I’ll never get over that it took just one strangers small moment of kindness to change Xie Lians path. All of the suffering he went through, all of the despair, the disillusionment, all not forgotten or even forgiven, but reconciled. All because one person, not Hua Cheng, not family, not his ex friends, not his people, reached back to him when he’d been starting to lower his own hand in defeat. It’s possibly my favorite and most meaningful part of TGCF for me, because for me it stops being about these two guys who were meant for each other and were impossibly lucky enough to have found each other, and becomes a story about a person who had lost his way in his world so thoroughly that he lost himself, only to be found and put back on his feet by that same world that he mourned so terribly. His world stops being a concept of scale of numbers, black and white, good and bad, and becomes about the individual. What he can do to help individuals, the connections he can make with them. Their histories, their names, their faces. Inside each person is it’s own world. He’d been knocked off his pedestal, and the fall hurt to the point of breaking. But now that he’s risen to his feet, he’s able to look all these people in the eye, and they’re so much taller than he’d seen before.
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Does leopard still have 3 lives in her final battle? Or was that changed?
Yep. I think she drowned her once, then Leopardstar lunges up refreshed, and she gets the upper paw on Mistyfoot with 2 lives to go.
(MAYBE tw gore, but I really did try to be tasteful about a head being smashed on a rock.)
On her back, splashing and thrashing furiously against Leopardstar's claws dunking her head under, Mistyfoot glimpses a wave breaking just over the tip of a stone-blue rock. Her only chance.
With a surge of power, her claws sink into her leader's golden shoulder and they tumble and roll to the right. Before the tyrant even realizes what's happening, she's yanked up, and then whipped backwards with a wet CRUNCH
And then again
And again
And again, until Mistyfoot can't even make out what's left of her leader anymore. All she can see is that it's a red, brown, and yellow blur, because her eyes burning with salty tears and her whole body is trembling.
She drops the corpse onto the stone and it slides into the water, lifelessly. After a moment it spasms aimlessly one last time, like an insect does after its head is bitten off, unlike the deliberate, agonized throes of Tigerstar suffering through his doomed lives. And then it's still.
There's only the tranquil sound of bubbling water, and Mistyfoot's frenzied panting. Her pounding heart makes it hard to hear either.
The blood is carried off by the shallow water in scarlet swirls, but the lake runs pale red as if it's washing it away. Some were aware of this prophecy, but Mistyfoot was not.
It isn't closure to her, or a fulfillment of divine decree. It's just blood that should be on her paws, slicked away by the complicit river. She wished it could feel like it's over, but she's smart enough to know the truth. Has been through enough terrible events like this to understand what comes next.
Her body will move foward. Her mind will need to consider her deputy. Her paw will come down on code-defying cats like Blackclaw and Greenflower. But her heart will stay here, next to the remains of Leopardstar, the same way another piece of it remains at Stonefur's side across space and time.
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What makes a rock a rock and not a crystal?
Ok SO
A mineral is a naturally occurring non-organic solid with a defined chemical composition and an orderly molecular structure. This means the molecules throughout the entire structure will be exactly the same, and be arranged in a symmetrical, geometric, repeating pattern called a crystal lattice.
Quartz is a mineral. Its chemical formula is silicon dioxide, and its crystal lattice forms a repeating tetrahedron.
Ice is also a mineral. Its chemical formula is dihydrogen monoxide, and its crystal lattice forms a repeating hexagon.
Obsidian is not a mineral. It is a mineraloid, a mineral-like substance. Its chemical composition can vary wildly, and instead of a crystal lattice, its molecules are jumbled up in an amorphous solid, meaning there’s no nice repeating pattern to them.
A crystal is any solid material with a crystal lattice.
All minerals, by definition, have a crystal lattice. So all minerals are crystals! Some things that are NOT minerals are also crystals!
Sugar is a crystal. It has a crystal lattice made from molecules of sucrose. But it is not a mineral because it is organic.
Often, these repeating geometric patterns in the crystal lattice cause the substance to naturally form big geometric structures with distinct faces - such as the points formed by quartz. These larger structures are colloquially also called crystals, and their shape (called a crystal habit) is determined by the shape of the crystal lattice. The same crystal lattice can produce multiple different crystal habits, and it’s all very cool and complicated but I won’t go off on a tangent about it right now.
A substance does not have to form big structures like this to be scientifically considered a crystal. It just needs a crystal lattice!
A rock is a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids. It can be made of a single mineral, or a bunch of different minerals. But when made from a single mineral, it will not be one solid block of that mineral with an unbroken crystal lattice. Because it is an aggregate, it will be a bunch of micro- to macroscopic grains of that mineral all compacted together, each with their own individual crystal lattices.
Granite is a rock. It is made of grains of minerals such as quartz and feldspar.
Limestone is a rock. It is mostly made of grains of calcite.
So rocks can be made of crystals, but rocks are not crystals - in the same way that a house can be made of bricks, but a house is not a brick!
And this is just a very quick overview of these terms, because the scientific definitions can get increasingly pedantic and there are tons of weird exceptions! It is all very fascinating.
But of course, the word rock also has a colloquial definition, which is just… a chunk of that hard stuff the planet is made of! A mineral, a crystal, a fossil or a bio-organic solid… whatever! This is a rock collection and these are my rocks!
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i think it’d be super cute and funny if angel signed alastor up for some pole dancings lessons and alastor ACTUALLY went JFJDJDJD
HAH - I can actually imagine that if the current hotel residents got to make any customizations to their rooms during the rebuild of the hotel, that Angel Dust would 100% be the kind of person to just have a pole installed in his room for practice and working out.
I feel like if they got tipsy and competitive enough (because Alastor would definitely out-dance Angel when it comes to his preferred forms of dance), Alastor would end up dragged upstairs to Angel's room for Angel to prove to him that he can dance, actually, thank you very much!! Could someone that can't dance do THIS?!
If he ends up shoving a drunk Alastor at the pole at any point, I'm 100% imagining Alastor as the type of person who is not even remotely flexible enough for the kind of coordination pole requires, but that also has enough freaky demonic super strength and also the ability to, like, break his own bones and do things like rotate his head 180 degrees or tilt it sideways at a right angle, and so just brute forces his way through any of the beginner moves that Angel shows him in the most horrific, uncanny way possible.
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