Place your bets now on “which character is a dragon in this AU.”
Ragnild: Thorn may be the prince of everyone else around here, but he’s not the boss of you. So he’s not allowed to order you to kiss him!
Leif: Actually . . . I tried to do that on my own . . .
Ragnild: Oh. Well . . . still.
You’re the only servant I got to bring from Sønheim when I moved here. There’s nobody else whose job is attending to my needs, so you can’t just take breaks —
I still don’t know the language of anyone here, you’re the only one I even get to talk to —
Leif: Princess . . .
Ragnild: . . . hey, what’s that?
AaaaaaAAAhhhhHHhhh!!
Leif: I was not trained to attend to this!!
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31 Comments
At first, I thought it had be Tiernan, because blue, but what if it’s the “Stalker dude” because he is uh predatory.
I’d go with your first guess. Is there an AU where one of the human characters was a creature? But still I can’t guess a reason why Tiernan should kidnap Ragnild.
Oh, it’s got to be one of the vampires. Or Kale. Or the dragon from the base universe. It kinda depends on what the dragon is going to do.
Also, I’m having a weird bug where the site keeps defaulting to Rose Garden, even though I’ve got Northern Lights as my theme. Anyone else having a similar issue?
Oh, that’s what looks different. Yes.
I switched the default theme to Rose Garden, since it’s finally spring! If you choose Northern Lights on the sidebar, that’ll save a browser cookie that overrides the default.
Unfortunately, it seems like that cookie isn’t getting saved, or maybe it’s getting overwritten somehow?
for what it’s worth, when I come back to the site throughout the day, the Rose Garden CSS loads, then after about three-quarters of a second it snaps to my preferred Northern Lights.
Yeah, it always loads the actual website before it loads the cookie. No idea how to change that. (If any Javascript-savvy readers have suggestions, I’m happy to try them.)
I think it should work faster if you change this line:
obj.addEventListener('load', set_style_from_cookie, false);to:
obj.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', set_style_from_cookie, false);This will load the cookie as soon as the HTML is read, rather than waiting for the entire page (with all the styles, images, scripts, etc) to be downloaded first. (This is supported in all remotely modern browsers, but since you also have
<body onload="set_style_from_cookie()">you have a fallback even on ancient ones also.)Switch made, and it’s definitely faster for me.
…but not instant, it blinks really quickly from the default to the cookie, so now I’m a little worried it’ll cause the same kinds of vision problems that flashing gifs do.
Any ideas for making it instant? (I use multiple sites with dark themes, so I know there’s some way to keep it from blinking like this…)
Yeah, I see the blinking too; I suspect it’s because the
DOMContentLoadedevent still has to wait for all the JS to load. I don’t think it’ll induce vision problems (US Government accessibility guidelines only prohibit more than three flashes per second, for example); but still, not ideal.Not sure how you have your site set up, but if you can get this code:
<script>set_style_from_cookie()</script>as close as possible to just below the block of
<link rel="alternate stylesheet">tags (ideally somewhere still inside the<head>) that ought to make it do the switch before it starts drawing the page.There is just one way to make it really instant: make the decision on server, not in javascript. Javascript will always be little too late.
Comments are nested too deep to keep replying directly, but: the new addition seems to be working!
The site setup is, I have a Wordpress plugin where you enter all the code you want in
, and it gets injected as a unit. So I just pasted the script under the list of stylesheets there.This means
is redundant and I should remove that property, right? (Seems obvious, but I figure it can’t hurt to double-check.)Yay!
I think the comment box mangled your reply, I can’t tell what it is you think is redundant. If you meant
onload="set_style_from_cookie()"then yes, I think so. Since you just have a big text box you can edit, you can also clean up the code a bit by moving the entire// Javascript to toggle between site themes<script>block to under the list of stylesheets, and then replacing the entire(function() { ... }})();block withset_style_from_cookie()to get rid of the second<script>you just added.In response to HKMaly (as you noted, nesting!): there’s nothing like server-side rendering, but as this code is synchronous and doesn’t have anything to cause delays between the stylesheets and it, the browser won’t attempt a paint in the interval, so it’s close enough to instant for practical purposes.
Suggested cleanup is done, and so far everything’s still working!
I don’t know that I actually have server-side editing access — the host is a company that I pay, not a machine in the basement that I personally maintain. So this will have to cover it.
Which character is a dragon?
I’d just assumed it was the dragon.
Me too. There was dragon in base universe, why couldn’t it be same one?
Surely there are other servants, e.g. Thorn’s entire staff?
Oh. Yeah, that’d make it a little difficult…
Thorn’s staff are not servants, though, they’re guards. They’re not paid to attend to Ragnhild.
Loving the new default background. It put a smile on my face when I first saw it.
As for this dragon I’d put money on it being one of the vampires, or the acutal dragon Thorn killed in the backstory.
This is why you always surround a vital position with effective AA positions.
Are we talking ballista or trebuchet?
In this setting? Yeah, ballista might be the best we can get.
Given that we’ve not seen any full-scale combat, the setting may have, for example, ballistae bolts with spellgems to accelerate them after launch, and a spellgem tip that sets off an actual explosion, mimicking our own missile technology.
Alternatively: Magical Girls casting Tiro Finale in waves.
I would assume that conventional ballistas wouldn’t be effective against dragons, so yeah, either something with spellgems or magical girls.
Eh, given the size of a dragon their scales might not be all that tough to break through. They still need to maintain a kind of upper-limit to even be able to fly, right? Someone who’s versed in bio, a dragon wouldn’t actually be all that tough if it’s light enough to fly, right?
Pretty sure weight isn’t the limiting factor. How heavy are the heaviest Air Force planes that are armored against bullets?
That really depends on the role of the aircraft. The A-10 Thunderbolt, for example, was designed to soak up enemy AA fire from the ground and air by having multiple redundant systems and literally encasing the cockpit in a titanium tub. By contrast, the C-5 Galaxy weights 380,000 lbs, but one hit and that baby is falling from the sky. Moreover, these are all jet aircraft. As I’ve heard it put, put enough thrust on a brick and it’ll fly no problem. Which, coincidentally, is borderline the design philosophy of the A-10.
A dragon, by contrast, somehow has to be armored enough to shrug off nearly any kind of attack, is typically as large as if not larger than your stereotypical medieval castle, have wings capable of generating the lift and thrust to put it in the air and keep it flying, and also have specialized organs capable of enabling it to breathe fire, depending on what mythology you’re going with. Plus, they’re still biological creatures, so you have to factor in the mass of the muscles, bones, organs, and the scales. (Yes, I have seen some of the clips of Heaven’s Design Team).
Compare a typical dragon illustration with the skeleton and potential reconstructions of the Azhdarchidae. Even as big as that sucker was, it still needed to adhere to a very specific body type and set of rules to be able to get up in the air, just like most aircraft. Same with military aircraft: Even as large as they can get, doctrinal and design limitations rear up, making you choose between a set of criteria you want that design to work within.
Dragons basically have to be more armored than a tank, capable of self-powered flight, and with enough muscle to crush stone walls. Unless there’s some specific magic at work acting as the duct tape holding those suckers together, I’m half-convinced you can drop a dragon with either concentrated small arms fire or one good hit from anti-armor/anti-air systems depending on whether it’s in flight or not.
First thought was Kale, of course, as our classic dubious villain. But the blue color scheme has me thrown off, I’d figure a Kale-dragon would be golden or orange. Same with the vampires, who would be black and red.
Honestly the blue matches Thorn best, which makes me wonder about a certain fluffy kitten as a loyal dragon companion…
Excellent guesses so far, so I’m going to go out to left field and guess it’s noted author JK R-ah-ødlun. Yes, Astrid Rødlund, that’s the one.
Katya…? I’ll admit I’m only guessing that because of BICP, though.
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