocturne, her belly round with the insects that had once shared the space with her. "The gods saw fit to give us three, after all," she said, and nuzzled the little green chick, who cheeped sleepily and burrowed deeper into her father's mane. Polemos shed her wet things and joined Qogir in the shelter, placing the sleeping Kismet, still in her knapsack bed, between them. "Have you thought of names yet?" He told her them, and she smiled again. Yes, good names, she thought, and joined her family in rest. [rule] @Leopardmask @Aliciawonderland @Heirless @Buffykiev @Foxe @arboretumm @TropicalDiamonds

Aww! First of all, amazing art! You're very descriptive and I adore it!

@Karrikut
Can I just say, I love the image of tundra hatchlings hanging out in their dad's mane

@Leopardmask Right?? Happy beeps in the floof!

@TropicalDiamonds the art came by way of Styracosaurus; it was so pretty I had to share it! (they gave permission for me to use the egg bomb for this Pinkerlocke)

@Karrikut

!!! This is wonderful and amazing and I would looove to be on your pinglist for updates!