Song Call: Johnny Clegg, "Dela"

Last one of these for a while, I promise, but since I'm on a Blaine and Silverlock kick (as I have been for the past...well, a really long time, but whatever). This is them from Blaine's point of view, at the beginning. In this case, it's more the lyrics than anything else- in particular, the translation of the Zulu lyrics as "I am content," which is a particularly Blaine-like sentiment to express.

-----

One day I looked up and there you stood
Like a simple question looking for an answer
Now I am a whale listening to some inner call
Swimming blindly to throw myself upon your shores
But what if I don't find when I have landed?
Would you leave me here to die on your shores stranded?

I think I know why the dog howls at the moon.
I think I know why the dog howls at the moon.

I say:
"Dela! Dela! Ngiyadela!
(Content, content I am content)
When I am with you!
Dela! Sondela mama, sondela!
(Closer, closer, come closer mama)
I burn for you!

I've been waiting for you all my life -- hoping for a miracle
I've been waiting day and night -- day and night!
I've been waiting day and night -- waiting for redemption
I've been waiting day and night -- I burn for you

A blind bird sings inside the cage that is my heart
And the image of your face comes to me when I'm alone in the dark
If I could give a shape to this ache that I have for you
If I could find the voice that says the words that capture you
I think I know, I think I know
I think I know, I think I know

I think I know why the dog howls at the moon.
I think I know why the dog howls at the moon.

I say:
"Dela! Dela! Ngiyadela!
(Content, content I am content)
When I am with you!
Dela! Sondela mama, sondela!
(Closer, closer, come closer mama)
I burn for you!

I've been waiting for you all my life- hoping for a miracle
I've been waiting day and night- day and night!
I've been waiting day and night- waiting for redemption
I've been waiting day and night- I burn for you
Burn for you, I burn for you
-Johnny Clegg, "Dela"

Song Call: Duncan Sheik, "Home"

Yes, Blaine, fine, you can have the entirety of Duncan Sheik's first album as your soundtrack, go ahead. And yes, you can have some of the tracks off "Daylight," too, but not all of them.

Wangsty little fucker. *rolling eyes*

The lyrics are horribly saccharine, but I'm fond of "Home" as a relationship song for Blaine and Silverlock, more from Blaine's point of view. It's less the lyrics than the tone and the melody, honestly, and something about Duncan Sheik's voice makes me think of Blaine.

-------

Don't get me wrong, I'm feeling O.K.
But when I'm without you, it's just not the same
Don't misunderstand me, I'm feeling alright
But when I'm without you the day turns into night...into night
You dream of a future...a possible place
Where we lie together face to face
And I'm looking forward
I will not deny
I dream of a future made for you and I
You and I

...and then I'm with you
No longer alone
When I'm with you
It feels like I'm home
And you are with me
No longer alone
How could it be?
It feels like I'm home
It feels like I'm home

I look through the darkness into the sky
The moon up above me brilliantly shines
I've never been happier watching it glow
I'm here by myself, but I know I'm not alone...I'm not alone
I look through the brightness into the sky
The sun up above me, spitting out fire
Call me a child, call me naive
The world is much brighter
Than it ever used to be

-Duncan Sheik, "Home"

Song call: Voxtrot, Rise Up In the Dirt

The first time I actually listened to the lyrics of this song, I nearly fell over; this is basically my Silverlock/Blaine "OMG we're retarded and in love" song. It's their quintessential relationship song. The whole thing is mostly Silverlock talking to Blaine, but a few lines fit both of them. The lyrics kill me with how hilariously appropriate they are; I've italicized the best ones, for my own entertainment.

-----

Too many times you're gonna go out river-walkin'
Too many times you come home late
Too many times you suck yourself out of the scene,
It makes you wanna go straight
It makes you wanna go straight

Too many times you trade the bottle for the body
One drop for breath and one for skin
You say nobody knows the truth about your body,
You look tired and thin.
Are you tired and thin?

But if I were a good man, would it really happen?
Would you walk me home then everyday from work?
But maybe I'm a good man, wouldn't let it happen
I believe in love, I'm married to my work

Cause I could be a father, I could be a brother,
I could be a flower, rise up in the dirt
We were born to live here, we were born to die here
And you know this when you work
Yeah, you watch me when you work

When you are free from the work of this house
Well, you know what to do with your hands
Yes I'm sure
You got a few ideas

And when you wake from the shell of this body
Oh will you sing your ghostly lament?
Oh yes I hope
You've got something better up your sleeve

Too many times you bleed your love dry for your family
And let it over in your sleep
You'll overtry some hold the burden like a man,
Something you can keep
Something you can keep

You smell the scent of something burning in the kitchen
He smells the future on the lawn
These are the things we've come to recognize as truth,
We cut the right into wrong
We cut the right into wrong

But if I were a good man, would it really happen?
Would you walk me home then everyday from work?
But maybe I'm a good man, wouldn't let it happen
I believe in love, I'm married to my work

Cause I could be a father, I could be a brother,
I could be a flower, rise up in the dirt
We were born to live here, we were born to die here
And you know this when you work
Yeah, you watch me when you work

It seems that we used to live like rebels
But now we get scared like our parents
I shudder and think
It's just a waste of money

And when you wake up tomorrow, my son
You will be the father of something terrible
It will it shine, throughout your life
It won't bury you, cause we know

Somewhere in the darkness, you will find love,
Baby you will find love
You will feel young again
And you will feel young
-Voxtrot, "Rise Up In the Dirt"

Bad dream

"zzzzchrkSNNZZKKfiftyfourzzSNKRRSCCCKKKK -warkkkkzzz-"

"Anyone seen the Bad King?"

"Whatchu lookin' at? Dontchu be lookin' at me like that."

"Fuck, nigga I'm right here, where you goin-"

"I said meet me at the station- what the fuck-"

"zzcchhkk zzzzssssscrkcrckseventy threecskkkrk Newarkkkkkzzzssss-"

Torrential downpour- I scrambled under the overhang as soon as I got off the bus. The Port Authority was a miserable place to be under any circumstances, but it was especially bad in the rain.

Station guards were shoving people off the platform, into the building. Was it colder in here than I remembered? Hard to tell. Rain makes things fuzzy, anyway.

The flourescent lights cast no shadows.

"Bad King, man, come on, I need to get me some of that-"

"zzzkkkmergency Alertzzzkk chkkk chkksssrrr"

"Bitch, don't be talking to me that way-"

Nothing but static from my phone. "Look, I know the weather is shitty- Mellani! Mellani- just tell me which bus I need to take so I can get my fucking ticket and get home."

"zzzkkk kkkyou take the zzzzchhhrrr -even through zzzkk kkchkrr Newark-"

"Shit." I cut the call; the rain was screwing with the lines or something. It happened sometimes.

One of the guards pointed me towards a set of stairs, and I went obediently. Best not to fuck with them, especially not in rain like this. The stairs led down, and then down, and then a gate fell over them with a clang.

More flourescent lights, but more shadows this time. Graffiti on the walls, incomprehensible messages scrawled in spit and spraypaint, weird murals done in that Japanimation style. Too narrow to be a hallway; this was an access tunnel of some sort.

"Bitch, I said-"

"And then I told her not to worry, 'cuz I'd be home soon but now they got all the fucking doors closed-"

"ZzZZZZkk..lani? ...zzztell me what chkchkzzZZZZssSS-" My cell phone was still spitting static, even though I'd cut the call.

Other people in the tunnel- black girl standing at the end, by a door. Waiting for the bathroom, talking on her phone. Two men on the stairs, wearing ski caps at funny angles. Me, suit, briefcase, phone. Laptop in the bag, but I wasn't going to get a signal down here.

Wherever "here" was. Goddamn, but I hate the bus.

Voices everywhere. Static.

Started walking- found a ladder, climbed up. Banged on the grate, told the assholes on top of it to move the fuck away, let me through. Need to get home- Mellani's a bitch, and a useless bitch at that, but she worries.

New tunnel, same light, same girl standing at the end of the hall, waiting for the bathroom. The lights flickered.
b

"Bad King, you seen it? Bad King, you wan' get some for me?"

"Come on, come on, I said just a little longer baby, you just gotta wait-"

"And I'm like, no she did not and she's all fuck whatever bitch so I slapped her- yeah, I fucking did, she deserved it-"

"zzzZZZchris?"

Weird mural staring at me with giant eyes. Some sort of music group out of Asia, under the Bad King label.

The lights flickered again.

My laptop crashed to the floor, falling out of my bag- something was stuck in my throat. I coughed. Again. Then again- it was still there, stuck, squirming. Stuck two fingers down my throat, got a grip on it, pulled-

Wires, tangled up and fine as vermicelli. Sparks crawled over them- reminded me of seaweed, and sealice.

Coughed again, choked again. Kept pulling. Could feel them sliding up my throat, gag reflex kicking in, dry heaves- wet, tangled mess of wires.

"Yo, man, you okay?"

"Fuck, that's disgusting- call the cops or something-"

"Can't get a fucking signal down here, Christ-"

"Who you been talking to, then?"

"ZZZZZZZsssssssss... ... ..."

"Shit, that's nasty- man, you okay?"

One last choking cough, and that was the worst of them out- tangled, stringy mass of wires, the length of my arm, spattered across the grimy concrete floor. All that remained were the last stringy wires hanging out of my mouth, the long singular strands that I pulled out one at a time. One was long enough to make me start retching again, but it passed quickly.

Stared at the mess. My laptop had landed and opened- the screen was fuzzy with static.

"You can maybe get a signal with that thing, right? We gotta call someone-"

"No fucking signal." My voice sounded like rust. "No fucking signal, the whole system just got hacked."

Static everywhere, cutting up the voices.

"ZZZzzzzSSSSking hacked..."

They were staring at my laptop. Panic. The lights flickered.

"Whatchu mean- hacked, like, hacked?" She had implants for eyes, and they were showing nothing but snow.

"Technotist." One of the guys shook his head. "No way. Not a fucking Technotist."

Nobody said anything. Even the static on my phone was quiet, listening. Nobody wanted to say it. But it was true- the rain, the tunnel, the static.

Lights went out. No light but the glow of the girl's implants, and the static on my laptop screen.

Could feel the rain again, torrential downpour on my face. Something stuck in my throat.

"Shit."

Technotist. We were fucked.

"ZzzzzsssBadKingkkkgkkkch ssssssssss... ... ..."

"..."

On roleplaying, in general, and character relationships

Working on a general Blaine-in-Districtmancy post at the moment, and got sidetracked.

For the last few years, most of the characters I've roleplayed intensively have been transplants from other storylines of mine. Cecelia, Stacia, and Vlad are the only characters I played for any length of time that were completely original, created for the game. They've all inserted themselves into other stories, but they didn't have their roots in those plots. Tanavir, Nevaru, Nick, Liall, Spots, and Lenore were all from other stories of mine, even if they were transformed by the game.

They weren't all transformed completely; mostly, their origins and backstories suffered radical makeovers, but their personalities didn't actually change terribly much. Tanavir was always a bitch with weird attachment complexes- but her original incarnation didn't have a clan or a family. She was just a wandering vampire chick with a vaguely obsessive crush on a sixteen year old girl. Still a bitch, though, and perfectly willing to turn on any of her companions.

Nevaru was never an alcoholic, originally- and, originally, he was in love with Tanavir. I was hoping to keep him around as a character so I could develop that, but then Tana became a demi goddess and the campaign shifted continents, so that idea got scrapped. The original Neru was a demon slayer.

Spots went from being a fanatical freedom fighter to an archaeologist with terrible luck; the original Spots MacDowell wouldn't have recognized d20 Spots in the slightest. d20 Spots, however, is totally a proto-Blaine, from his curses and bad luck to his inability to shoot things. Spots probably underwent the most radical changes, both character and background-wise.

Len comes in at a close second; she was the angel of music from Boffo, and she became a twenty-something pyrokinetic with a deep abiding love of TS Eliot and a job as a fencing instructor. Same general attitude towards the world- very happy-go-lucky, somewhat crazy. Lots of protective instincts towards her family.

Nick and Liall didn't change much, even if Nick, in Blue Rose, is a lot goofier than Toggle!Nick. His bigotry manifested itself in game in silly ways that aren't funny at all, in the story. I just don't like playing incredibly serious characters in a game. Levity is good. And Liall is generally less of a hardass- but the important thing that remains true to both characters, in both universes, is that Liall takes her job very seriously, while Nick doesn't take it seriously at all. Nick is very loyal, yes- but in Toggle, he's loyal to his wife and his horse and, eventually, Aya. His entire character rests on his obsession with a fairy tale- he sees himself as the wandering knight, in search of adventure, with his untouchable, beautiful, noble female companion. (The Tale of the Templar is something I ought to write someday- it's a lot of standard fairy tale nonsense, with a properly tragic fairy tale ending. The Templar kills himself, and the girl lives forever- that's where the story ends. In reality, the girl raises horses for a while, and then leaves to open a bar in the city- The Templar's Rest.)

Nick's connection to the Tale of the Templar colors much of what he does in Toggle; less so in Blue Rose. Liall's obsession with her job showed up more in Blue Rose than it will in Toggle- she is a soldier first, above everything else. After that, she is Nick's wife and Aya's friend- or, in Blue Rose context, Skoros' friend.

I used a lot of Toggle characters in Dead Inside, since DMing Dead Inside was mostly just a chance to wank over the NPCs. But because they were all NPCs, and I was in control of half of the game, they didn't change much. The Dead Inside universe was as much like the Toggle universe as I needed it to be. Yeah, Foxbird ended up being a member of the police, but she does eventually end up doing that anyway (sort of). Everyone else was more or less unchanged. Theron was a little more badass, Stella was a little more crazy (Triforces everywhere!), Blaine was slightly more despondent than usual (with good reason, he likes to point out), but that was about it. Silverlock was the same mix of sleazy and pathetic he is in his original incarnation (sad, but true).

Using preexisting characters in roleplay is fun and useful for getting to know your characters in different contexts. I wouldn't be nearly as close to Nick or Liall without having roleplayed them- that does, however, make their deaths that much more painful for everyone involved. And Tanavir never would've seen the light of day without getting roleplayed. On the other hand, it does change them- Nick wasn't actually a bigot until Sammy's character started hitting on him, and Blaine was probably a whole lot happier before Dead Inside.

Some characters like shifting universes- Silverlock is a slut in every sense of the word, and is always up for a new perspective. Blaine doesn't enjoy change as much, as it tends to make him miserable. I don't know if it's stress I've been dealing with or the characters' difficulties adapting to new universes, but so far whenever I try roleplaying Blaine and Silverlock, they end up separating. They'll be back together by the end of the first plot arc of Districtmancy, but still. They've been going through all sorts of crazy issues for the last year or so.

Characters go through cycles, same as everything else. There was a point in time during which anything I wrote about Opal and Tyler involved in vicious arguments and cycles of self loathing. They've since gotten over that, in my head, and are one of my personal OTPs. So I'm not terribly worried about Blaine and Silverlock; they've been an OTP of mine for years- they predate Boffo, even.

I just find it interesting to track how my characters relate to each other in the backmatter in my head. It was easier with Opal and Tyler, since I did actually finish their story. Toggle is such an enormous undertaking for me, in terms of scope and plot, and I may never finish it. So the characters are all in a sort of limbo; everything I write for them is subject to change. This is good, in some ways, because it means I don't have to worry about writing characters into a corner. But it can also be frustrating for me and the characters, because there is no preexisting framework of a story in which to set things.

I've mostly come to accept that the only things I write really are just thinly veiled epic romance stories. More on that later, maybe; I need to get out of the habit of writing ridiculously long posts here.

BAM! ZAPPO! POW!

Why the fuck am I incapable of writing action scenes? Just- augh. I know it's a problem many writers have, but I'm utterly incapable of writing any sort of action. My mind just freezes up. I can write pages and pages of useless exposition and stupid dialogue, and I can see the action I want to write perfectly in my head. I just can't describe it.

Blarg. Maybe I should try writing sex scenes. Different sort of action, but action nonetheless- and the scene I want to write right now is just a few layers of clothing removed from a sex scene, anyway.

I get too hung up on making sure a scene is finished; I should start posting shit as I write it, just to get it out of my head and into a format where I can look at it critically.

On roleplaying (Blaine in Districtmancy)

So, Districtmancy. (Shit, this got really, really long. >.>)

I'm not sure what it says about Blaine and Silverlock that whenever I roleplay them, they end up separating. In Dead Inside it was perfectly understandable, and mostly Silverlock's fault- he's occasionally very easily distracted by shiny things. And Drake is a very shiny thing; most of Blaine's dislike of the man stems from jealousy. Too, in Dead Inside, Drake and Silverlock were trying to take over the world, and Blaine will put up with a lot of nonsense, but he draws the line at world domination.

Blaine in Districtmancy is much, much less stable than Blaine is in his original incarnation. As much as it irritates him on occasion, his immunity to drugs and alcohol in Toggle saves him from a lifetime of battling addictions. And taking care of Foxbird gives him something positive to live for during the more difficult transitional periods of his life. He doesn't have either of those things going for him in Districtmancy; when his mother dies (unfortunate traffic accident), he starts stealing things and ends up getting thrown out a window by the police when they catch him. (Hence the scars on his face- face, meet plate glass window.) He's in juvie for a few years after that. Then his father dies (heroin overdose), and he gets sent to NYUAA for healer training, where he's an antisocial punk. He doesn't have many friends on Governor's Island; he's sixteen when he ends up there.

Orrin is four years younger, and a firemancer, but also something of a punk. He attaches himself to Blaine for no good reason that anyone else can discern. (Orrin is actually an incredibly accident prone kid- he mostly sticks to Blaine as a survival instinct, since Blaine never goes anywhere without a plentiful supply of bandaids.)

Between med school and keeping Orrin from cracking his skull open on things, he gets his life somewhat under control. He finishes off school and his residency a year or so early and gets a job at Columbia Presbyterian in the ER, and becomes addicted to his work. When he can't handle being addicted to his work, he gets addicted to cocaine, too. (It was actually a series of particularly brutal ER cases that pushed him into drug use as a coping mechanism.)

(Mildly entertaining things- chain smoking and twitching are characteristics of users, but Blaine didn't start doing either until he went into rehab. Jason may occasionally comment on this, but Blaine has been clean for the last five years, apart from the cigarettes and the occasional drink, and would take accusations of being back on drugs about as well as he takes reminders of the kidney thing.)

His dealer eventually stopped taking money and instead charged favors, which was how Jason and Co ended up busting him in the middle of harvesting an illegal immigrant's kidneys for sale on the black market. Blaine's only excuse was that he was higher than a kite on something new and unidentified at the time. He only used cocaine up until that point, but his dealer suggested he try something new, in exchange for a bigger favor than usual.

He sees that point in his life as hitting absolute zero; he comes out of rehab with an incredibly rarefied sense of self loathing that six years of counseling has just barely begun to dent. The real reason he hates Jason so much is not because he thinks Jason is an irritating fuckwit (though he does), but because Jason serves as a tangible reminder of how low he'd sunk as a human being, and how precarious his grip on stability really is. It's a touchy subject for him, which is why he flies off the handle and tries to hit Jason when Jason brings up the kidney thing.

He hates Orrin in part because they were best friends, and Orrin ratted him out to ARC- but primarily because they were best friends, and he never wanted Orrin to know how incredibly screwed up he was. At some point in the future, when Silverlock asks him if he'll ever forgive Orrin, his response is, "There's nothing to forgive." Which is true- he doesn't blame Orrin for turning him in, and he is, in fact, almost grateful for it. He hates himself now, but he hates who he was before even more. He hates Orrin as a defense mechanism- he doesn't think Orrin will ever be able to forgive him for sinking so low, and he certainly doesn't think he deserves Orrin's forgiveness.

He works for Paige, at Templar's Rest. Maddel worked with him at the hospital and at NYUAA, and got him the job- Maddel mostly did this because he knew Blaine could be useful, and he would be, at the very least, entertaining. (As surrogate father figures go, he kind of sucks.) The lower level of the Rest is an upscale lounge/bar; the upper levels are occupied by art galleries and private rooms that can be rented by the hour. Most of the time, he really does just do security work- he makes sure no one goes upstairs without a proper escort, makes sure clients treat employees with the proper respect, that sort of thing. When necessary, he beats people about the head and torso with the butt of a sawed off shotgun. Occasionally, someone from Faery with a few bullet wounds shows up in one of the rooms upstairs, and then he gets called on to deal with that.

More often than not, his patients give him a 0_o look over the fact that he's human. Blaine tells them this is merely an unfortunate accident of birth, and not something that should be held against him. He does genuinely enjoy being around citizens of Faery; something about their auras, if not their incredibly racist and bigoted attitudes, is soothing to him.

He meets Foxbird on his operating table; about a month later, he meets Silverlock, who thanks him for putting Foxbird back together. (And by "thanks him" I mean they kind of have sex in Blaine's office after Silverlock uses the worst pickup line in the history of ever. I kind of really want to write that scene, because it's hilarious for me.)

My characters are a lot sharper in Districtmancy; Maddel is more of a racist Nazi asshole, and Silverlock is more of a sociopath. (I need to stop watching Oz, or at the very least, stop equating Blaine and Silverlock with Beecher and Keller. It isn't pretty.)

Blaine and Rien (though Blaine and most of the people at the Rest call him Silverlock; I imagine Drake would, too) are together for about four years prior to the start of the game. Silverlock gets attached to the point where he would actually be monogamous if Blaine asked him to- but Blaine doesn't ask, because Blaine has no self esteem. (One would not characterize their relationship as being particularly healthy, no. But Blaine is less fucked up with it than without, so go figure.)

Life is fairly uneventful, until three days prior to the beginning of the game, when Blaine lets himself into Silverlock's apartment and finds Orrin there, mostly naked. (At some point when they were both in college, it's possible Blaine and Orrin hooked up drunkenly? And then never spoke of it again? But neither of them ever stopped thinking about it, except they tried really hard to forget about it because it was really weird for everyone involved, especially me? Yes.)

To be fair, Silverlock had a plan here- he was hoping to eventually get them back on speaking terms with each other (he meets Orrin by coincidence, but he knows all of Blaine's backstory, and he's seen pictures of Orrin). It was a very half assed plan, and he went about it in a very stupid manner, but he did have a plan. Both Orrin and Blaine flip out, and there is a minor brawl; Orrin's nose gets broken, and Silverlock ends up with a black eye and a split lip. Blaine gets out with a bitemark on his shoulder, because Orrin can be really fucking vicious sometimes.

Two days later, Jason shows up at his door, and points out that, hey, not only is Blaine a healer, but he's something of an expert on dark aligned soulmancers with ties to Faery! Blaine points out that Jason is as annoying as he is ugly, and also, fucking someone for four years doesn't make you an expert on their mancy. And Jason smiles, and says, sure, fine, sorry for bothering you, I'll just go ask Brannskada if he'd like to help- I'm sure he would, he's NYPD to begin with and this sort of case would look great on his record- and Blaine tells Jason to shut the fuck up and get off his porch, and also he'd better be getting paid in cash.

So, three days after his violent breakup with Rien, he goes clubbing for great justice with a necromancer and a cop; four days after, he has to go and visit Drake of all people, who feels the need to remind him of said violent breakup. Also, he gets attacked by an invisible stalker. Five days after, he gets attacked by a werewolf, finds the mutilated body of a fourteen year old girl, and becomes a vague older-brother-figure to the same werewolf that attacked him. And if the game stays on schedule, he'll be stuck seeing Silverlock exactly one week after their break up.

It's a good thing he's got a murder case to worry about and a bunch of crazy teammates to keep in one piece; if he didn't have something to distract him, he'd probably be finding himself a new dealer. As it is? He's still probably having a bad day.

only amounts to a couple of tears

Ugh. Writing anything lately is like pulling fucking teeth. (Case in point, I wrote that sentence hours ago and couldn't find it in myself to write anything further.)

Been having nightmares, which is always fun. I suppose there's something to be said for being predictable, but that doesn't mean I particularly enjoy it.

Build up to Blaine's death, because I can't, you know, write something upbeat for once. I blame it on listening to an excess of Duncan Sheik, and the heat. It's impossible to be upbeat in this weather.

-------------------

He knew most of the apprentices by name; all of them ended up in the infirmary at some point or other. Theirs wasn't a safe or easy profession, and training left scars.

"Thank you, Healer Torkehaav." The girl called herself Mist, though her mother had named her Cecily, and Blaine had been there to cut the cord when she was born. He wondered when he'd gotten so old, sometimes. She flexed her fingers carefully.

"My pleasure, Lady Mist. Your hand won't be back to full strength for another few weeks- don't strain it, or I'll put you on probation for stupidity."

"Aye, sir." She grinned. "As you say."

"Off with you- get out of my infirmary, I'm sick of seeing you here." He pushed her towards the door and she ran out without another word.

Blaine slumped against the examination table, head bowed. Mist's hand had been completely crushed- an accident with a locked vault, the sort of thing that happened more often to thieves than assassins. He stared at his own hands, which still surprised him with their lack of scars. His reflection in the mirror still startled him on occasion, though that was as much because he avoided mirrors out of habit as it was his appearance.

He clenched his right hand into a fist, and uncurled his fingers slowly, one by one. Then he clenched his left- but his fingers would only curl weakly towards his palm.

He touched the examination table, then tried to pick up a crucible- and he cursed when it slid through his fingers. He wasn't quick enough to catch it before it shattered on the floor.

Fighting down panic and despair, he took down a scalpel from the rack along the wall. He couldn't feel the edge of it along his palm, couldn't feel the tip of it pushing into his fingers. Just numbness, and the sight of blood pooling beneath his hand.

Maddel found him on the floor some time later; he'd sliced his hand to ribbons and hadn't bothered to stem the bleeding.

"What the fuck are you doing?" The elf knelt beside him and began binding the cuts with magic and bandages. "Idiot."

Blaine smiled weakly, and ran his good hand through his graying hair. "I think I'm dying," he said quietly. "What do you think?"

Maddel paused and stared him in the eye. Blaine could feel the soft brush of aether against his senses while the Masterhealer examined him.

"Well?" Blaine asked, after Maddel was silent for a little too long.

He looked away, frowning, and tied off the bandages around Blaine's hand. "I think you're right."

Blaine laughed humorlessly. "I hate it when that happens." He leaned his head back against the cabinets and stared at the ceiling.

Maddel sat back on his heels and lit a cigarette. "You only just noticed?"

"Aye."

"It's just the hand for now, but it'll spread- extremities first, then-"

"I'm aware of how it progresses, thank you, sir." Slow nerve death, his borrowed body grinding to a halt. He'd be bedridden within a matter of weeks, and then it would be a race to see whether his brain would die before his internal organs. Slow, messy, and inevitable.

"You'll have to tell your family."

His family. He almost laughed. "Not yet."

"Torkehaav." Maddel's voice was serious enough to pull Blaine's eyes away from the ceiling. "Don't be a fucking coward. You have to tell them."

"I'll tell them." He looked away. "But not yet." His good hand scrabbled for purchase against the counter, and he pulled himself to his feet. "I need a few days off, sir."

Maddel sighed, and rubbed his eyes. "Fine. You have three days, and if you try to disappear, I'll hunt you down and drag you back myself."

"Duly noted." He touched Maddel on the shoulder. "For what it's worth, old man, I'm sorry."

"Get out of here before I hurt you, Torkehaav. You know full well I'm not above hitting someone who can't hit back." Maddel's glare was fierce. "And don't you dare apologize to me again."

"Wouldn't dream of it, sir." He left Maddel staring at the shattered crucible on the floor, and pretended he didn't see or feel the hurt in the elf's stance.

Theoretically, he could live for months while his body broke down; the thought sickened and infuriated him. Some gods held suicide to be a sin, but his had never been one of them. It was time to pay the Avatar a visit.

earth mother

Faraz Aghavni is the reincarnation/reboot of Foxbird; she's 6'6", making her my tallest human character in any story. (Kupric is taller- he's around 7 foot- but he's a half-elf, and when I say half elf, I mean half elf, half giant hybrid.) She's the youngest of the soulless (not of the demographic, just of the particular small group of them that I'm generally concerned with), having obtained her soul at the age of six. Since she hadn't hit puberty or finished devloping a personality or any of that jazz, it wasn't all that traumatic for her. She remembers the time before the Tower opened as a boring, flat, colorless time. Then there was the year or so between her reawakening and her friends' reawakenings, and that was even more boring, if slightly more colorful.

She's still incredibly strange, of course. She's got no interest in people outside of her personal circle of "family," except as temporary amusements. She spends most of her evenings out a bars, hooking up with strangers. By the time she's twenty four, she's acquired as many notches in her bedpost as Silverlock had at fifty, which is a number that is not slight.

Jay has given up on getting her to stop- she can more than take care of herself, under any circumstances. She's easily bored by most people, unless they're actively working to entertain her. Most of the time, she's able to relate more to plants than people.

She's got a degree in biology and is getting her AD in arcane botany; she is, essentially, a druid. She speaks to trees. She wants to reintegrate greenery in the city- Redmark used to house a fantastic park, but most of it is gone now; the DeLavrey manor, too, was once located in the middle of a forest, inside the city. She spends a great deal of time working with members of Lesser Faery- the elves in the Fifth Era have largely lost touch with nature, but the Lesser Fae still maintain that connection.

She's a bit feral- fiercely protective of her family, but not inclined to give a shit about anything else. She's almost a mother figure- but I don't actually have any mother figures in my cast of characters (Shanreth doesn't count). She ends up taking care of Tim and adopting him as her protege/little brother.

She fights with her fists, mostly, and on certain memorable occasions, her teeth. Generally, once Faraz gets involved in a brawl, the brawl is over. She's been known to incapacitate entire teams of murderball players in under ten minutes. She's the second best fighter of the five of them- Eleth still floors her two out of three times, but she can take out Ravi and Lindra easily. She's never actually been in a serious fight with Orrin.

For all that she's a crazy Amazon, she's actually fairly mellow, and not all that different, personality-wise, from Foxbird. Not as well socialized, though that's more her own personal choice than anything to do with the way she was raised, and not as inclined to build up a harem of cranky men. But they're similar in their take-no-crap attitude towards the world.

And, y'know, she's six and a half feet tall. I'd probably be immensely fond of her for that reason alone.

Check on the rep- yep- second to none

"...give fans an inch and we'll have people having sex on it."

Quote of the day, from Transformers & Sex: A How-To. Not that I'm, you know, contemplating writing robot porn or anything. *cough*

...

I take back what I said about Orrin not being able to grow facial hair; he totally has a beard. Thank you, Gettyimages.

(Whee!)

It is monumentally annoying to find that, even with the autosave feature, I still tend to lose large chunks of my work when my computer mysteriously crashes. *sigh* I've finally gotten back to work on some of the things I started writing months ago- mostly bits and pieces of Silverlock's backstory (and damn, he and Aya were such brats when they were young), and some stuff on Orrin. I keep feeling a vague desire to write Seventh Hour or Song of Shadows things, too, but I should maybe figure out where the hell those things are going first.

let the motherfucker burn (Orrin babble)

(I keep watching Nip/Tuck, waiting for Sean and Christian to kiss- and they never will, but that doesn't keep me from hoping.)

I think, possibly, the real reason I've let the Fifth Era run off with itself so much is because sometimes I really enjoy naming new characters. The core five plus one all have delightful names- Orrin Brannskada, Faraz Aghavni, Ravi Anrai, Lindra Barak-Anrai, Lorreth Hjordiss, Jaden Morehan. I don't know why Blaine insists on ridiculous and vaguely ironic Swedish names (Torkehaav was mispelled Swedish for "dry ocean" and Brannskada means "burn injury") but they seem to suit him well.

Orrin is actually very little like Blaine. He's quite a bit like the person Blaine could have been, had he stayed a thief, however. Very friendly, very high energy, somewhat ADHD, fidgets with his hands constantly. He's easily distracted when he's bored, but if he's interested in something, he'll tune out the rest of the world. He can be very intense when the mood takes him.

He's 5'8" and solidly built, with traditional redhead complexion and six billion freckles. He has hazel eyes, and has never quite managed to grow a beard; after a week or so of not shaving, he gets a little fuzzy around the edges, but that's about it. This is incredibly disappointing to him, because part of him always wanted to be a pirate, and he feels no pirate is complete without facial hair. He and Mordant shop at the same clothing stores- worn out jeans, steel-toed boots, button-down shirts. He wears arm guards; he has several different pairs for different occasions, but mostly he just wears plain leather ones. They keep him from chewing on his wrists (it was a bizarre nervous habit he picked up as a very, very small child) and they hide the scars from the times he bit down to the bone as a kid.

He smokes (Blaine did, too, but Blaine hand rolled his cigarettes after picking up the habit from Maddel- Orrin smokes cheap Dzyrachan imports), but not profusely: after sex, when bar crawling, and occasionally with his morning tea when he's been pulling all nighters during exams.

He's got the equivalent of a master's degree in arcanic engineering; his doctorate thesis is on energy conversion matrices. (What? What. What? I DON'T EVEN KNOW.) All of Orrin's academic advisors love him- he's a brilliant engineer, but he's kind of a spaz. His research fellowship has him TAing a few engineering classes and some arcane theory classes. His students like him as a person, but he's a pretty useless teacher. He's also perpetually late to all of his classes.

He rides a motorcycle that actually starts three times out of five- he keeps trying to take it apart and fix it, but it hates him quite violently, and he's only succeeded in making it worse. It's got a vintage arcanic engine that isn't really compatible with the Fifth Era, but Orrin refuses to upgrade it to something that, y'know, works.

He's got decent hand-to-hand combat skills, but he prefers hitting things with sticks (his prefered weapon is something like escrima sticks, but he's proficient with a quarterstaff and a three section staff as well). Orrin, unlike Blaine, has no problem punching people when he feels it necessary. In fact, he quite enjoys it. He and Faraz occasionally go out late at night on weekends and engage in acts of vigilante justice. (There's a reason people are terrified of Faraz. SHE WILL CRUSH YOUR SOUL BENEATH HER FOOT AND DEVOUR YOUR ENTRAILS.)

He lives in one of SCoAA's graduate housing apartments, down the hall from Faraz. They used to live together, until Faraz qualified for a place of her own and moved out. (She's got a degree in biology, and is getting her doctorate in arcane botany; she's essentially a druid. Talks to plants and everything. Her apartment looks a bit like a jungle.) They still practically live together; Orrin raids her fridge almost constantly, and Faraz usually shows up in his kitchen and makes him cook for her. They make a point to meet for lunch every day, unless they're both terminally busy. They're incredibly close- nothing happens to either of them that the other doesn't know about. (This means that Orrin gets all of the gory details when Faraz randomly hooks up with some guy she met in a bar for the fourth time that week- and that Faraz has a mental catalogue of all of Silverlock's tattoos.) (Also, Orrin is a thirteen year old girl. Dear god, he is such a thirteen year old girl. Or possibly he's just really, really gay; he can't quite decide.)

He and Silverlock are ecstatically happy together, even when Silverlock does kind of get him involved in a plot to overthrow the government. (I'm still not sure what's going on with that, but whatever.) They don't stay together, I don't think. I'm not sure why- I just can't see Orrin as growing old with someone. I can't really see him as growing old, period. And Silverlock, for all that he is perfectly capable of monogamy, doesn't entirely enjoy it. Dunno; if the timeline in my head ever does get to the point where they break up, it'll probably have something to do with Theron. (What? What. What? I STIL HAVE NO IDEA, but Silverlock and Theron aren't allowed to have sex ever again, I don't care what either of them have to say on the matter.)

the naming of cats- i mean, characters

So, in my head, Nick isn't much on speaking terms with anyone after Blue Rose. He's still sulky, particularly since so many of the drabble prompts I'm procrastinating on are about him and Skoros. But I've figured out some of the details of his family/the Ishkhahareni/Akvaria.

Ishkhahar is one of the more popular fertility deities, though she's most popular along the coast and in Akvaria. She's got a decent Rothcaran following, but she is most closely associated with the Akvarian highlands. The Ishkhahareni are her most devoted followers- those who choose to be married in her name. Isshkhaharet Akvaria is a matriarchal, polygamous society that takes all of its traditions- especially the pre-fourth era ones- very seriously.

Marriage is a huge thing for Ishkhahar's followers, though it's taken to extremes in Akvaria. Rothcar and Ikatia are the only other provinces that really make allowances for extremist Ishkhahareni and other polygamous deities. The practice is largely frowned upon in Dzyrach and Tarmish. (Someday I'll draw a map.) Akvaria is loosely (very loosely) based off of a romanticized version of Muslim Spain (I'm not gonna lie, it's totally Rozarria). This means that the native language is a combination of Toggleverse-Spanish and Toggleverse-Arabic, and that all of the natives have incredibly ridiculous names.

It suits, though, because so many families are polygamous monstrosities, and the easiest way to make sure you're not marrying your sister is to check your last names. Nick's full name (since I now know that "Zanadreth" was just a place holder) is Vanick de Bayez Viudo y Zabalmedina Cruzado. And yes, that's largely just a combination of a bunch of Spanish words whose meanings I found to be hilarious and/or appropriate. And according to proper naming conventions, I'm misusing those conjunctions horribly, but they suit my purposes well enough.

I'll probably have to tweak the naming a bit more, since the Ishkhahareni are equal opportunity polygamists- Nick is the younger son of his father's second wife; his father is the first husband of their clan's matriarch, whose primary surname is Zabalmedina. Because he belongs to a clan- and clan isn't quite the right word for it, but the implications are mostly correct- he gets the "y stuff" tacked on to his name. He isn't one of the matriarch's children, so that denotes him as a secondary member of the family.

Mireia Zabalmedina Cruzado is the matriarch of the family; she inherited a great deal of land from her parent-clan, and she married Nick's father (Dario Viudo Anastasis) despite his unlucky surname, and has three children with him. Dario then married Nick's mother (Zahra Bayez Mendoza) and they have two kids- Nick, and his older brother. Mireia has two other husbands, and five other children (eight total). Dario has three wives, and a total of eight children; Mireia's second husband has a second wife (who happens to be Mireia's sister, actually) and a total of three children, and her third husband, who is something like fifteen years younger than her, is otherwise unmarried and has no children. There are rules as to how many spouses you can have depending on whether or not you're someone's primary and how many children there are and how much anyone stands to inherit.

Thus, the people Nick considers to be his parents are as follows:
Mireia (matriarch), Dario (father), Zahra (mother), Alara (father's second wife), Orsino (Mireia's second husband), Silvalia (Orsino's second wife (and also Mireia's sister, but that's irrelevant), and Stefan (Mireia's third husband). Though only Mireia, Dario, and Zahra are legally responsible for him, and in a less close-knit family, only Dario, Zahra, and Alara would be at all involved in raising him.

He has an older brother, six half-sisters, two matriarchal brothers, and one matriarchal sister. So, eleven children, broken up between seven parents. I'm still working out how the ages fall; some of the children are older than some of the lesser spouses.

Family systems of the size and scale of the Zabalmedina's are rare. Most people just have one spouse, because that's all they can afford. Mireia's mother only had one husband, but her husband had a second wife, and Mireia has several brothers and sisters.

Adultery is a capital crime, and will get you stoned quite thoroughly by anyone in the area. That said, it isn't adultery if your primary spouse has given you permission, or if you intend to marry. Marriage is not an easy way out of an adultery charge, however, since you still need the permission of your other spouses, and you get judged by the priests of Ishkhahar during the ceremony. There's magic involved, and if they decide the marriage isn't a "true" marriage, you get stoned anyway. (A "true" marriage is one in which the involved parties are getting married out of actual affection for one another, and not political or monetary reasons. The magic involved is simple tactile empathy on the part of the priest, who is usually a leechmage.)

Same sex marriages are out of the question in Akvaria, though they do happen occasionally among the Ishkhahareni of Rothcar and Murundcar. (Rothcar, in general, has a much more liberal attitude towards these things, given how many of their important historical figures have been flamingly gay. (Oh, Siegfried. *shakes head* I'M NEVER WRITING THE THIRD ERA.) Murundcar...that's a post all to itself, really. There are lots of elves in Murundcar. It's a weird place.) There's a willingness to look the other way in the case of same sex relationships between married people, particulary women, but among the unwed over the age of twenty, it's considered an ostracizeable offense. (So is divorce- if a couple simply grows apart, they remain married. But if a divorce is necessary, the case goes to an impartial committee to decide where the fault lies, and the person at fault is cast out of the family. It's a messy business, and not one that happens often.)

Nick is a happy hypocrite in that he'll cheerfully fantasize about Liall and Aya, but being within fifty feet of Silverlock makes him want to punch someone in the face. (In Silverlock's case its as much the fact that he was a prostitute for so much of his life as the gender of the people he sleeps with. Though, to be fair, he does sleep with more women, on average, than men.) He's not actually as straight as he'd like to pretend, but he is too closeted to even acknowledge that fact to himself. Liall only teases him in Blue Rose-verse; she's a bit more sensitive in her original incarnation, and he's a bit more inclined to be an asshole when he's provoked.

I've been working on family trees, which means coming up with names for all of the children and parents. Things tend to get a bit...hyphenated. XD

Nick's parents are pretty cool, though- as far as his immediate family members go, he's closest to his half sisters from his father's third wife, and one of his satellite fathers- Mireia's second husband is the one who taught him to ride.

I need to start making little posts again; these long, worldbuilding things are fun and interesting for me, but they take forever to finish, and I'm pretty sure no one else gives a damn.

Ah, well. I'm probably going to focus on Orrin for my next lengthy babble.

one more casualty

Bleh. My creative processes are dysfunctional at the moment. I have a bunch of writing prompts to finish, and they're going nowhere fast. (Three of them are about Nick, and I'm really not in the mood to write for him.)

Well, that's kind of a lie. It's just that most of the things I want to write for Nick involve Aya. And I do want to write their final battle, but that's amazingly, incredibly depressing and involves Liall getting raped, or at the very least severely assaulted, and the fallout from that nearly leads to their divorce. And then, you know, she and Nick die, and they don't even die together. Nick's horse also dies. Aya has her fourth and final miscarriage, and loses her eye. It's really depressing.

So instead I'll write bits of the actual story...like the part where Blaine dies! Because that's not depressing, either.

--

The rifthorror crawled closer.

The elves had fled, seeking higher ground. Their order was meant to fight, but nothing mortal could stand before this. It was a nothingness older than the universe, so old and empty it could not contain even a proper name.

Blaine could barely remember his own name- he was too human for this, too mortal- and so he'd become something else, not human nor god but something in between. His god was busy elsewhere, distracted by a war on the aetherial plane. The only one listening was Natasha, who could not touch him. "Who am I supposed to pray to if this doesn't work?"

She laughed, her voice faint over the sound of rushing water in his head. If this didn't work, there would be nothing left to pray to, except perhaps the undead gods of Radrezaria with their strange, opaque magicks.

Venani might be ignoring him, but the Avatar's death had opened a doorway in his soul, and he drank in aether with abandon. His skin grew scales, and his soul swelled, stretching to the bursting point, like a balloon overfilled. There was water everywhere, and it answered his call, rising up from the stones beneath his feet.

The rifthorror crawled closer.

The water rose higher.

It had swallowed pieces of the city, devouring the soul of the earth itself. It was no bigger than a man to the naked eye, but to those with aethersight, it expanded beyond the limits of what could be measured. And where it walked, life simply...ceased.

The water rose higher.

He began to choke. He could breathe water as easily as air, but it choked him now, filling his lungs. The horror was looking at him, and they were both drowning and it wasn't fair. The power he was using came from Venani, and Venani had marked him from the moment of his birth. Do no harm. Not even to this thing of nothingness and death that came to devour the world- and he could see it in perfect detail, and he knew exactly how to destroy it and he knew- knew- exactly what it would cost him.

There was no one to hear him scream but Natasha- and where she walked, so too did her brother.

The rifthorror stood before him, close enough to touch.

(you are so small, so young) it said. (and I am so old) (this world used to be mine) it said (it was mine)

He could see the outlines of the souls it had swallowed sparkling along the edges of his consciousness. He could see its eyes, like stars, and he could see its hunger. He could feel its sadness.

His hands- still rippling with scales- plunged into the center of it. He couldn't feel anything anymore. His world became the soft echo of its voice and the rush of water as the waves crashed over them both and he became, for a single moment, a perfect conduit of power.

The last thing he thought was that it was terribly ironic- and then the sound of Natasha's dice, her brother's footsteps and-

(you are so young)

-------------

Silverlock was running on adrenaline and aether- his senses were in overdrive, leading him to the tower. All around him, he could feel the tiny lives of the vermin in the catacombs, and those few larger creatures that hadn't fled. Above, he could feel the rifthorror like a pulsing wave of rot- and then it disappeared in a wave of pure, distilled aether.

His left arm burned with sudden, exquisite pain. He stopped short, clawing at the source of the pain, and then tearing at his skin with his knife when he realized the cause.

The talisman was a match for the one he'd kept in his right arm, woven with the same spells and protections, and keyed to Blaine the way its twin was keyed to Foxbird. Her talisman was now around his neck, still whole. If he needed to, he could use it to find her; if not, as long as it was whole, he knew she was alive, and well.

The small crystal disc burned white hot, cauterizing the wound even as he ripped it out of his arm, and it shattered when it hit the ground.

He stared at the broken talisman for a full minute, blood rushing in his ears, unable to feel anything but numb.

And then he could feel nothing but rage, and rage was good because rage was power- and may all the gods help anything that stood in his way.
---------------------------------------

The rifthorrors are made of anti-aether, for lack of a better word; they're the stuff that was left over at the creation of the universe, and they're keyed to certain elements the same way the aetherial plane deities are. The seven horrors weren't shattered in the sundering at the start of the Fourth Era; this one is one of the lesser six, the one representing Fire.

Basically, Blaine got lucky, otherwise he'd never have been able to touch the thing. If he'd been elementally aligned to anything but water (technically water, earth, and life are Venani's elements, but Blaine naturally takes to water far better than to the other elements), the thing would've eaten him.

Silverlock likes keeping tabs on the people he cares about; he made locator talismans for Foxbird and Blaine (he has them for a few other people as well), and kept them embedded in his arms. (Yeah, okay, it's a little gross, but it means that no one's going to find them unless they know where to look; talismans of that nature are dangerous in the wrong hands.) They explode when the person they're keyed to dies.

Blaine gets better, of course, much to Silverlock's vague consternation and relief. ("I'm, um, sorry. For, you know, dying..." "Don't worry, I intend to take full advantage of your guilt for the next, oh, ten years or so." "You could try to not look so gleeful when you say that.")

Pirates of the Caribbean

Noting that the following will contain spoilers!

Now that I've seen the movie twice (okay, one and a half times- I slept from Jack's rescue from Davy Jones' Locker to the gathering of the Brethren Court the second time), I can put my thoughts and feelings into better order.

I should watch the second movie again at some point soon, just to remind myself of the plot- but I really didn't enjoy the second movie much. It was too much filler, and did too many things to the characters that I didn't really approve of.

The first Pirates of the Carribbean movie came out in the summer after my senior year of highschool; I saw it in theaters three times. And now, the last movie comes out during senior week of my last year at MHC...I think I'm a bit more fond of the series than I would be otherwise, simply for that reason.

Anyway, At World's End was beautiful. The opening scene, both times, sent shivers down my spine. The litany of rights being taken away in the name of stopping piracy felt a bit overtly political to me, which was odd, given that this is Disney, that staunch supporter of traditional family values, democracy, and America. Still, the singing and the hangings were a powerful, powerful way to start the movie, and I'm a bit in love with the song "Hoist the Colors."

Liked the Singapore pirates, wished the Singapore Sisters hadn't bitten the bullet so quickly. That whole scene made me wonder why Barbossa and Elizabeth ever let Will open his mouth in public, because the boy may be cute, but he really isn't that bright. (He redeemed himself so much in this movie, though! I just can't get over my dislike of Orlando Bloom enough to properly adore the character.) I loved that Elizabeth pulled a knife on the guard, and Barbossa had to tell her to back down. I wish that sort of characterization had been the consistent one for Elizabeth- she became ruthless in the second movie, and that ruthlessness would have been palatable if it had been consistent. It would have been believable if Elizabeth hadn't been so clean. A girl doesn't learn to fight and swear and be piratey and still maintain such a clear complexion. It pissed me off, that she had no visible scars.

I'll admit I wasn't enthused at the idea of Barbossa being brought back to life at the end of DMC, but he was amazing in AWE. The whole movie was just a lot of him going, "I am surrounded by IDIOTS," and it was fantastic.

The multiple Jacks scene was a bit too art-movie for me, though the goat was a nice touch, and the crabs were awesome. The only thing I could think through the whole scene, though, was, "Man, this is going to make some fantastic livejournal icons." I can see them now. "MY peanut," and "Shoo," and "I'm through with this weirdness."

Had a few "Physics doesn't work that way!" moments on the Black Pearl.

The first time through, the intertwining betrayals and the plotting was pretty incomprehensible. It was clearer in my second viewing- and, to me, the movie underscores Jack's brilliance. It's a brilliance born of insanity (I hold that the many Jacks are always there, lurking in the back of his mind), but it is brilliance. He was brilliant in the first movie, too- the second movie butchered that, but very little happened in the third movie that he wasn't aware of.

I hold that Jack was in control of everything until he had Davy Jones' heart in his hand. He couldn't stab it- he wasn't sure he wanted the fate of the Captain of the Flying Dutchman, but he figured the threat would be enough to protect Will and Elizabeth. He wasn't counting on Davy Jones being a man with nothing left to lose, and while I think he was shocked (not devastated, not quite) by Will being stabbed, he saw it as an out for himself. I think Jack was holding Will's arm when the heart was stabbed (I can't remember, though- it might have been Elizabeth? Argh, I made a point of watching for that the second time through).

The first time through, I kept thinking Bootstrap was going to sacrifice himself to be captain, so Will's part was a shock to me. Second time through, it was much clearer that Bootstrap was the one who cut out Will's heart, and that was just chilling. "Part of the ship, part of the crew," indeed.

Norrington's death was a sad surprise (had a "guns don't work that way!" moment there, when he shot the rope), but there wasn't anywhere for him to go, really. If he survived, he'd have gone back to being an enemy of the pirates, and he had no realy way to redeem himself for the second movie.

Beckett's death scene pissed me off. That was the death scene of a noble villain, one who did everything with the best of intentions, one who realizes that his actions were atrocious, and one who knows that the only way for him to set things right is to die. Beckett was not that villain. He was motivated solely by greed, and his actions, deplorable as they were to the audience, were technically in the right. He was trying to make the seas safe for merchant ships and ordinary citizens but destroying the pirates who, you know, loot and plunder and ravage and steal. He did nothing to deserve a noble death; he had nothing to reflect on to make his death mean anything, not for his character or for the plot. The way he kept repeating "Good business" may have been some attempt at making his death mean something, but he still wasn't a noble villain. He shouldn't have gotten an awesome death scene. (Not that I didn't appreciate it, aesthetically, but it was out of place, and irritatingly so.)

Also, friendly fire isn't, and at that range, there's no way Pearl and The Flying Dutchman wouldn't have been shooting each other. There's also no reason for Endeavor not to have opened fire right back at them. Dutchman would've been fine, but Pearl would've gone down like a sack of vaguely supernatural bricks. Stupid naval warfare tactics. Really stupid.

I didn't listen to Elizabeth's speech the first time through. The second time through, I did, and wished I hadn't. When she says, "We will show them what we can do," I figured she was going to actually say something along the lines of, "We will show them the meaning of fear," or something equally angry and violent. Her speech was that of the already defeated- it was the "Do your best, even if it isn't good enough!" speech. What they needed was a "We're the Goddamn Pirate Brethren, and we will CRUSH AND DESTROY all who stand before us!" Because they're pirates. They kill and loot and rape and pillage, it's what they're good at.

I enjoyed the fight/wedding scene too much to be bothered especially by Elizabeth's mysterious ability to fight; that was the ruthlessness we'd seen in the beginning of the movie showing through, I suppose. (At least she didn't try to solve anything by fainting this time. >_<)

Loved Ragetti releasing Calypso; he and Pintel and Gibbs had a tendency to steal scenes, and it was awesome. Loved Captain Teague and the Pirata Codex, and the fact that Jack's hair might someday grow up to be as awesome as his father's. The bit of conversation Jack had with Teague after Elizabeth gets elected Pirate King makes me wonder if Teague didn't trade Jack's mother for immortality or something similar.

Kind of wondered at the circumstances that made both Jack and Barbossa Pirate Lords. Barbossa was originally Jack's first mate, and I guess he had the Black Pearl for ten years, but the pieces of eight have to be passed on to officially named successors- and the Carribbean only needs one Pirate Lord. ...okay, I guess they could use two, but still. Makes me wonder what happened there, 'specially since Ragetti was carrying around that eye for three movies. (Makes the scene where Barbossa sticks it in his mouth and then pops it back in Ragetti's eye socket a bit more meaningful. Also, Ragetti in an eyepatch = hot.)

Loved the ending. Loved that Will became Captain of The Flying Dutchman, loved that Elizabeth agreed to wait for him and keep his heart. Wished the movie had made it clearer that Will got freed from his service- it's vaguely implied in the cookie, with the green flash, but it needed to be stated more explicitly, I think. The ambiguity is awesome, though, and I prefer to think that he doesn't get to stay after ten years, because it makes his choice and Elizabeth's choice that much more poignant. It's a proper fairy tale, not a Disney fairy tale, and I love that.

Still, as far as my squishy, happy-ending-loving parts go, it's nice to know that Will can canonically have a chance at returning to Elizabeth and his girly son. XD

I shall gleefully await the fourth movie, and hope that neither Will nor Elizabeth show up in it- because their stories are done, even if Jack's isn't.

not gonna be...

Continued from the previous post: the life and times of Silverlock D'Alestri, post-plot.

After about twenty years, Blaine dies and Silverlock gets a bit wangsty. He hangs around the Temple of Venani a lot, and becomes close friends with the new, non-crazy Avatar. This comes in handy when Theron discovers he's allergic to bees. (I'M A BAD PERSON.)

He spends some time working for the mob, and he goes back to prostituting himself for a bit (as a free person, he can get a guild license, which he does; he maintains his standing in the Guild of Prostitution for the rest of his life, just because it's a useful thing to have, particularly when he's feeling petty and vengeful, or when he wants to make some spare cash).

Two hundred years after Blaine dies, he sees Theron in the slave markets. The first thing he notices is that Theron looks like a pretty version of Blaine; the second thing he notices is that the kid is practically seething with untapped magickal potential.

He spends the next eight years making Theron's life miserable while giving him a thorough grounding in aetherial magick. Because Theron is actually an inhuman and unnatural magickal abomination, he's quite good at manipulating aether, and is a much better mage than Silverlock once he pulls his head out of his ass long enough to learn things. Of course, Theron is also thin, sickly, and apparently deathly allergic to bees, so as long as you punch him in the face before he starts spellcasting, you're golden. Or, you know, force feed him honey.

They have sex once, and Theron never forgives him for it. Even after Theron leaves and becomes the zombie overlord of Radrezaria, Silverlock never stops being in love with him, just a little. And Theron, emotionally stunted little idiot that he is, never quite realizes this.

He spends some time as an acolyte of Joshel, and later some time as an acolyte of Azan (more than any of the other deities, those two are his patrons- he's bound to Venani and Natasha because of Blaine, but neither of them expect much from him, though he does have a brief affair with Natasha- but most people do, at least once). Mostly he does freelance magework and hangs around with the DeLavrey family, becoming a retainer of sorts. The government gives him a job in the arcane researach division of the military towards the end of the Fourth Era (he remains an independent contractor, though, as he usually has several unrelated, private projects going on at the same time as his work for Parliament). When Radrezaria implodes, the Justiciar demands an explanation; Silverlock is one of the few people with any inkling of what might have happened, and that gets the Justiciar's attention.

He changes his name to Rien when the Voyancy is destroyed; those of his associates who survived assume he does it out of mourning and respect for the dead. He actually does it because he knows the Era is coming to a close- and because he thinks Theron is finally dead. (He does stupid things for the people he loves.)

In the Fifth Era, he's still doing freelance work as an independent contractor, but he's also the Justiciar's Shadow- which basically means he's back to being an assassin, but a government sanctioned one. Thankfully, the only members of the Assassins Guild who knew him as a Guildsman who are still alive are Maddel and the Librarian, and neither of them really care that he's broken Guild law. The Guild has a phenomenally high price on his head for being an unlicensed assassin.

The Guild is much smaller in the Fifth Era- free capitalism reigns, and all of the Guilds are shrunken in their powers (except the Guild of Prostitution, curiously enough; that one's stronger than ever). The DeLavrey family is headed by a teenaged boy, and Silverlock has very little to do with him, on the Justiciar's orders.

He meets Orrin when the Dean of one of the universities offers him a position as a teacher; most mages died at the end of the Fourth Era, and the new Era brought an influx of leechmages and magicrafters. They work in related departments, although Silverlock does less "work" and more "irritating the fuck out of his superiors" than anything else. No one at the university can touch him; he's one of the strongest mages left alive, and he finds this hilariously ironic. As far as magick goes, he's very well trained, but not actually all that powerful. Most of his spellcasting is very subtle, ritualistic stuff that kills people very quickly and effectively while giving him enough of a boost to escape. Unless he's got an outside power source nearby, he's actually very limited in the sorts of magick he can do.

Orrin is nothing at all like Blaine, but his soul is the same shape and operates on the same frequencies, and that's enough for Silverlock to get attached. It helps that Orrin is cute and surprisingly well adjusted despite having been born with no soul. Orrin, after growing up in a research laboratory with Faraz, Lorreth, Lindra, and Ravi as his closest friends, has different criteria for "weird" than the rest of society and thus fins Silverlock to be just, like, one of the coolest things ever.

(It also helps that Orrin really, enthusiastically enjoys sex once he gets the hang of it, and that growing up in a research lab means he'll try anything once...or twice, or, y'know, anything is pretty good once you get used to it...)

Silverlock doesn't know if he imagines the pieces of Blaine he occasionally sees in Orrin; he also doesn't know if he likes Orrin for Orrin, or if it's just a side effect of being drugged by his soul. This is, actually, something he loses sleep over; after Blaine's death in the Fourth Era, he became a much colder, much crueler person, but after the opening of the Tower and the start of the Fifth Era, he mellows out and rejoins the rest of humanity as an active participant. (Theron is indirectly responsible for this; his situation is one of the few things in his life that Silverlock feels guilt over.)

More plot happens, but that isn't quite worked out yet. I do know that Theron gets to take down about a hundred dragons by transmuting the air in their lungs into nitrous oxide ("Dragon physiology is curiously vulnerable to nitrous oxide, you know. It puts them down for days- most make a full recovery, but about ten percent of our subjects just...never woke up. A pity, really- we lost so many good specimens that way.") because I have to let Theron be badass on occasion. It's a tragic waste of his character if I don't.

(Interesting point of trivia! Whenever Theron and Silverlock get into arguments, Silverlock usually wins by threatening to sleep with Bren and/or Stella. This is way more effective than it should be.)

I'm not sure what happens after that; he really is determined to live forever, because the world really doesn't get boring. Possibly he'll travel- either planar travel, or I'll expand the Toggle world, since I know there are other continents. I just don't know who, or what is on them. I can see him enjoying the Boffo universe, though, or possibly Uva.

za

Continued from the previous post: the life and times of Silverlock D'Alestri.

About a year before the end of his indenture, and after about a week of intensive summoning work, an assassin breaks into the house. Silverlock (who was asleep on the couch at the time) throws a paralysis cantrip at him and forgets about him until morning, when Gannet leaves for the university for the day.

The assassin is Hawk Samarkand, and by the time Silverlock wakes up enough to release him from the paralysis cantrip, he has one hell of a crick in his neck. Hawk isn't completely incompetent, but he's not used to doing solo missions, and his partner is out of commission with a set of broken ribs for a few weeks. (Maddel frequently gets pissed off at the various assassins who come through his infirmary, and will refuse to magickally heal them until he feels they've learned their lesson.) Once he promises to not assassinate anyone, Silverlock gives him a cup of coffee and they chat for a while. Hawk is worried that he won't be able to support himself and his partner on his own, and if he can't manage for a few weeks, how is he going to manage for a few months when he and his partner eventually decide to have kids? Silverlock, meanwhile, has no idea what he's going to do with himself once his indenture is up; he still has thousands of marks of debt to pay off because Gannet is an asshole who steals things (and people).

Hawk is a nice guy at heart- a truly good person, honestly, for all that he kills people for a living. ("It's a living, you know? Been the family business for generations, and it's not like I'm bad at it. Sure, I'm not as good at it as Civet, but most people aren't. And I just wouldn't be satisfied doing something like, I dunno, carpentry, or bartending. There's no thrill. And I meet interesting people this way, too.") He offers to sponsor Silverlock in the Guild, if he can't find any other, more suitable work once his indenture expires. Or, at the very least, he'll pay back the cup of excellent coffee Silverlock gave him.

(Silverlock falls a little bit in love with Hawk, too, but he does that a lot. It's one of the things Aya mocks him for most frequently- to which he usually responds with, "And I suppose you're so much happier, being the frigid bitch that you are.")

A year later, Gannet kicks him out, and he leaves with nothing but the clothes on his back and a plethora of interesting and potentially dangerous tattoos. He goes looking for the Assassins Guild, and finds it- ("If you're looking for the mage covens, you're in the wrong area." "I'm not looking for any trouble, milady. I'm looking for Hawk Samarkand." "Then you are looking for trouble, since it follows that man like stench on a bog corpse." "Be that as it may, he owes me a cup of coffee.") and gets sponsored as a provisional apprentice.

The only Assassin-Mage in the Guild takes him on. Banshee is a 4'9" black woman with vaguely sentient hair, and she kicks Silverlock's ass six ways to Sunday in the first half hour of their acquaintence. Then she teaches him everything she knows about destructive necromancy, which is considerable.

He keeps up his acquaintence with Hawk and Civet until Civet finally gets pregnant; they still remain friends, but by that point he's too busy with his apprenticeship and they're too busy with raising a kid and getting paid for them to see each other much. He does occasionally get to hear Hawk lamenting the kid's clumsiness, and he finds out in a peripheral sort of way that the kid got sent off to the Thieves' Guild and was doing well there. (This doesn't become important until a good twenty years later, when he meets Blaine. After a few years, some pieces click into place, and Silverlock spends a day alternating between beating his head against a wall in frustration and laughing hysterically.)

He spends somewhere between five and ten years as Banshee's apprentice- probably closer to five, since he already has a thorough background in magickal stuff, and is physically in better condition than most of his fellow Guildsmen. She teaches him some advanced weaponswork to supplement his streetfighting skills (and the stuff he learned from Aya, way back when), and she teaches him to integrate his magick with his fighting, and she spends two or three years attacking him without warning to build up his reflexes and his resistance to various poisons. (For years, that's his one failing as an assassin- he doesn't have the immunity gained by spending a lifetime absorbing small amounts of poison, and this leads to some humorous episodes in the infirmary when his career is just beginning. He figures out how to neutralize most poisons magickally, but that was a trial and error process that also frequently ended hilariously.)

Sometimes he runs into other mages, who twitch violently at the thought of his chosen profession. Most mages with strong empathy become healers or psychotherapists; very few of them become serial killers. ("I see it as the natural progression of things; the only rush greater than sex is death. And I can see by your horrified look that that isn't a satisfactory answer. Ah, well. Let's just say I'm a masochist and leave it at that, shall we?") Being part of the Guild means he has an enormous extended family- he has a society to belong to, and everyone who isn't part of that society is a nonentity until they prove themselves otherwise. Killing them is a bit like killing very large rats that twitch and squeak in entertaining ways when you poke them. He's a very well conditioned, functional sort of sociopath.

When he finally earns his tags (Guild-speak for graduating one's apprenticeship; proof of membership and identity are a set of dog tags, magickally imprinted by the Guildmaster himself), he and Banshee work as partners for a few years, until she retires. Then he's on his own; he uses the connections he has to the Candlemark gangs and the more eccentric parts of high society to good advantage, and he builds up an information network that is the envy of many in the Guild. Most of his close acquaintences from his youth are in positions of power once he becomes an assassin.

He has as many enemies in the Guild as he has allies; for the most part, he's seen as an eccentric, but he's respected for his skills. He's not the best at what he does, but he works hard to be damned good at it, and he doesn't get involved much in Guild politics.

He mourns Civet's transition to Guildmaster, and is one of the few people who says goodbye to Hawk when Hawk leaves the Guild. (Hawk becomes a bartender in Eastmark.)

He had an apprentice, who would've been another assassin-mage, but the kid died in a stupid accident. Silverlock doesn't talk about the incident ever, really. He doesn't blame himself, but he still sees it as a failure of sorts. He took Foxbird on her apprentice test, which is a bit different- he just oversaw her first assassination, and made sure nothing got too terribly fucked up. He wasn't her actual apprentice-master; most apprentices do not, in fact, get individual training of that sort. They tend to be communally trained by the older Guildsmen. Only those who require specialist training, like assassin-mages or poisonmakers, usually receive an apprentice-mster.

As an assassin-mage, and as a leechmage, he frequently gets called on to clean up other people's messes. He works a lot with the Guild mystics to track retrieve the tags of dead assassins, and he often gets called on to interrogate Guildsmen who've failed their missions. This is actually the case when he meets Blaine for the first time; an assassin came back to the Guild in shreds, after failing a time-sensitive assignment. He has to get all of the pertinent details out of the assassin in question before Maddel puts him under for intensive healing, so someone can go out and finish the job.

Blaine gets a nasty jolt from encountering Silverlock's leechmagick while in the middle of channeling his deity; Nagendra's curse kicks in, and his connection to his god shuts down, leaving him with a backlash migraine of epic proportions.

For a few moments, however, Silverlock was able to get a very good "look" at his soul, and what he saw was fascinating. (Deity-born mages like Blaine always parse a bit strangely to those with aetherial sight. To someone as sensitive as Silverlock, he's like an Escher done in irridescent colors.) Really, he was doomed before he and Blaine ever had their first civilized conversation; when he gets attached to people, he does so on an aetherial level. I wouldn't use any term as trite as "soulmates," since the feeling isn't at all reciprocal, and because on any given day, he's likely to run into five or six people whose souls operate on a similar wavelength. It just happens to be a wavelength that his soul finds irresistable.

(According to Silverlock, it's like cats with catnip, and he's very, very embarrassed to admit this.) It's because of the buzz he got off of thirty seconds in the presence of Blaine's soul that he decides to get to know him better. (Blaine figures this out after he dies, and spends a good deal of time wishing he had a corporeal form with which to kick Silverlock in the head.) The irony here is, of course, that to be within thirty feet of Blaine, Silverlock has to shut down his empathy, or Blaine loses contact with his deity. (This is really only potentially harmful when he's in the middle of spellcasting; the rest of the time he would just feel vaguely disoriented and slightly nauseous. As a priest, he has a direct connection to his god, all the time; he hears hissing in the back of his head, and the sound of water. When that connection shuts down, the lack manifests itself as something like an inner ear imbalance. They give each other migraines! ...no, I don't believe in writing functional relationships, why do you ask?)

It's fortunate for both of them that they actually like each other; Blaine is a lot like Hawk when he isn't wangsting, and Silverlock goes out of his way to be a likeable person when it suits him. They also bond over a shared affection for Foxbird and a shared distaste of Greymalkin. (I still need to write the scene where Blaine gives Greymalkin syphilis.)

Aya and Blaine don't get along very well; Silverlock thinks this is poetic justice, since he despised her boyfriend. Aya terrifies Blaine just a little bit, though by the time she's a general and head of the DeLavrey family, she terrifies most people just a little bit. It's the eyepatch- you still get the feeling her missing eye is staring at you, somewhere. (There are a great many people who think she actually had her eye magically preserved and uses it to spy on her enemies. This is blatantly untrue, but Aya does nothing to discourage this rumor.) Aya mostly just doesn't have time for Blaine's wangsty nonsense, and she thinks Silverlock could do much better for himself than some whiny, underfed religious fanatic. In this, and perhaps only this, she and Blaine are in agreement.

The actual story still needs a number of plot points worked out, but the biggest spoiler is that it was the Guildmaster the whole time. That's a subject for another post, I think- this one is mostly about Silverlock.

After the story, and after he gets his hands put back on properly (Blaine stuck them back on, but it was more of a quick fix than anything permanent), he keeps on assassining for a few more years- ten or twelve. As a reward for helping to save the world, Parliament agreed to waive his taxes for the rest of his life, so he finally pays off the last of his debts to the Guild and works when it pleases him to do so. (At the time, he wasn't planning to live forever, but the no taxes thing was definitely a marker in the "pro" column we he did make that decision.) When he gets tired of working, he starts teaching, though he refuses to teach any new assassin mages.

shtuff

Oh, man, Blogger has an autosave function now. My life is golden.

I need...to get off my ass and stop being emotionally/mentally paralyzed. I can't afford paralysis right now- I won't be able to afford it for the next few months, possibly years. I'm not sure how to deal with this.

Anyway, that's not why I'm posting. I'm posting because I've got crap in my head that needs excising, so here goes: early Fourth Era Silverlock, in a nutshell! Sort of.

Silverlock gets really attached to people he cares about. Part of this is just the way he was conditioned- the best way to keep slaves from rebelling was to make them part of the family, and he considered his fellows at the House his family. The House Mother and House Steward were his parents; the other slaves were his brothers and sisters. And he was happy growing up with them, and he loved them all dearly. (The rest of it is the way his magick works and the way his soul interacts with the world around him, but more on that later.)

Hundreds of years later, he wouldn't trade his magick for anything- but when Gannet Sorlin took him away from the House as his apprentice, Silverlock seriously considered suicide, rather than leave his family.

He was fairly miserable as Gannet's apprentice. They lived on the edges of Candlemark, where it borders Eastmark- it's not the nicest of neighborhoods, and at the time, he didn't really know anything about life outside of the upperclass. Sorlin, recognizing this, put severe restrictions on his movements, so as to prevent him from getting knifed in an alley.

The first castings he learned were defensive ones- he wasn't permitted to leave the house until he could construct a solid energy shield as a reflex. (Gannet was an asshole, but he wasn't stupid, and he wasn't about to waste a potential leechmage. Third class mages were incredibly rare, and having an apprentice was a mark of status among the leechmage community.) It took him the better part of a year to manage this, of course- and during that year, he wasn't permitted past the threshold of the front door.

Eventually, Gannet lets him wander about on his own, but for a while, he isn't allowed past the borders of the street they live on. (I have the name written down somewhere, but I can't recall it at the moment.) He spends a lot of time sitting on the front steps, writing letters to Aya. By this point, she hasn't spoken to him in years, and has more or less given up on him for dead. She hasn't met Nick and Liall yet, but she's joined the army and moved off of the DeLavrey estates.

(They meet when she's fifteen, and one of her mother's cast-offs hires Silverlock as an escort to one of Ninaya's parties. She's a rebellious teenager, he's representative of a million things her mother hates- and, to their respective surprises, they actually like each other. [The man who buys him for the evening is High Prince Ostrek Rehoren of Murundcar; Os is the reason Silverlock can curse fluently in High Murundic.])

They keep in contact through letters, since she can't get away from her duties with the army, and he's not allowed to wander on his own. (When he's a slave, Silverlock is incredibly obedient. Mouthy, yes, but obedient.) At some point, when he's sitting on the steps, writing a letter to her, one of the neighborhood kids wanders over and starts being annoying. Her name is Andra.

Gannet spends most of his time working at one of the universities, which means he's gone for most of the day. He'd give Silverlock some sort of task or assignment to complete, but otherwise, Silverlock would be left to his own devices, such as they were.

Andra is your standard six-year-old street urchin, but she doesn't throw rocks at him like several of the other street urchins do- she's just curious, because he sits on the steps every day, writing, and when the others do throw rocks, the rocks just bounce away.

He teaches her to read; she's a sweet kid, and bright for her age, and her mother works all day, so she's lonely. He can kind of relate. This is when he starts using the name "Silverlock," rather than his House name. (It was "Estri," which is Shrivish for "prince." Aya still occasionally calls him that, when she's feeling sentimental.) He'll say he chose that name because it was indicative of the person he'd become as a mage (the streak in his hair manifested when Gannet broke his magick), but it's actually just a nickname the kids on his street gave him. It's also the name Andra's mother uses for him, and he was a bit in love with her for quite a while.

Once Gannet is assured that he can take care of himself, he starts wandering the streets at night. He gets into a decent number of fights, but manages to stay alive. People learn to respect him after a while. He runs into a street-dance fight and convinces a few gang members to teach him the basics of street fighting and street dancing. Magick is all well and good, but one of the first things he learned at the House was to be comfortable with his body, and to use it to the full limits of its capabilities.

He takes to street dancing like a fish to water, and having an outlet for his physical energy (besides, y'know, having sex with Andra's mother [who totally has a name, I swear]) actually helps him concentrate better in his mage studies. He's a very physical person, even without his magick; he tends to touch people when talking to them, and he's very physically affectionate with people he considers friends. Sleeping around is an extension of this; sex is just another gesture of respect or regard, but not a particularly valuable one. It doesn't mean anything more than a friendly handshake, and it takes him a very long time before he finally understands that most people don't- or can't- feel the same way.

He's a remarkably sensitive empath, and he's had very thorough psychological training, but he's still occasionally clueless when it comes to dealing with people. (He figures things out for the most part by the time he joins the Guild, but he still has a number of gaps in his concept of "normal" human interaction.)

He becomes an active member of his neighborhood, and even though the local gangs don't completely accept him as one of their own, he still gets his own place in their hierarchy. He stops being miserable once he's got a group to belong to; the one thing discovering his empathy truly underscores is his need for people. It's as much an energy thing as it is an emotional thing; his own personal aether reserves are quite small, and if he isn't leeching energy from other people, he gets exhausted fairly easily.

He meets Vanick and Liall a few months before they die; he and Nick hate each other on sight because Nick has some very old fashioned notions of propriety, and Silverlock has dealth with traditionalist Akvarians in the past. He and Liall get along just fine, though, and they both half-jokingly lament the fact that Aya is terminally monogamous. (I've had Nick trying to explain Akvarian views on adultery and homosexuality, but the whole subject makes him amazingly uncomfortable. Liall has done a lot to break him of his more offensively bigoted ideas, but some things are too ingrained for her to fix.)

For all that they never see each other, he and Aya remain close friends; this meeting is the last one they'll have before he joins the Guild and her mother dies.

I now have a del.ici.ous account, because my recent computer troubles have made me paranoid about losing my bookmarks. Here 'tis. Currently it only contains my fic folder, but I'll get around to sticking my art and WTF links in there, too.