Sydney might not be quite so haranguey if Maxima wasn’t standing there. Yes, she’s essentially firing spitballs from over Superman’s shoulder, but hey, they’re all friends, right? Friends can tease each other about fatal weaknesses and allergies, right?

Harangue in a good word. It’s one of those words where if the first time you encounter it is in a novel and you’ve never heard it spoken it out loud, you might not quite guess how it’s pronounced right then and there, so you come up with a ‘close enough’ version in your head and make sure you don’t say it outloud until you have a chance to look it up. The same thing happened with me and ‘macabre’ though my ‘close enough’ version was ‘mac-a-bare.’ Fantasy novels are especially bad about this since they have so many made up words. I’m pretty sure I have a handle on how to pronounce Menzoberranzan, but still basically no idea on Drizzt’s cat, Guenhwyvar. In my head it’s ‘GWEN-e-var’ or ‘GWEN-hwy-var.’ Please tell me other people do this.

Well Sydney’s starting to ask a significant question there, but, well you know how she is. To be fair I’d probably stumble too if something that looked like Chorius started talking like Frasier.

Chorius is the representative for the Miscellaneous category, the races that don’t have enough of a significant population to have their own seat. In some ways his job is the hardest one on the council because he’s usually speaking for the most diverse bunch. Chorius is considered a “Monster,” but not in a pejorative sense. Monsters are themselves a diverse group, and can be hard to define. Usually when describing one, people tend to start with a movie reference. “It was like the thing from that movie The Relic / Outlander / Hellboy / any of those things in Pacific Rim / etc.” They tend to be darkly colored, but sometimes have glowey bits, chitinous or otherwise armored, claws, spikes, fangs. Basically if you throw a blanked over them while they’re sleeping, they’re sure to ruin it in short order. There is debate as to whether Kaiju and Monsters are the same thing. Monsters are “large” which is to say the size of a large human up to the size of a large horse, maybe even a large horse with a fat, lizardy tail on it (which you can bet probably has spikes) but they’re not “enormous.” They just look similar, but the debate may be pointless because there certainly aren’t any Kaiju on council and in fact, giant sea monsters are almost unknown, even to some of the longest lived council members.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon as soon as I get up. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :)

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.