I spent a good chunk of last year just messing around with a pencil and paper like the good old days!
Growing up an orphan after the death of his father, Kane becomes a thief in order to support the orphanage that had taken him in many years ago. After mistakenly robbing a bourgeoise who happens to also be the prince of Redwater, he is thrown into helping Prince Thom the Kind find his mother, and along the way Kane is confronted with learning about his own mother, a fire fae.
I know it’s not a bird of prey, but I can’t not post these. A little orphaned hoglet whose mother was found dead in someone’s garden came into the wildlife rehabilitation centre I work at. He was very hungry!
#KingKong Gorilla Love Supreme! * Join us in giving a massive birthday shout out to our very on conservation #wildographydudette, @rememberingwildlife #RememberingGreatApes esteemed contributor & @kahuzibiegacongo Ambassador @shannon_awp * Show her some love by giving her a follow, purchasing/licensing prints & supporting causes dear to her like the @lwiro_primates https://shannonhinson-witz.com/ * #Wildography #wildlifephotography #humanity #love #andrebauma #mountaingorilla #shannonhinsonwitz #greatape #wildlifeconservation #orphan (at Kahuzi-Biéga National Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cdu0Z5wuYmY/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
i love the idea of the entire batfam being hypercompetent. just like. good at stuff.
because yea, they’ve all been trained extensively by a variety of teachers and mentors and various learning experiences. they all have their skills that they’ve honed to perfection for years. but there are just some things that they’re a natural at, things that make the unique, things that give them an edge just enough to rise to the top in a world full of gods and monsters.
yes, damian’s a trained assassin, and has been since birth. yes, damian works hard to keep his skills up. but the weapons training? it comes to him almost naturally. maybe it was something passed down from both bruce and talia, both deadly fighters in their own right. maybe it has something to do with the al ghul bloodline. either way, damian is absolutely deadly with a weapon in his hand. a blade can arc through the air faster than the human eye can see when it’s in his hand. he can work horrible wonders with an unbalanced sword, and turn combat into an art with a balanced one. tiny fingers wrap around the rough handle of a whip with surety, and he can slip batarangs into his palms and up his sleeves without them ever being seen.
tim’s got one of the most analytical minds of any vigilante alive. he’s not a supergenius or anything, and he leaves the higher-order computer skills and tech to barbara. but to him, the world is a puzzle after a puzzle, and tim never fails to solve them. figuring out dick and bruce’s identities. taking apart a grapple gun and fitting the parts together to make a beartrap. knowing exactly what to say and what to do to get bruce to break and bend and let him in. catching patterns in the chemical formulas of crane’s various toxins. reading through the lies that fell from his family’s lips like raindrops from the sky. everything and everyone tim knows are made of jagged pieces, but tim figured out early on how to put them together, step back, and take a look at the bigger picture.
people say cass doesn’t have any people skills, due to the years spent in isolation, spent alone. but the reality is, she has too many. reading people has always come easy, body language is an open book to her. but what many didn’t know was that there was a big difference between reading a book and analyzing it. it’s easy to see the insecurities of each of her brothers. it’s much harder to know exactly what to do or say to let them bring down their walls for just a moment, show their affection and prove their love in the smallest but most important of ways. it’s easy to see the poison of a smirk on a reporter’s lips, to catch the probing gleam of their eyes. it’s much harder to turn the reporter around, chasing their own tail until the story they were searching for in the first place was lost. it’s easy to pinpoint teammates and other heroes’ strengths and weaknesses, to see them play out in the field and plan for them the way every bat did. it’s much harder to make the others aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, and to convince them to put aside their ego and work on bettering themselves. but cass seemed to have a knack for it.
jason may like playing up the role of the blustering, bull-headed wild card of the family. mafia-don-from-movies meets muscled brawn. but he’s got a literary mind at the heart of it all. he’s real good at codes and decryptions, because he’s read about them before. he’s lightning fast a nygma’s riddles, because he’s poured through the books from which riddler gets his inspiration a hundred times over. life and art turn into one in his mind, and overlaying his family’s stubbornness and trust issues with novel style analyzations and character assessments that help him understand their interactions a little better. words float off the page and wind their way inside his head, and some may call him dramatic when he can’t force himself to speak so he uses quotes instead, but never say echolalia wasn’t useful.
each member of their worn out and sewn together family had their niche, their own particular area in which they excelled. but dick was brought up in a world where there was only two protecting gotham, two partners working together to keep an entire city from falling apart. jack of all trades, master of none, but better of master than one, dick always said, eyes twinkling with mischief. because sure, his acrobatic prowess was unchallenged. but he grew up on the road visiting city after city, country after country, and it gave him a head for languages. not even dick is sure how many languages and regional dialects he actually knows. his darling little smile was honed to perfection, and interrogations with him never lasted that long. you could drop him in the middle of nowhere and he’d always find his way to civilization, or you could toss him in the middle of a bustling but unfamiliar city, and he’d always make his way back.
