...Except. Last night. That WHOLE ENTIRE AREA (and then some). Was being COMPLETELY AND ENTIRELY COVERED UP. By weebly telling me that I can customize something (something to do with a footer) if I upgrade. AKA, I pay them money to use the site that I've been using just fine for free.
Frankly, I'm never paying weebly a cent and I'd explicitly forbid my girlfriend from paying for me because HECK NO I'm not going to cave in to that kind of junk. If they tried forcing it on me again, I'd just stop using them and move to a different site. (I mean. In that case. I might need to pay weebly so I can use my site...but it'd be the smallest payment possible for the least amount of time possible and be purely so that I could make the announcement of "SCREW THIS, I'M OUTTA HERE!" and announce where I was moving the blog to.)
Fortunately, whatever it was, it was only temporary. Things are back to normal, so yesterday's blog is now up as it would have been last night were I able to.
As for today! No family night tonight, that'll be tomorrow. But today I worked, and that means...yep! I was trapped in my own thoughts again.
In this case, I was working on a few details of the Disease setting (which I call the Epidemic series). I've named that book of mine before on my blog, albeit only once or twice and way back, by now probably over a year if not two. Basically, it's a post-apocalyptic series which has a few details:
-The titular disease was a manmade virus of sorts that was engineered by the Big Bad (and a secondary villain helping).
-The disease consumed a great deal of many modern technologies. A lot of older things work (for instance, cars from the 80s and first half of the 90s), but newer things were 'eaten' by the disease (which I know is a bit questionable, but the disease is explicitly supernatural in nature given...well, just see the below).
-The disease propagated itself everywhere. It exists everywhere, categorized in "dense" areas (mostly, forests, jungles, etc.; areas where there is lot of flora and fauna to store it) and "scarce" areas (mostly, cities, where it isn't stored as well).
-Plants were unaffected, but in scarce areas, will wither and die if prolonged contact with humans not having a specific gift is maintained.
-Non-human animals were also unaffected.
-Humans still with, so to speak, "the blood of youth" as it were (as in, loosely speaking, below the age of 30) were given superpowers, which the disease powers. Off of where they spent the most time acclimating in the first few weeks, their powers took one of the two types mentioned. (Scarce powers are more precise but lack power; dense powers are more powerful but lack fine control.)
-Humans over that age either were killed off by it or were transformed into beasts the story dubs Darmichrons. They're on average about 8-10 feet tall, have massive strength, speed, endurance, razor-sharp claws, and carnivorous teeth to match; they maintain their human intelligence, but have the primal instincts of an animal, and are driven to be monstrous sadists who hunt the surviving humans for food primarily, but also for sport. (These are who I'll be talking about.) They are capable of speech still.
-The series protagonist is patient zero: the person first infected with the disease.
Darmichrons are the earliest villains in the story, although they later fall to the status of cannon fodder in spite of them being dangerous. They've got immense regenerative abilities on top of everything else and incredibly tough skin--what this amounts to is that projectile weapons (e.g. guns, bows) are ineffective against them (thus why the heroes use weapons like swords primarily, when not utilizing their powers), and even most attacks don't work.
They do have weaknesses (touching plants won't harm them, but get a plant inside of their body and it's poisonous to them; they have an unexplained mystical weakness to silver; they can't penetrate through brick mortar buildings; they're vulnerable to the elements e.g. being burned alive, drowning, freezing, electrocuted to death, and similar things which the heroes exploit), but they're still monsters to face.
One particular trait about them is that when they are in small enough groups, they still think individually, but when they get into a large enough mass, a hive/swarm mentality takes over. As in, "the death of a few will ensure the rest get to eat", where to overcome a force they essentially rush them with superior numbers and utilize their natural skills. They no longer speak, but they don't need to; they instinctively know what one another are doing, and as such are able to coordinate attacks such as that whatever force they are attacking is overwhelmed with minimal resistance.
I'm quite fond of my creation, by the way; they took inspiration from vampires, werewolves, zombies, and largely from Chiropterans (or however they spell that word) from Blood+, among other sources. But! These are all preexisting facts; I was not working on the above.
I was more working on a later plot point. In the sequel story to Disease (which was originally part of Disease before I decided to split the book in two), there's a point in the story where the protagonists need to make an alliance with a group of Darmichrons. (This is also not new and always was a part of the story from basically the get-go.)
Said group of Darmichrons was larger than any other group in existence (and thanks to what I've planned elsewhere in the story, that might mean a group upwards of 100,000 or so), and had one key trait: somehow, they were able to overcome the hive mentality and regain a level of individuality in spite of them being together...yet in spite of having regained it, still maintained many of the aspects of their hive mentality. (Basically they got the best of both worlds.)
Still not new. But before, I just had the heroes meet up with them with nothing extra attached. Yet I thought about a few facets of the consequences of this culture, and devised an alternative meeting method. It starts with the heroes sending their half-Darmichron (capable of freely transforming between human and Darmichron) in as a scout.
He reports back that it was a good idea they sent him in, because if they hadn't, they'd all be dead--the Darmichrons have guns. THIS is new, but it seemed to just fit so perfectly and logically. A normal Darmichron would never use a gun, because of their sadism and desire for the thrill of the hunt; a gun's cheating and more than that, anatomically, it's basically impossible for them to use standard firearms.
These Darmichrons given they have a society which has human intellect and has some facets of them subdued (including the sadism) in favor of the community were able to figure out bypasses. (After all, guns aren't that hard to modify and Darmichrons are big enough that they can carry something like a shotgun as if it were a Dillinger, in that it is a small-arms for them rather than taking both hands.)
The heroes have the ability to sense Darmichrons from a distance (this is how they stay alive: by running from fights they don't think they can win, or being entrenched and prepared when running's not an option), but guns have a range longer than that distance.
The Darmichrons use them as both their main defense against superpowered intruders, and to hunt said superpowered individuals--because they are nigh-immune to bullets, there is no risk of friendly fire. However, humans are just as vulnerable to being killed with guns with superpowers as they are without them. (Alright, so a few have abilities which make it difficult to kill them with gunfire, but the vast majority of the heroes are not immune to bullets.)
So the Darmichrons have a huge advantage. The heroes haven't used firearms ever since the apocalypse--because their main opponents that they go up against are Darmichrons who're immune, they had no need to use them; firearms were a waste of space.
Darmichrons' main opponents are humans...who aren't immune, and thus had good use for them. It just took specific circumstances for them to be able to create that environment where they used them. And it's a huge advantage, since it means that in addition to their natural strength/speed/etc. granting them a huge edge in melee combat (no need to carry a melee weapon when your teeth, claws, and appendages are lethal enough on their own), they have the ranged weapons to make it such that the melee was never necessary.
This is, of course, precisely the type of advantage the heroes were hoping to gain, which is why they wanted to seek the alliance in the first place (since the antagonists at this point are an army of superpowered humans and the heroes are comparatively outnumbered).
Of course, to the chagrin of the humans, they meet said Darmichrons by them ambushing the heroes, albeit not killing them. (They followed the half-Darmichron back, shot warning shots at the heroes to let them know not to move before the heroes sensed them, and then moved in closer.)
They explained their curiosity, since there are three core rules of their society,
Darmichrons don't hunt Darmichrons,
Darmichrons don't hunt with humans,
And humans need to be hunted; they won't come into the nest.
The reason they didn't attack is because they possessed the curiosity that two of their basic rules had been broken, so they do in fact listen to the pitch the heroes make. (The alliance is made, for two reasons. The antagonists would wipe the Darmichrons out once done with the heroes, and that the heroes give the Darmichrons multiple things that they were incredibly okay with--a complete continent to call their hunting grounds where if humans were found it was at their own risk; any excess livestock to be exported to said continent; various different levels of therapy to re-introduce elements of humanity, everything from at the lowest level making them omnivorous rather than carnivorous and at the highest level allowing them to become fully human again, with them being able to choose any treatment even none if they prefer themselves the way they are.)
I thought the idea made a lot of sense at least. Then again, I'm the only one who knows the full story, so all my ideas for the story make more sense to me.