There Is A Certain Feeling Of Longing. Not Sexual, Not Romantic, Not Specifically About Anyone. Just

best friends forever

Selkie Fabian with selkie Hallariel au you see the vision

Bill accidentally stole Hallariels pelt while he was pillaging in Fallinel and Hallariel fucking hunted him down

Bill fell in love the second she took his eye out but Hallariel only married him because he promised her a life of freedom and adventure on the sea something she’d never had before and she fell in love with him along the way

Telemaine was extremely protective of his daughter because he knew that like a half elf half selkie wouldn’t be very well received in Fallinel so she always hid her selkie-ness up until she left and stopped giving a shit about what Kei Lumennura thought

Part of why she left was because Telemaine refused to let her near the sea (he insisted that her mother learned to live without the sea to keep herself safe so she could too) but he finally caved after Bill stole her pelt because “I’m in danger either way at least I’m not miserable at sea”

She planned on only marrying Bill for a few years before going back home until she actually fell in love and then got pregnant

Fabian was allowed a lot more freedom than Hallariel had growing up but he was still told a bunch of horror stories about selkies getting their pelts stolen so he is very protective of his pelt

Like so protective that the Bad Kids didn’t even find out until like halfway through sophomore year (he only told them because Riz jokingly tried it on when they were all hanging out and Fabian snatched it away in a panic)

The main reason they have as big of a pool as they do is because Hallariel insisted on having someplace her and Fabian could shift

Fabian still misses the ocean terribly and travels down there on weekends he can get away

When Kalvaxus set their houses on fire he had to stop himself from running to check his room and find his pelt because his parents were in danger

When he got home after prom Cathilda immediately handed his pelt to him because she knew he’d be panicking about it

Cathilda knows about Fabian being a selkie (of course she does she practically raised him) but he didn’t realize she knew until he was about 12 (he thought he was being sneaky) so it became sort of a game for her to see how much she could tease him about it before he realized she knew

She insists on washing his pelt because he insists on storing it with the rest of his clothes and she doesn’t want it to get dirty (she always framed it as something similar to giving his selkie form a shower) but she has a rigorous washing process that she insists on doing every time despite it taking like an hour each time

The first week after she gets sober Hallariel takes Fabian down to the beach and gets in the ocean for the first time since she had him

Before Fabian she always insisted she would not become some trophy piece lying around Bill Seacasters house like most of the selkies she’d heard about who married pirates (and the she had Fabian and then…yeah)

Fabian and Mazey have a tendency to borrow each others clothes and it’s all great fun until Mazey takes his pelt without realizing thinking it’s just a regular coat (he is scared to death of telling anyone he’s romantically involved with that he’s a selkie cause, y’know, horror stories) and he has a genuine panic attack when he can’t find it

About an hour after this happens Riz (who Fabian had asked to find the pelt) shows up at Mazey’s doorstep demanding the pelt back and Mazey is just so confused

Fabian finally tells her like a week later and she feels just so bad

Hallariel doesn’t fully trust the Bad Kids until she learns they know Fabian is a selkie

Gorgug starts joining Fabian on his late night oceanside trips after they all find out (he says it’s because it’s not safe for Fabian to be out there alone but it’s really because he just wants to hang out with his friend)

So so many beach trips with the party over summer after junior year (would’ve been sophomore but yknow night yor-*I am shot in the head by Riz Gukgak killing me instantly*)

Kristen challenges Fabian to an underwater breath holding contest and like just to freak them out he just kinda stays under for like 5 minutes

He can stay underwater for a while when he has his pelt but when he got possessed on Leviathan sophomore year he had to leave it behind and when he doesn’t have it he’s kinda shit at holding his breath naturally (he never trained it because he assumed he wouldn’t have to deal with being in the water without his pelt a lot but he started training it after that)

He has control over how much he shifts when he’s in the water with his pelt so unless it’s been like a while and he’s craving the ocean he’ll usually go for just like patches of seal fur along his body and occasionally he’ll let his feet turn partially tail-like if he feels like swimming a lot

The Bad Kids think his patchy form is just so adorable (he would be fully human around them since he’s still not fully comfortable with it but the halfway form is kind of the lowest he’s able to dial it when he has his pelt in the water)

Jawbone finds out partway through junior year (Adaine makes an off handed remark about Fabian’s pelt and he was just very confused) and once he finds out he immediately starts researching the shit out of selkies

He finds out that there’s a support group at Aguefort for selkie students and he gives Fabian the information

Fabian very reluctantly goes and actually enjoys it a lot (it’s less like a support group like it says and just kinda like a place for selkie students to hang out and bond with other selkies) so he keeps going weekly

They were all very skeptical of him when he first showed up (I mean the most popular kid in school who is also the son of a world renowned pirate showing up to a selkie hangout when nobody knows he’s a selkie feels like a red flag) but he brought his pelt with him just in case to make sure they knew he wasn’t an enemy

At first he has a bunch of people giving him pity because they assume Bill basically abducted his mom but he shuts that shit down quick (“if my papa tried to abduct my mama she would’ve taken out his other eye and slit his throat”)

They are all so jealous of the fact that he actually lived on the sea for most of his life (they have a monthly trip to the beach because most of them aren’t able to go out that much and a good majority of the people in Elmville have lived there all their lives or most of their lives)

Ok yeah that’s it for now I just got selkie Fabian in my head and couldn’t get it out

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on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

holy fucking shit people simulated the 302 neurons in a worm’s brain with software, put it in a Lego robot and it behaves like a worm

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/weve-put-worms-mind-lego-robot-body-180953399/?no-ist

When around other people Riz and his mom force themselves to walk fully upright with a more humanoid posture. In their own home though (or in Riz's office when he's alone) they tend to hunch and crouch slightly because it's just a more comfortable posture for goblins, even popping up onto the balls of their feet.

Riz freaked out his party at LEAST once on the Night Yorb quest when he got up in the middle of the night for some water and his siloette didnt match what he usually had in the dark.

when i say “unfollow me if you support trump” im not saying it ironically. no, seriously, if you support trump then i dont want your disgraceful ass to be in any way associated with my blog. get out.

This is fucking 1984

Children who have no concept of age are adorable. yes, Tim fell of the high bars. 

reblog if you hate nazis and don’t think they should speak on college campuses