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edited 11th Apr '18 6:31:51 PM by dRoy
I can't speak to the darkness level, (That's going to depend on city density and lighting patterns, which I expect to differ from what I'm used to in the US) but I live a bit lower latitude than the southern border of Germany, and we get significant variance between summer and winter daylight times. No "Midnight sun" or anything, but very noticeable.
For best precision, you probably want to search "Sunrise time <date> <specific city>", as modern Germany extends between 47.5 degrees up to 55 degrees (borders the southern edge of Denmark.)
Edited by underCoverSailsman on Mar 27th 2025 at 8:21:07 AM
So, this is a bit of a logistics/management and maybe even politics question.
In my story, the werewolf packs of North America (and overall, everywhere else) do not like each other. They certainly despise vampires and do not want humanity to find out about their existence, but apart from that, they are quite divided and often have pretty vicious fights over enforcing the borders of their territory or even acquiring it from other packs.
With that said...
Obviously, people need to travel to places for various reasons and there are those who need to temporarily live in other places for certain reasons.
How would packs that are so brutal about keeping their territories clear of nonaffiliated werewolves deal with people like college students, people on business travel, tourists, etc? I should note that unlike the hatred of vampires (which is an inborn part of them) this animosity is more or less social/political, so it can be changed or altered.
Edited by Swordofknowledge on Mar 27th 2025 at 10:40:55 AM
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace
@ Trainbarrel:
Oh, I should have clarified. The werewolf packs don't care about humans in this context; it pertains to other werewolves. The problems only arise when werewolves need to go to college or has to travel for business, want to take their families on a vacation, etc.
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace
Those people just have to wear "dog-tags". designed for this occasions, like passports, and if a wolf walks up to them to gauge the intent, they just flash them and they realize "Ah, just passing through, carry on" without saying a word between each other.
@ Trainbarrel:
That's a pretty good one, some kind of physical object or paper that marks them as non-hostile visitors. They're brutal about their enforcement but that's certainly reasonable enough to get around that.
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar WalllaceYeah, the Arctic Circle is the farthest you can get from the pole and have the Sun stay below the horizon all night or above the horizon all day (disregarding complications like the nonzero size of its disk, refraction, and local variations in the height of the horizon). You don't have to get too much further south to see summer nights practically as dark as winter nights and winter days adequately lit like summer days. Seasonal variation in the length of the days is quite noticeable at degrees of latitude well into the thirties (I can't personally vouch for anywhere more tropical).
need some help with a specific sentence. Ahem. The context here is that a teenage boy is sensing something off and tells someone so but they mistake it as well pubescent feelings (he's with his female friend and eventual love interest at the moment).
I therefore ask for sentences to along the lines of well, implying that a teenager is getting flustered around an assumed romantic partner.
I imagine it would feel like a twisting in the stomach, perhaps sweating palms and a sense of overall nervousness. I will say that, although I have not been a teen/preteen for a very long time, I remember the feelings of budding romantic nervousness I would feel back then. And I will say that they were definitely very different than fear or a sense of "something isn't right here". That was a far more negative feeling than the kind of heightened awareness and nervous energy one feels around a romantic crush. So, I find it somewhat hard to imagine that even a kid that young would mistake the two.
Now, I can imagine that other people around this kid would mistake his unease for nervousness around a crush, particularly adults. I actually wrote up an entire thing on how adults would react/mistake these feelings before I reread your question.
EDIT: I have now reread your question again, and I realize that my original interpretation was correct
. Sorry about that. Here is how I think the adult would respond:
I imagine it would be a combination of that knowing/patronizing way certain adults will act when a kid does something typical of their age group (Well, he IS that age after all, so what do you expect...?) and the You're not hungry, you're just thirsty type of speech one gets when asking for food and a parent/caregiver has decided that you aren't ready to eat yet.
- Teenage Boy: Something wasn't right here. I don't know what it is, but...I just feel nervous, like my stomach is in knots just by being here.
- Oblivious/Misunderstanding Adult: Well, was Crush's Name there?
- Teenage Boy: ...Uh, yes?
- Oblivious/Misunderstanding Adult: Well Teenage Boy, when you get to be that age, it's natural to feel a certain way around people you like. It's just a natural part of growing up, it's nothing to be scared of.
- Teenage Boy: No, it wasn't like that. I was just...the whole situation/place felt wrong, like I was...like something bad could happen at any moment
- Oblivious/Misunderstanding Adult: (Chuckles). Oh yes, I remember when I had that crush on Sally Frederick in sixth grade, I couldn't stop thinking about the ways I'd make a fool of myself in front of her (laughs again).
That sort of thing is what I'm talking about.
Edited by Swordofknowledge on Mar 28th 2025 at 5:36:03 AM
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar WalllaceI’m thinking about polishing up one of my old short stories to publish. Not sure how to go about it, though. Would it be better to post it on Tumblr or Wattpad or should I send it to a magazine?
You’re Gonna Carry That Weight.
Wattpad would definitely better for non-fanfic than tumblr.
Most likely only two people will see it if you put it on tumblr. But Wattpad has gotten people actually published and at least one made into a movie, so if you need to publish original fiction on the internet, Wattpad is most likely to be seen and could even lead to something.
~*bleh*~You're welcome, sorry about the confusion.
Oh, I figured the crush was there. That was why I had the adult mistake the nervousness for hypersensitivity about embarrassing themselves in front of the crush when the kid insisted they were feeling something off.
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar WalllaceSorry but there is no way to TLDR this since it requires some background and context in order for the question itself to make sense. My apologies for that.
I'm wondering how to "balance out" a certain character's redemption arc with not being a complete idiot in an extremely desperate situation.
One of the vampires of the story (the oldest brother of one of the four protagonists) is first introduced in Part 1 as a villain, and an extremely powerful and deadly one at that. He is a ruthless enforcer of his parents' will and has committed many horrific atrocities in the name of ensuring their particular vampire group maintains its power over their territories.
While he is an honorable (and even compassionate) man at times, he is essentially a living weapon who carries out orders without any thought for the morality and even practicality of them.
Over the course of the story his personal character arc centers around him slowly becoming his own person, learning how to use his will and morals to decide his actions rather than simply obey commands. He also sees how much damage and destruction he has directly and indirectly wrought over his 180 years of service and chooses to become something better in the future.
Now, with that out of the way, here is the question:
The truly "final" part of the Final Battle is a desperate struggle to prevent the main-character-turned-Big Bad's Clipped-Wing Angel form from fusing with the body of a certain young boy. If this happens, he will be able to recreate a new even stronger Kaiju body and even worse he will be able to make his world-spanning werewolf army move again, restarting the mass slaughter of supernaturals and assimilation of humanity.
The most practical/ruthless way of solving the crisis is simply kill the boy to permanently deprive the villain of a host, but of course no one in the group wants to just execute a relatively innocent and helpless 12-year-old.
This vampire however is in the perfect position to perform this grim task. Even in his weakened and exhausted state he's stronger than everyone else there, and the others are too preoccupied to stop him anyway. Plus, the boy is the child of an enemy who took his arm and turned his beloved cadre of human servants into feral werewolves which forced him to Mercy Kill them.
What I'm saying is that he has every reason to do this horrible thing, yet he doesn't and instead throws himself into fighting this monster the hard way. Because he's a better person now and has grown from who he once was.
I just don't want this to look like a case of "morals over reason", even if it lines up with his character.
Edited by Swordofknowledge on Mar 28th 2025 at 7:49:57 AM
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar Walllace
It's a very complex question and I'm not sure I can provide a satisfactory answer in a few lines, but one thing I could suggest would be to have his background involve multiple such killings of similarly innocent characters. His Character Development could then involve him realising over the course of his long life that there would have been other ways to achieve the same goal without killing those innocent people, or that the killing essentially brought nothing. So when this new situation arises where killing an innocent character seems like the obvious solution, he could see this as an occasion to prove that those past killings were not the answer and somehow atone for them.
I apologise for not being able to provide more specific examples at the moment and maybe what I'm suggesting falls under the stupid reaction you want to avoid. I may come back later if I find better ideas on that.
Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.
@ C105:
No, that's perfectly fine. It's definitely one of the more complex questions I've raised here, so I understand.
That said, I think you did a good job of outlining a more "practical" (if that makes sense) viewpoint for this character other than "Killing kids is bad! I can't bring myself to do it!". I mean, it is "bad", don't get me wrong, I fully believe that. I just didn't want this to be entirely a knee-jerk decision made on feelings, since the stakes are astronomically high at this point. Plus, the lack of introspection involved wouldn't fit him.
I definitely like the idea of him ruminating over the fact that his past bloody actions have only made things worse, even if they helped his group in the short term, and this being a sign of him truly moving past that. Heck, I could imagine him calculating how killing this boy would just spark a new conflict/cycle of hatred after the threat is done, considering how important he is to a powerful faction in this story.
Edited by Swordofknowledge on Mar 28th 2025 at 6:54:19 AM
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the snake. — Edgar WalllaceI need some advice for a book I'm working on. This is going to sound like a dumb question, but bear with me.
I'm working on a novel involving dinosaurs, and one of the rules I set for myself while writing it was "no Jurassic Park references." I did that for two reasons. One, I want to have it so the story stands on its own without being compared to Jurassic Park, and two, I feel like these sort of references break the immersion. One thing I've tried to do is avoid using as many species associated with the franchise as possible, except those that were already popular before the movies came out (i.e. Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, etc.).
But then there's Spinosaurus. There's a scene in the story I really want to include it in, but I'm not sure I can without breaking my rule. To a lot of people, Spinosaurus is closely associated with the Jurassic Park franchise, almost to the same extent as Velociraptor. The depiction in my story is based on the more up-to-date interpretation of the animal, but that's also how it looks in Jurassic World: Rebirth, so I can't even use that to set it apart.
So what should I do? Is Spinosaurus too closely associated with the Jurassic Park brand for me to use, going by my own rules?
The whole species or just the one in JP?
If it is just the one, you could just use another species of Spinosaurus and it won't break the rules you put on yourself.
For example: "Spinosaurus aegyptiacus"
The longest known Therapod ever, measuring 14-18 meters.
As an example.
"If there's problems, there's simple solutions."

How dark does it get at night in Germany? When does the sun normally rise/set? Does it vary noticeably between summer and winter or is it about static?
I've never traveled outside Scandinavia,and around here the sun never sets in summer and never really rises in winter...
~*bleh*~