can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?
You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.
You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.
You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.
You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?
Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog?
Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.
Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.
But man.
That stuff is scary.
shit just got creepy
Or maybe magical healing doesn’t leave scars or damage. It is magical, after all.
So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.
And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.
Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?
How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.
How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.
How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?
And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?
How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…
-shitty fedora man asking “CAN I HAVE YOUR PHOTO, MISTRESS” when i was wearing something kind of revealing and passed well besides for my voice (he clearly had no idea what fandom i was from and just wanted to get off to the photo later). i said yes and once he clocked me he went “it IS a MISTRESS i am talking to correct” and i said yes again. he asked me like three more times throughout taking the photo before he finally went away
-snapback-wearing trans bro and his friend at a meetup asking me if they could “borrow my dick”
-second trans man, this time my roommate, going off on a tangent while i was in the room about how much easier it was to be transfeminine
-this one actually hurt
-someone’s friend apologetically telling me, without me asking, that the only reason she clocked me was because of my voice and what i could do to improve it
-thank god i wasnt cosplaying a girl when this happened but this shitty dude in a Teemo hat at ACEN last year started complaining about “traps” and asking this other (presumably cis) girl next to me if she was a trap and he eventually stopped after someone nearby was like “transgenders cant help it”. afterwards teemo hat man gave an excuse about how we trick people and need to be “watched out for”
anyway!! this is probably why i’ve only met four other trans women over my entire time at conventions (and only two of them actually cosplay) and no one wants to fucking talk about it but us so i figured i’d at least raise awareness
Sometimes I think about the Tony that we had at the end of Avengers, smiling with his girlfriend in their tower after he saved New York from a nuke, building a new home base for the Avengers.
And then came the PTSD and the Maximoffs, Ultron and ‘together,’ the Accords and ‘did you know?’ and I think of the Tony we have now, sad, broken, tired. All his fault, always his fault, right, Stark? Still trying, but not with the effervescent drive of Avengers, but with the determination of a dying man.
And I hate it, but sometimes I think the Avengers were the worst thing that ever happened to Tony Stark.
g*psy is not a synonym for boho, hippie, fashionable, interesting, wanderlust, or anything else in that vein.
It is a RACIAL. SLUR. If you are not Rromani, do NOT use it. It’s really that simple. We travel because we are forced to. Not because we want to. Many live in forced poverty. If you are not a member of our race, STOP USING A SLUR THAT IS DIRECTED AT US.
It’s a breezy summer day and the rustling from the leaves outside sound like whispers from my small apartment. I’m sitting in front of my laptop, silently studying the 1.6 billion faces speaking simultaneously in front of me. It’s Monday, the day of the weekly conference call between all Muslims. We have been required to attend this Skype meeting from the the tender age of fetus, but I had never spoken in one of them before.
That changes today.
“Hey guys, what if…” I start to say.
Nobody hears me, but I refuse to be silent. How could I show my face again on Tumblr if I couldn’t even save my mayonnaise friends from death? How could I expect to earn their respect? Anon was right; why hadn’t I done this before? Thousands of lives had paid the price for my ignorance, but not anymore.
“What if you guys….. stopped killing people.“
Suddenly, silence.
1,643,398,023 pairs of eyes are on me. My heart is in my throat as the ISIS leader gives me a blank expression.
A single tear rolls down my cheek. "Please.” I say with a broken voice.
He is moved.
“Aight”.
My fingers are almost shaking as I carefully type in the ten digit phone number I have had memorized my entire life. The buttons on my home phone seem to glow a bit more dull, and even the ringing of the phone from the other end seems to be agonized, almost as if the world is telling me to hang up. But I refuse to give up; I can’t let my lily-white friends down. Not again.
The phone rings once. Twice. Three times. Still no answer. Just as I am about to hang up, there is a click.
All I can hear is heavy breathing.
“Hello….” I say quietly, my voice shaking. “Is….. Is this Muslim?”
There was a long silence before I heard a voice answer “ya lol.”
“I was thinking………..” I begin cautiously. “Maybe murder is…………bad.”
“Habibi, I…..I don’t understand. What are you trying to say….?” The voice seems shaken.
“What if…….world peace is good and killing people is…………not good”
He lets out an audible gasp. “Are you saying ISIS is…….bad?”
“Maybe death is…….not good.” I continue. My heart is racing. I remind myself that I am saving thousands of lives, and inhale.
The silence from the other end of the line is almost deafening. He seemed to be thinking, as if he had never considered this idea before in his life. Truly I had opened his heart and his mind. This…. This could end terrorism.
“Muslim….Please.” I whisper.
I hear a tear roll down his cheek, with my Muslim Communication Hearing™, and hold my breath as he finally breathes out his next words.
