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rabbitcruiser · 25 days

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Elephant Seal Viewing Point, CA (No. 7)

In California, the population is continuing to grow at around 6% per year, and new colonies are being established; they are now probably limited mostly by the availability of haul-out space. Their breeding was probably restricted to islands, before large carnivores were exterminated or prevented from reaching the side of the ocean. Numbers can be adversely affected by El Niño events and the resultant weather conditions, and the 1997–98 El Niño may have caused the loss of about 80% of that year's pups. Presently, the northern elephant seal is protected under the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act and has a fully protected status under California law (California Fish and Game Code [FGC] § 4700).

While the population is rising in the state of California, some colonies farther south are experiencing declining populations, likely due to rising sea and air temperatures. In Baja California, the two largest colonies, in Guadalupe and San Benito, have seen consistently declining numbers for the past two decades. Seeing as populations farther north are consistently increasing, it has been hypothesized that this discrepancy is due to a change in migration patterns. As sea and air temperatures rise, Northern elephant seals may not be migrating as far south as they have previously. The climate is expected to continue warming, and southern populations are expected to continue falling.

Populations of rookery sites in California have increased during the past century. At Año Nuevo State Park, for example, no individuals were observed whatsoever until 1955; the first pup born there was observed in the early 1960s. Currently, thousands of pups are born every year at Año Nuevo, on both the island and mainland. The growth of the site near San Simeon has proved even more spectacular; no animals were there prior to 1990. Currently, the San Simeon site hosts more breeding animals than Año Nuevo State Park during winter season.

Source: Wikipedia

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boundinparchment · 9 months

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Dream a Little Dream of Me - XLIV

Celestia had a cruel sense of humor. He knew this, even before his days as a student. But to be given a soulmate? Now, when he openly blasphemed against the cursed island in the sky? He would outlive you and the dreadful fated bond that haunted your shared dreams. There was little point in this. He could at least put a Vision to good use. People were nothing but disappointments. He had no use for you. Until you pulled the bow across your instrument and awoke a part of him long buried by self-hatred and arrogance. Soulmate AU; Il Dottore/Female reader w/ established personality and backstory. Slow burn. Lore and world speculation and interpretation within; follows canon story where possible. Rated Mature. Rating subject to change. Mind the tags. On AO3 here. (Landscape is inspired by Jökulsárlón, in Iceland. Rest of the lore is entirely not canon.)

Ice fragments lapped at the silty shore, shifting and churning. High winds and below-freezing temperatures, both normal in this part of Snezhnaya, battered the sea; when it melted, the tides pushed the sheets towards the beach and stacked them like a haphazard pile of books. If one looked closely at the piles of shards, one could see the faint pattern the water usually took or where a current usually carved its way through the water. Closer to land, the ice was soft slush, and it was easy to forget how cold the water was.

High above, ribbons of light rippled through the sky in shades of green, purple, and blue. The ice shards seemed to reflect and absorb the light as it danced over the icy waters.

He came here, centuries ago, early on. The northern wasteland held little interest, save the aurorae and a long-buried Nail. Few bothered to traverse the storms and distance without a reason.

This seemed as good a place as any.

Out of the corner of his eye, Zandik caught a glimpse of your bare face, shrouded only in the hood of your thick cloak. This far north, no one would see your face, nor his. Your cheeks and lips were wind-chapped, head tilted up as you gazed at the lights. They cast you in shades of colors he didn't have a name for that made his breath hitch and his heart falter.

Yet again, his thoughts were not his own and yet they were, for how could he not be intrigued by that alone? Occasionally, far before meeting you, his mind strayed and wondered about you, your life, your interests outside of the dreamscapes; now, he looked back and wondered what path, if any, might have prevented present circumstances and came up short. Illogical. Paradoxical. And yet, it made sense in every single atom of his person.

Pantalone disagreed. The Ninth understood it better than anyone and yet that banker had the gall to consider you a liability. You, who deserved to have rooms that made you comfortable and safe; you, who were proving to be more of a counter-balance in every way.

Zandik had been too lost in himself to tell you of the bank slip and interior designer. He saw to it the morning after your first nightmare but then he'd slipped down into Haeresys, unzipped Omega's bag and—

Nearby, one of the horses nickered.

He felt pressure on his arm and looked down to find your hand through his cloak's arm slit, your attention no longer on the sky but on him. His muscles twitched beneath your hand. Would he ever get used to that sensation? It was one thing to reach out and touch you, a gesture that felt like satisfying a craving on impulse while consciously aware of the movement required to do so. But to have reciprocation made him wonder how much of that was you and how much was simply the bond urging you to…

It would always feel like a conscious choice, wouldn’t it? Therein laid the problem.

“Local folklore tells of a dragon, living in the depths,” Zandik said, drawing his attention from you to the icy spines of the water. “Some say the creature is carving its way back to the surface as spring approaches and the ice thaws.”

When you didn’t speak, he continued.

“The myth is half-true. The dragon rests off the coast of this very beach and you can see, there.” He pointed out to the middle of the lake. “Out in the center, the ice turns to bone, barely visible when spring and summer rear their heads. It didn’t survive the Cataclysm. I discovered it first-hand once I grew used to the eternal cold. Accounts date back centuries but most of them stem from my original findings.”

Your arm snaked around his, your hand on his upper arm, holding onto him.

“Was it lonely, being so far from home?” you asked.

“At first, although not much different than what I already knew. Not long after, I studied the manner of how an Archon created a vessel and decided that, if a god could lock away their consciousness in an artificial, I would surpass that with ease.”

He had revealed his age to you as one reported the weather when you asked to help him catalog and sort the Segments. Zandik thought your emotional disposition would win out, that you would clasp your hands over your mouth or give him a pitiful, mournful expression at the notion of your soulmate spanning literal centuries; instead, you thanked him for trusting you and he endured a sensation in his chest akin to combustion.

Both of you spent several days taking inventory of what could be salvaged, what needed to be destroyed. The Ruin Cores couldn't be reused; they housed his memories in a similar fashion to how Spincrystal records held music and the etchings were permanent. The Cores, or the bits that remained after being thoroughly crushed, currently sat at his feet in a jar with the ashes of the Segments.

He had set a particular Core aside, long before you came down, told you of its purpose. Time would take its course but the knowledge it held was imperative. After all, if he was to accept his humanity as you asked, it was only fitting to erase the false memories embedded in your unconscious mind, too.

All the while, you wrote down ages and parts and core memories. You listened as he recounted tale after tale, his version of events from start to finish. Before he knew it, he spoke of Sohreh and how he broke her hyoid bone in an overzealous attempt to stop the bleeding, of his trial and subsequent exile from the Akademiya, his relentless search to understand and treat the darkened scales and necrosis of Eleazar.

Of a stranger finding him in the desert, promising him resources and the means to continue his research and surpass the gods.

The sprout had used that revolting term of outcast in your presence without ever giving you context for it. After all, it wasn't as if you had accessed his memories via Omega and you deserved to understand, at least in part, what made so many tremble in his presence.

You were gentle with Alpha, the youngest, the one you played with that day near the border.

Rho, all impatience and bluster, was the one who had taken you on a picnic when your patron brought you to Sumeru (clever weaving on Omega's part, Zandik thought).

Last came Omega, his exact copy. You cleaned his face, fixed his hair. He did not deserve such kindness.

"He said there were twenty-four," you remarked, voice echoing through the space. "I only count twelve."

"Some memories took to being their own individual person. Some did not."

Zandik didn't have the heart to tell you that a third of them had chosen to take their own life. Phi failed in handling the memories after Sohreh's death and ran into the unforgiving wasteland; as far as he knew, his corpse was out here, somewhere, frozen solid. Chi was Omega's failure and endured an existential crisis before he took his own life. Psi pushed back against Omega's arrogance so much that he might as well have stabbed himself with the claymore.

Even Zandik knew some things were better left unsaid.

He heard the shifting of your boots as you took his hand in yours, gloves making the intertwining of fingers stiff but not impossible. Even with the material between you, he could tell how well your hand fit in his. It made him wonder what else might fit and he shoved such thoughts deep into the recesses of his mind. One day, perhaps.

For one who saw music in the way some saw words, who lead with their heart and never had a problem speaking up, you were quiet this morning.

The silence in his mind was, at first, uncomfortable and unnerving. Every time he looked at them, all he could think of was how empty everything was without them. Centuries of chatter, gone, even if he could choose to tune in or out as he wished.

Nails on a chalk board would have been welcome if it meant filling the gaps in his consciousness.

And then, on a trip upstairs, he heard you play and attempt to wrestle notes from an instrument you weren't accustomed to. As stilted as it was, your playing soothed the desolation like a balm on burnt flesh, and he couldn't pull himself away.

Neither could he enter. You were finally finding your flow after weeks, perhaps closer to a month, without your proper instrument and the means to play. Zandik only brought his feet across the threshold when he could bare the tugging no longer and when watching through the crack in the door served to only tease him, like a beggar at a table full of delicacies.

Sheet music was not unlike a blueprint. You followed the structure, created the structure, and brought life to the intangible. It didn't make sense to him in the way measurements and mechanical parts and anatomy did but he learned the flow, turned the page for you, and let himself feel for the first time in years.

He was human. He knew that. You hadn't needed to brave his destruction for that.

But you did. Because that was you, inherently and wholeheartedly. You weathered anything life threw at you, sometimes stubbornly so.

A counter-balance; one whole to match his, different yet equal.

"Zandik."

He blinked, the ice fragments and aurorae coming back into focus, and instinctively, he flexed his fingers. You squeezed back instantly.

From the tone of your voice, it sounded as if that wasn't the first time you had said his name. Having so many thoughts and nowhere to put them was still taking time to get used to again. Manual prioritizing within himself and only himself was the biggest hurdle of this entire endeavor; it was like learning to walk again after shattering both legs and expecting to never walk again.

You shivered within your fur-lined cloaked, though you tried to hide it. As acclimated to the cold though he was, you were not, and he had spent enough time lost in his own labyrinth.

He felt your hand squeeze his one more time before you pulled away, taking your warmth with you. Zandik reached down, retrieved the jar, and stepped into the tide, red eyes examining the jar in his hands. His greatest accomplishments, reduced to nothing more than a jar of ash and metal. Years, decades, centuries condensed into a single vessel.

Zandik opened the jar and spread the ashes across the jagged sheets of ice and slush, where they mingled with the water and the silt. He fought the urge to shake the contents out in a single go, the way he handled other materials. If he was bothering with this ritual, he might as well do it right.

Such rites were for the living far more than the dead they claimed to serve. Zandik knew this, too, fundamentally understood it. But it was another matter to feel the weight lift itself from one's shoulders and the shackles of an unshakeable past finally come free.

Or perhaps he was trading one for the other in embracing a future with you, exploring the possibilities of existence on a predestined path.

A problem for another day. You were shivering again and lingering in the past was of little use now. He had finishing touches to put on your instrument and he was eager to hear your music properly, among other tasks.

"Come, rooh 'albi. Let us return. This cold is too bitter, even for me."

#dottore #il dottore #dottore x reader #il dottore x reader #fic: dream a little dream of me #soulmate au #il dottore x female reader #dottore x female reader

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