#4, Weather: Who designed these stupid mountains?
Originally posted here on November 4, 2021.
In a departure from both my normal behavior and the two headmates of mine that have so far been posting here, I'm going to respond to a prompt. My name is Kyir Duru Lu'ann. I'm fine with whatever pronouns. I'm a fictive, I guess. I have an "original" source, aka a super canon-divergent version of Homestuck, but I-the-character have been placed into so many universes at this point that I'm basically just an amalgam of backstories and versions of myself that have solidified out into a pangender mad-as-hell son-of-a-bitch mechanic and engineer that's getting too old for this bullshit. I'm about 40, give or take.
And I'm gonna talk about the stupid goddamn weather on Kalthoris, the planet that people got spat out on after busting out of Sburb in Homestuck. You know. As you do. Play a computer game that physically sucks you into its weird alternate reality, realize you can't win, and force the universe to drop you out onto a random planet in the multiverse. And apparently asking me about the weather of it gets me to show up because it was
that annoying.Whatever god, deity, powerful dragon, or whimsical power with bad ideas came up with the weather patterns on Kalthoris should fucking feel bad.
Here's a little context for you: after being spat out of the game onto a random, wild planet, my parents and their gaggle of idiot friends started pulling together a town by the side of what we would eventually call the Moonlight River. To the south of this river, where we placed the town, stretched rolling plains. To the east rose hills. To the north, across the river, was the Transleaf Forest, which covered and went for miles all around the Tunnelwing Mountains. (Whoever named these places should feel bad, too.) Beyond the mountains, through more of the Transleaf Forest, ran a series of weird, improbably rivers with a couple of lakes, and far to the north of that forest lay Hellkite's Maw, a much taller and more imposing set of mountainous peaks interspersed with active volcanoes.
This was all in a pretty small area, geographically. Like, way too small to fit all this bullshit.
So the weather patterns fucking sucked. I think there was an ocean to the south or something, because absolutely nothing blocked storms, hurricanes, and other obnoxious air fronts from coming in on that side. The flatness of the terrain down there lent itself to the occasional tornado, as well, which was honestly more obnoxious than it was dangerous because everyone basically had superpowers, including a bunch of bitches with wind powers. You'd think that they could control the weather a bit more, but no. They could just keep the tornadoes away from the town proper.
We got some weird weather across the Tunnelwing Mountains, too. Icy freeze-your-balls-off storms in the winter that would drop feet upon feet of snow on us--I don't understand the meteorology behind that, but it sure fucking happened. Sometimes we'd get ash storms in from the Hellkite's Maw, too, when one of the volcanoes would go out of its fucking mind to make sure that everyone around knew that it was the biggest baddest lava-spewer in the West, or whatever. We had to get the Breath players to maintain domes of wind to keep the worst of the ash out of town sometimes. This meant that the town a) could not grow very wide and b) could not grow very tall, so we had to get inventive with the architecture and a lot of shit ended up underground. At least we didn't really get floods--the Moonlight River never really overflowed, and any massive amounts of rain from hurricanes or what-have-you tended to just get funneled into the river. The janky stone bridge across it got wiped out a few times when hurricanes would roll in, but most of their power tended to get eaten upon making landfall and they just hit us with buckets of rain pissing down on us for a day or so.
We didn't get a ton of rain most of the time. It mostly fell on the far side of the Tunnelwing Mountains, and what did make it across usually ran out on the miles of forest between us and the mountains before it got across the river. Rain coming in from the ocean tended to run out before getting to us unless it was a particularly nasty storm. Again, don't know how much that kind of thing gets reflected on Earth. I don't know how nonsensical these weather patterns are. That's just how it was, and it was bullshit to live with, especially since no one knew fuck all about how to predict weather so it JUST HAPPENED.
As for me, I was born with lightning powers. In addition to being a Life player (meaning I got sick healing magic), I could shoot lightning out of my eyes and hands for... some reason. Kalthoris just did that to people. It was the planet of the dragons, for a time, anyway, and I guess it remembered their magic and tried to give it to other people. All of the second-gen players tended to have something weird going on with them. Third gens onwards got powers in fits and spurts, but the second gens were the weirdest. La for me, I guess. This never really translated to calling down lightning strikes or controlling storms, but I could sure rival one when I was pissed enough.
Anyway. There's my angry weather rant. I could talk about the weather where I lived on Kaldriel (snow. It's just fucking snow) or any other number of places, but none of that's nearly as interesting or anger-inducing as Kalthoris.
Maybe I'll see you around. Maybe I won't. I'm not as "community-minded" as Research, and I literally do not know why Goratrix is so fixated on talking to other people. Guess he's been too lonely for too long or something.