Thursday, October 21, 2004

Enough about Theron. He depresses me. The first arc of the story is his childhood, his rise to power, and his betrayal of Brenon and Mihonil. The second arc takes place between a hundred and a hundred fifty years later, after he's taken over.

Theron takes over by creating an army of the Dead and slaughtering everything in his path. He then turns all of those corpses into the Dead; using a combination of Omnismithing and arcane magic, he creates zombies with lifespans. He leaves a few people alive, but for the most part, they're all zombies. Then he rearranges the scenery, and sinks the capital city below the ground. (Yes, this is actually just Vagrant Story without the ass pants.) Theron, as the new Voyance, sets up court in the Undercity and does a few things to obliterate all magic use within the borders of his country.

The city spread out; the Dead don't need to worry about exhausting natural resources, and the living are considered second class citizens.

Warning: not especially pleasant

"Isn't this what you wanted?"

His voice echoed in the back of his skull as he kissed Brenon, his fingers digging furrows in the cold skin. Hard and vicious and deep, as he delved for the last vestiges of warmth in his friend's body with his tongue, with his hands. It was so cold, and he was so still.
--------------------

It was a dark world.

The sky was never so much gray as it was colorless, devoid of hue even when the sun was shining. And when the sun was shining, it never even managed a proper shine- it hung in the colorless sky like a coin on a string, left in the rain. It's light was tarnished, desolate.

It was a cold world.

The cities were as colorless as the sky, trapped in a perpetual state of late autumn, filled with bare trees and damp, biting winds. Spring was a legend, and summer nothing more than a myth. All there was was autumn, and the promise of winter on the horizon, forever.

It was a dead world.

Corpses filled the streets, and the living hid beneath the gutters, waiting for the reapers. Each day grew colder, darker, and more and more of them left their dilapidated dwellings to join the dead in the streets.

Stella smoothed out her skirt and crossed her legs at the ankles, waiting patiently for the bus. Dead leaves swirled, dancing like marionettes around her feet in the cold, cold wind.
--------------

There's something oddly touching about the way Theron violates his best friend's corpse...*cough* I'm so going to end up tearing my eyes out if I ever manage to get to that scene. Theron is just so full of anger by that point- he's angry at the world in general, but angry at Brenon in particular for giving up. He sees it as a betrayal; this doesn't excuse what he does (and never mind the details, really), particularly since he does it again to Mihonil later, when he's thinking perfectly clearly.

I think I'm just going to blame Theron's character on the Book of Vile Darkness and have done with it.

The other bit is Stella's world, if it were as dramatic and pretentious as I feel like making it. She's blind and wears skirts with ponchos and bitch boots, and Solneki is afraid of her. Since Solneki isn't afraid of anything, this is rather impressive on her part.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Birthdays

It's late; I wake to darkness and the moon,
My rest once more distressed by frightful things.
My body aches from rising far too soon,
And trembles with the fears that autumn brings.
I think October caught me unawares
With turning leaves that suddenly enthrall,
And sighing breezes singing soft like prayers,
Their music dying in the dawning fall.
I hear the changes coming, like the plague,
Brought in with mobile motes of rushing time
To shatter fragile hopes and make dreams vague,
With both the terrifying and sublime.
It's late and I must wait for night to end,
As sleep is ever my inconstant friend.
It's late; I wake to hunger and the moon,
My rest once more distressed by frightful things.
My body aches from rising far too soon,
And trembles with the fears that Autumn brings.
I think October caught me unawares
With turning leaves that suddenly enthral,
And sighing breezes singing soft like prayers,
Their music dying in the dawning Fall.
I hear the changes coming, like the plague,
Brought in with mobile motes of rushing time
To shatter fragile hopes and make dreams vague,
With both the terrifying and sublime.
It's late; I wake with moonlight in my eyes

Monday, October 18, 2004

Theron

It's kind of funny how much I actually like Theron, despite the fact that he makes me sick sometimes.

Let's face it, the kid is screwed up. He survived by cannibalizing his mother's corpse- only to be raised by said corpse. Even if they'd stayed in one place long enough for him to make friends, most other children avoided him instinctively or threw rocks at him.

He actually seems to exhibit symptoms of autism or schizophrenia; until he meets Brenon, he honestly does not give a flying fuck about the rest of humanity. He's a very disturbing and disturbed child- his lack of emotion may be the result of the rather traumatic circumstances of his birth, but there's probably also a genetic predilection for various brain abnormalities.

'Course, I'm not at all qualified to judge if my characters are autistic or not, but it seems as though Theron could be, slightly. Asberger's syndrome, perhaps, only he doesn't exhibit any of the obsessive compulsive symptoms or any of the impaired motor functions. His fixation with magic could possibly fit into that category, but it's not quite the same...It would make a great deal of sense for him to have some sort of developmental disorder, though. And mild autism would explain a few things.

He's incredibly intelligent and amazingly talented with magic of all kinds- he can whistle, weave, and smith, but smithing is his primary strength. It takes him a while to develop into an Omnismith; having the talent is one thing, but no amount of talent is going to help without the proper training. He's a magical prodigy, though.

He becomes Bren's friend because Bren is persistent and can't take a hint; Theron actually doesn't feel particularly attached to Bren, despite the fact that the older boy saves his ass on a regular basis. He feels no empathy towards other living things, which is why Bren has to actually tell him that kidnapping Whimsey's pet rabbits and cutting them open is a very bad thing.

As he gets older, Theron learns to interact normally with other people. He still just uses them to further his own goals, but he can pretend to care about normal, human things. If he feels anything at all for Brenon, he hides it well...and never mind about what exactly happens to Brenon, because I still haven't forgiven him for that. Well, not nevermind, because I'll have to write it eventually, I suppose.

Theron wanders around for several years and picks up a few classical arcanum techniques, after finding he has a real affinity for pain magic. He's kind of like Silverlock D'Alestri, only not at all concerned with the consent of his power foci. (Silver gets his power from pain and sex, but he never uses someone as a foci without their permission unless he's being paid to do so. Gotta love mercenary morals.)

The Voyance Blacklists Theron for using arcane magic in the city, but doesn't realize it's his own son he just condemned to Death (really need new words for this). Theron leaves for a while and comes back an Omnismith who acts like a Vimancer- which is slang for necromancer, sort of. Vimancers work with both life and death, hence the turning a cabbage into a bird and creating life out of that which was dead. Proper Vimancers are just myths- no amount of aether manipulation can create or heal a soul. The Voyance is an inverse Vimancer, also called an Unraveler, because he can animate corpses and destroy or wound souls.

Being Blacklisted is what allows Theron to become an Unraveler like his father; his already screwed up genes get twisted even further when his soul is damaged by the Mark. (The Voyance is effectively a Blacklisted Omnismith- being Marked gradually seals away a person's magicrafting and slowly destroys their soul until they become one of the Dead. The Voyance's Mark is a little different, but the principle behind it is the same.) Because he was an Omnismith first, being Marked doesn't do anything to seal his powers, unlike the Voyance, who loses any of his original powers by being marked before succeeding to the power base. Omnismiths are funny because they're pretty much exempt from everything- they make up their own rules because they can transmute reality.

The general moral of Theron's existance is that it's a bad idea to mix magic and antimagic, and screwing with someone's genetic makeup is only going to end in grievous bodily harm and massive propery damage.

After all this trauma, Theron snaps completely- he was a cold, uncaring bastard before, but after coming into his own and having his soul ripped away (during the course of this, he realizes the Voyance is his father), he loses any control he might have had. He uses Brenon to get back at the Voyance and his mother and basically the entire country- and that's where things start to enter the incredibly squicktastic territory, because the things he does to Brenon and Mihonil are just fucking wrong. (It's worse with Brenon, though, because Mih never really trusted him. Brenon always did, and would have done anything for Theron had he simply asked.)

*shudder* Yeh. Theron is evil in the worst sort of way; he's willing to betray the trust of the people who love him (and Brenon really does love him) without feeling even the slightest bit of regret.

I wish I could make these things a bit more organized and coherent, but I won't be able to get real, concrete impressions of the characters until I actually start writing them. The good news is that Theron's rise to power is only half of the story; the second half is Stella's story. The world Theron and Bren live in is a pretty bright one, but their story is fucking depressing; Stella's world is a very, very cold one, but she gets a happy ending. So does Brenon, actually; I haven't yet decided what to do with Theron. He's fucking hard to kill, though...

Sunday, October 17, 2004

Mourning Star

A little bit of history- back during the Giant Crazy Story With Too Many Characters, there was a young woman named Radrazha; this was before any of the current countries came into being. Mages and smiths and weavers were common all over the place; mages more so than smiths or weavers, as actual arcane magic was seen as more useful than crafting. Radra was a windsmith at first, but she eventually came into her full power as an Omnismith after a series of incredibly traumatic events including but not limited to being raped, committing murder, and getting married.

She eventually went batshit and destroyed a huge chunk of the scenery. Her husband killed her and raised their son, who eventually grew up to restore the broken land and ascend the throne of this new country, Radrezaria. He named the place after his mother despite his father's protests, and eventually killed his father for getting in his way. As the son of an Omnismith and a very powerful mage of demonic descent, he was pretty damn badass in his own right- and he became the first Voyance.

The borders of Radrezaria became closed to outsiders for a while as the Voyance built up his power; he blamed mages for his mother's insanity and made Radrezaria a haven for those who practiced alternative forms of magic. When he died, he became one of the Dead- the very first one, actually. The next Voyance refused to reveal how he came into the title, and thus a whole culture of secrecy surrounds the succession- certain laws were passed by the first Voyance, however, that are strictly adhered to.

The Voyance is not allowed to bear or father children. (Female Voyances are rare, but they have existed.) The first Voyance passed along his powers when he turned himself into one of the Dead, and every crafter who was Killed after that becomes absorbed into the power base. So each successive Voyance becomes more powerful than the last as they absorb the powers of renegade crafters when they Die.

They're mutants, really; magicrafting is hereditary, and becoming the Voyance does some crazy shit to your genes so that the power is built into your genetic structure. Having more than one person with that sort of power at their disposal would have disastrous consequences on the balance of power in Radrezaria, and the first Voyance knew this from the start.

The Voyance himself can't actually use the crafting power he absorbs from the Dead; the successsion rituals but you in a permanent state of near-Death so that he can't actually craft anything. He's an Unweaver, an Unraveler of the highest degree. Despite the inherited power of enough smiths to make an Omnismith of unimaginable power, the Voyance is unable to tap into it, and can't actually touch the elements.

Theron's mother was a renowned aethersmith, and a member of the Voyance's council. She was a power hungry bitch with no compunctions about using sex to get what she wanted, and the fact that she was an aethersmith, the rarest of the rarest, only added to her appeal. The Voyance was a lecherous bastard, but he expected Shanonil to be smart enough to keep from getting pregnant. When he found out, he had her Killed (need a better word for it)- but somehow Theron survived this. Shanonil became Shanreth, and brought her baby to term. If the Voyance had figured out that she was pregnant sooner, Theron probably would have died; as it was, he managed to feed off her corpse long enough to be born prematurely, but this nearly destroyed Shanreth. (It's difficult for a zombie to regain its strength, you know.)

The Dead can't use magic and most of their memories are gone, but Shanonil had her memories woven into Theron before the Voyance Killed her and managed to recover most of them after being exiled. She took care of Theron out of spite, for the most part, and moved around a lot to keep the Voyance from finding her. Eventually she moved out to Luthra, a farming village in the asscrack of nowhere, near the border Radrezaria shares with this world's equivalent of the Lost Woods.

Theron doesn't actually find out who he is until he grows up; Shanreth leaves him in Luthra with Bren's family and disappears a little after his thirteenth birthday.

What all this means is that Theron's existance is against the law- and he's the first proper Omnismith to be born since the founding of the country. The combination of the Voyance's power sink and his mother's aethersmithing produced an Omnismith...and an inhuman, mutant freak. >:D

Theron knows his mother is a corpse; he's always known it. He lives a pretty lonely and occasionally abused life until he meets Bren, who decides to make it his job to take care of Theron. They're sort of friends, in the sense that Bren would do just about anything for Theron, and Theron doesn't hate him in return. For Theron, that's practically a declaration of undying love- but Theron's not the sort of person you want loving you. It's just not...healthy.

Next post will be a bit more in depth about Theron as a person. Whee.
Theron liked to pull wings off of butterflies.

He would lie very still beneath the trees at the edge of the forest with a daisy sprouting from his mouth like a bizarre flowerpot, and wait. Eventually one of the colorful insects would alight and he would move, almost too quickly to see, and clap his hands around it. The first few times he tried this, he crushed the butterfly, but afternoons of practice lent him a delicate hand, and now he could snatch them out of the air without so much as ruffling the powder on their wings.

Theron's favorite butterflies were enormous, long-legged, green-spotted creatures with flailing, furry antennae. Whimsy called them King's Guards and loved to watch them feeding from the butterfly bushes outside her home. They always struggled when Theron tore off their wings, long legs waving feebly and antennae stabbing accusingly into the air.

They made Theron laugh when they fought back, and he would pluck out their legs, one by one, before slicing them in two with his knife.

Bren never said anything, because he'd seen plenty of children take delight in tormenting insects. Normally they stopped doing it once they turned thirteen, but Theron was young in so many ways- and there were so few things that made him laugh. Besides, what were a few butterflies? Caterpillars damaged crops, and they never lived long anyway.

The cruelty never bothered Bren, but when Theron took the wings in his hands and breathed life into them, the sight of them fluttering off into the forest without a body always made him feel a little sick to his stomach.

But then Theron would always turn to him and smile, and he could never resist answering that smile.

---------------
Theron, you corpse fucking bastard. Ugh. Brenon, you so desperately need to grow a spine, it hurts. (And I need sleep, so this won't be coherent at all.)

The story, which is going to be called Mourning Star, takes place in Radrezaria, which is actually a neighbor to Rothcar, the other country where all my fantasy-ish ideas take place. That doesn't really matter, though; Rothcar won't be involved in this story. The important thing about Radrezaria is that it's one of the countries formed after the Crazy Fantasy Story With Too Many Characters takes place. That actually isn't important, except to me, so nevermind it.

There are three primary types of magic: Weaving, Whistling, and Smithing. Craftspeople are at the top of the foodchain, both socially and economically; the government is a thaumocracy, run by an elite circle of crafters and the Voyance- who really runs everything. Most people have some small amount of crafting talent, whether it's magical or not. Very few citizens are completely unable to create anything constructive, and very few jobs involve absolutely no creativity.

Receiving a crafter's licence allows you to add a suffix to your name; you can't do so otherwise unless you're a foreigner, as Whimsy is. Even merchants have crafter's licenses, if only to be able to appraise the stuff they sell. (It's not especially difficult to get a license; you send samples of your work (between five and ten pieces, generally) to the registrar in Radrezyne, where it is examined by a board of examiners and whatnot. You're tested for quality and consistency, and if you can prove you know what you're doing, you're given a trial examiner (there's one in every town and province, at least) who will watch as you craft something, to prevent crafter fraud. As long as you can prove yourself vaguely competent, you get a license and the appropriate suffix.)

Obtaining a magicrafter's license involves a meeting with the Voyance, because he oversees all magical dealings in the kingdom. The requirements are a bit more stringent, as even whistling can be dangerous if done poorly. And once you fail to get your license, you must train for five more years before attempting it again. You can still practice magic without the license, but there's a cap on the size of the project you're allowed to undertake, and a limit to the kinds of things you can craft, and the materials you can use.

Whistling is supplementary magic; a whistler can call down the elements for a weaver or a smith to use, and can lend strength and support to another crafting. Technically they aren't crafters, because they don't make physical things; they are the artist and musician equivalents, and they usually use musical isntruments to focus their talent. Whimsy is a very powerful whistler, which is almost unheard of because she isn't a native. (Magic outside of Radrezaria is your typical stuff- the mage draws from the aether through a particular focus, and shapes it to his will. No one does this in Radrezaria- outsider mages have a history of being lynched, so they tend to avoid the place.)

Large scale weavings or smithings usually require the presence of at least one whistler to keep their work from unravelling; the number of whistlers needed depends on the skill of the crafter, but it isn't at all uncommon for whistlers and crafters to enter into partnerships with each other. The better rapport the whistler and the crafter have outside of their work, the more secure the crafting will be.

Weavers combine things to get other, similar things, sort of. Magic is based off a five primary element system, and a crafter is generally only able to work with one or two elements really well; most weavers have some amount of proficiency in all five, but specialization is necessary unless they want to spend their lives as a Mender. A weaver weaves together various elements to get various effects. A lot of weavers are illusionists, but they can also create packaged spells, and they do a lot of actual cloth weaving as well; enchanted cloth is a big fashion thing.

It's sometimes a little difficult to discern the difference between a weaving and a smithing, but it's a little like the difference between a physical change and a chemical change in elementary science. Weavers can't change the stuff they work with; they can tie it to other things so that it resembles something else, but if you took it apart, you'd just have threads of fire and earth or light and water or aether and cotton.

A Smith is almost like an alchemist- they transmute things into other things, using the elements. Smiths are rarer than whistlers or weavers and their limitations are more severe. A windsmith, for instance, cannot work with any other element when smithing. Not only is it against the law, it's also incredibly difficult and very likely to burn out the crafter and leave him dead.

I think the primary difference is how the smiths and weavers use elements; a weaver works directly with the elements and combines them together but can't actually make them interact with material things; a smith uses the elements to transform and create new things. That's a very shoddy explanation. Let me try again.

Brenon is able to weave Theron's gaping wound back together using earth and water- the basic elements of living matter. He specializes in earth, I think, which constitutes most material things. Theron wouldn't be able to bind his wound together anywhere nearly as easily, because he can't put things back together- had he had chunks of skin removed, he could have created more skin by smithing it out of a handful of dirt or anything else he had on hand. Generally a smith's element will determine the limits of what he can and can not create; a firesmith can't create water, for instance, but he could create metal out of water. Yes, the laws of physics, I know. A crafting on that scale would require a brigade of whistlers. Smiths are rarer, and generally not very powerful. A very powerful smith usually has to be bred, the way Theron accidentally was.

More on that later. I hope things are sort of explained here.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Everything Bounces

All that is shall be
in the world
what is shall be
in the world
all that is shall be
what it is
shall be
all work and no play makes me a dull girl but we knew that already, didn't we? didn't we didn't we once think of flying flying so high into the sky into trite rhymes and jangling rythms badly spelled like spells gone awry to our dismay we looked into the abyss and it glared at us and told us to go away away my heart's on fire but they caught the arson last night without bothering to put it out who can say where the road goes? the muffin man, the muffin can! it seems so much less fun when you add punctuation or so they say; I wouldn't know. there was a time when love was free and true when the people sang of red and black and the stars were born from the gutter, the gutter of The Wretched (taste my capital letters, foo) not the miserable, they were never the miserable, but i simply sang damned, damned, damned i am, because the highway man has left me and you. still. don't. get. it. maybe you never will and maybe i never did, but what does it really matter in the end? Necrophiliac necromancers betray their best friends for nookie and ultimate power; film at eleven. compulsive gamblers try to kill themselves after their girlfriends get whacked, news at six. a girl and a boy discover the other halves of their selves in each other, while the odd man out finds comfort in the bottom of a bottle. ninth grade will come back to plague us all; here we are living in america at the end of the millennium- but the millennium has come and gone, 010100 like an area code gone wrong, like a zip code known to many but understood by few. it's probably in new york, new yourk, your new yourk not mine. ninth grade stole my heart and my originality and tenth grade stole my soul; i haven't yet learned to live with the lack and maybe the dark wind howls because your mother was a hamster? hey? did you ever think of that? this is far too lucid for my tastes, said lucy, far too lucid for lucy and lucy might be luckier than the rest of us if she's too lucid for being loopy. i dreamt i was a moron, in days gone buy me a shrubbery because it's all i'm good for nothing, nothing at all, nothing at all the white horses are still in bed with me and her and her and her and her- and now i've lost count, but it was a small bed and there were a lot of us and it was, for just a few moments, utter heaven on a stick. i'm still in love with a pathological liar and a fictional figment of someone else's imagination. they aren't the same person, either. i'm in love with a dream and a Dream and a girl and a boy and a life that wasn't mine and never will be; maybe we will and maybe we won't and maybe one day i'll remember how many licks it really does take to get to the center of that fucking tootsie pop- i always hated tootsie rolls, the only candy made stale straight from the factory- tilde, tilde, tilde- but who actually licks a lolipop anyway? don't we all just put them in our mouths and suuhhhhck? like a vampire, a sugar vampire with cotton candy veins and blue raspberry blood, soaking into the carpets. dark red won't hide the spills; you need black for that but they'll still catch the shine of moonlight on your eyes. i did this once before, when death hit the wall and we were all meatballs but they didn't get it then either, neither, nor. the grammar gets you every time- and isn't he still oh, so molestable? when the girl we might have been ran off with the girl we used to be leaving us all alone with our confused sexuality and scorn for ourself- 'you hate the world just as much as you hate yourself' how perceptive how perspicacious how perforated...or not. there used to be more of me that wasn't me but i've lost that ability- you're not much good to me alive, are you turkish? turkish? sold your soul for some turkish delight, stale and prepackaged but well frozen none the less and i imagine we'll be fed to the pigs. you can call me susan if it makes you happy but i do not think it means what you think it means and maybe there's enough of me that isn't me to hold me together when the storm blows through.

in the end we're just lines of paint, swirling down the drain, the drain, the pain in the brain, in the heart in the main, we cannot stop when we've not yet started but we'll give it a go anyway any day ruth go gather your grain, leave us to our pain, your husband finds you wanting and he'll not give you enough to assuage your hunger, hunger, the world that doesn't rhyme, and not the word, neither. the lord said thou shalt wear tassels, but i'd rather be one, a fringe on somone's coat, bright blue and full of holy love, a fringe of love of fingers of cloth a fringe of airy silence nothing beat a fringe upon the worlds, the words, a freudian slip, so silky smooth against our skin and so slight to conceal the mishaps of our skirt. oops. my slip is showing, growing, groping? knowing what we know now, why should we bother to wear them at all? just strip down to the bare essentials and live free, die, love, be well, be well, stay well, oh keeper of my hart...be you hart or be you hunter, be you child of the rood inverted bassackwards and upside down without a clue, what to do? when your memories return in a blast of shining truth and light love and peace why is gillian anderson an avocado, anyway? maybe canada and california are secretly the same place, but that still doesn't explain winnipeg, guinea pig, so far north the ground freezes before your heart, and for us, that's a sight indeed. a slight indeed, a slip of a boy of a thing, and we're back to that again, because really, what else could possibly be on our mind? i hated him and maybe i still do, for stealing away my callous indifference and giving it back to me unbroken. i've still got it- keep it in a box and wear it 'round my heart on a hot day in july. CAPITAL LETTERS SHALL BE THE DEATH OF ME.

perhaps i'm already dead, but i rather think not; it all bounces in the end. on a molecular level, we're all really ecstatically happy, and busy as baby bumblebees squished into stinging, vomit inducing slush. ah, girlscout campe. still don't get it? well enough, they never do, never did, never will unless i explain in small. very. small. words. and here we are, with an excess; an excess. of punctuation, you see. . . it's all in the visual clues, but we havn't got any, nor spell cheque neither.

there are no ideas here, in the basement of the barrel of my mind, which is a shame, a crying shame, for once there was a phoenix dwelt down here, in the midden heap, keeping warm. once there was a phoenix, all phonetic beauty and fire, but now she's gone.

she's saved, she says, and she'll write about the truth, fifty thousand words of truth as she sees it, which is to say, nothing it all. Say nothing at all, and you'll find us better listeners than if you'd said nothing but truth.

We don't want truth; its taste is too harsh for our palates. So instead I'll give you flights of fancy, on gilded wings and grinning cards; the joker reappears thrice blessed in this story.

It's a beautiful day to crack the big sky, on the dark side of the day. Live was I ere I saw evil, Live Evil! Life is a palindrome, after all. Arev, she speaks! And listen if you wish, for she'll not hold it against you either way.

Perhaps we grasp coherency as we grasp straws, and leave them behind when the scapegoat is chosen. Maybe we like it better that way-

But it really is a beautiful day.

drabbles

That bloody first line challenge has made me write things for fandom. Cower in fear.

Sandman

"If you meet Death on a corner, tell her you aren't interested." The tall, pale man said these words with such intensity that the bartender stopped his compulsive wiping of the bar for a moment. He'd seen plenty of strange people in his time, but this man and his companion probably ranked in the top ten. Something about the eyes...

"Tell her you aren't interested," the man repeated, catching the attention of what few conscious and remotely sober people were left at the bar. "Especially if she asks you out for a drink."

"Stop being such a prude, honestly!" The girl he was with laughed- she must have been one of those goth kids you saw on the news all the time, wearing black with makeup all over her face. She was smiling, though, and he wasn't, as she dragged him to the door. "Come on, it's not even two yet!"

The man looked directly at the bartender with his strange, empty, endless eyes, and repeated one last time, "Not interested," before disappearing into the street.

The bartender looked at the clock and decided that it might be a good idea to close a little early tonight.

Death Note

They're the sort of things that wouldn't bother him if he were anyone else. Raito has reached this conclusion despite the fact that he is quite sure he has never been anyone else. Logical examination of the feeling would render it quite ridiculous, but Raito is uncharacteristically unwilling to be logical in this instance.

It gets worse when they haven't been sleeping, after spending hours poring over police reports and security tapes. The little movements catch his eyes in the most irritating of ways; he finds himself tracking L's thumb in its inevitable ascent to L's mouth over and over again as they read, and the endless writhing of L's toes against the upholstery almost makes him want to writhe out of his own skin from watching them.

He has a job to do, a goal to reach. Kira must be stopped, and these distractions are unacceptable. Raito twists at the cold metal against his wrist and wonders when these things became distractions in the first place.

----------
The Sandman one amuses me more; the other I wrote for Sonya, because she's a fan of Raito, and I felt like fucking with him. (Also because I'm obsessed with L's toes, but shh.) S'not especially good, but I'm not especially good at the whole drabble thing, so whatever.

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Utter Crap on a Stick

Lurking, wide eyed in the chair
Fingers drumming, never still
Eyes dart, and flicker, and flare
Not shivering, despite the chill

The other leans; a prideful line
Against a cold edged slice of sky
Dark eyes knowingly define
The boundaries of truth and lie

Suspicion lurks in every corner
With darkness daylight can't dispell
Cheap clocks chime- a well paid mourner
Sings dirges in this cheap hotel

Stealing breaths before they're born
The silence hangs heavy, from a thread
Until they speak with equal scorn,
"You could have been my only friend."

EDIT: Alternate fourth stanza. Can't decide which I like better; the new one is technically better, but the last one works better with the characters, sort of.

The air between them fills with ire
And silence on a fraying thread
Is betrayed as both inquire
"Weren’t you once my only friend?"

Sunday, October 03, 2004

Tired of being in love with a pathological liar.

I think I'm going to write Stella Matin for Nanowrimo this year; since we'll be working with it in Moneta, I may finish this year. It'll be kind of difficult, since half the group are people I know and like, and half the group are people I don't know well at all; I always feel like such an idiot, sharing (forcing) my writing with other people. Particularly the creative stuff- I would never actually ask someone to read any of the pieces scattered around the blog, and I abandoned the website because I couldn't stand the thought of encouraging other people to read what I'd written.

This doesn't mean that I don't want feedback, mind- I love hearing what people think. But actually asking someone to read something? No. I hate doing that, because I know they've always got something better to do, something better to read. Other people's ideas are more original, more planned out, more entertaining. I have no right to waste their time with my drivel.

I suppose it'll be good, though; between being an officer in Moneta and being in Verse Writing, I'll be forced to share.

Anyway, Stella Matin. I suppose the actual title will be Mourning Star, and, since the universe keeps expanding, it'll include Brenon and Theron's stories as well as Stella and Walker's. Because Theron may be one of my truly evil characters- and I don't do truly evil very often. Not with people I like, and I thought I liked Theron until he became a complete and utter bastard. Maybe he'll redeem himself, and he'll fix Brenon and they can move to the Caribbean and sip Mai Tais in the sun when not cheerfully molesting each other.

I kind of doubt Brenon will let himself be fixed after Stella enters the picture, though. Damn my characters and their ambiguous sexualities! It's been so long since any of them have admitted that they're just straight or gay...Bloody bastards can't make things easy for me, no, of course not. And of course all I really write are excessive and thinly veiled romance stories because I can't write anything else.

But, anyway once again. Brenon and Theron's part of the story happen in a steampunk sort of setting; they have steam engines and gas lights and things, but haven't quite gotten the hang of electricity yet. They're very creative with what they have, though, and it isn't unheard of for a crafter to specialize in engines and the like. Stella's story happens maybe a hundred years later, in a world kind of like our own, but with a more limited color palette. It's a bit like the eighties, actually. Cars and such, and primitive computers. Buildings that were built twenty years ago look like they've been around for twice as long, and the sky is very rarely blue. It's not a happy world that Stella died into.

Yeah, she's dead. They all are, by that point.

It's a very cold world. (And I think that's how it'll start, but it's too early in the month to know, really. Too early in the month to think about it in this much depth, and if I over think I'll just ruin it, the way I did last year.)

I don't write to say things, not really. If there's any recurring theme in my writing, it's about the importance of family and the importance of love in every day life- and that's mostly just Boffo, since none of the other stories are very well articulated or thought out. Seventh Hour was all about freedom and free will, I'll admit that, but it was mostly mythological wankery. Mostly just wankery, really. Some of the most beautiful writing I've ever managed, but a fuckload of wankery.

Meh. Only October, and I'm already tired. I'm stuck on the fringes of being what I want to be, and I'm tired of living off fringe benefits. (The title to this entry is more apt than you know.)

Gambler and Goddess

"But we never do anything fun anymore." Her voice was whiny, petulant.

He glanced at her and shifted his arms into a more comfortable position behind his head. "What, like strangle kittens?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of drowning them, but you know what I mean. You're so serious all the time."

He laughed at that, just to prove her wrong. "I'm no more serious than I was before, Tasha. I'm just busier, now."

"So busy! Yes, so busy staring at the clouds. Come on, Didi. I want to do something fun for once. It's been ages."

"You keep whining like that and it'll be another age before we do anything fun again." He sat up, though, and pulled a pair of well worn bone dice out of his pocket. "Spades?"

She rolled her eyes. "Spades is boring."

He grinned, an easy, charming grin. "We'll raise the stakes, then. Kittens, or small children?"

Her eyes lit up- literally, like a pair of golden lamps. "Babies! Yes, babies- it's been so long since I've had a proper sacrifice, you know, with blood and candles and wailing." The lights of her eyes dimmed to a more human shade of dark brown. "And for you? What would you have me put in the pot, Didi?"

He twirled the dice between his fingers with practiced ease, still smiling. "A kiss, I think. And maybe a new pair of boots?"

"New boots again? What happened to your old ones?" She tweaked his bare toes, giggling.

"Lost 'em in a bet, and you'd know that if you'd been paying any attention at all," he scolded. "Come on, lets play, if you're so bored."

They used one of the small skulls at her belt as a cup for the dice, and she giggled every time she lost, and blushed every time she kissed him.

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

Didi (Vladimir or Vlad to everyone else) would be my current D&D character; he's a cleric teetering on the verge of being evil, but his inherent indifference to the concepts of good and evil keep him neutral. Tasha (Short for Natasha) is a manifestation of his deity. Death and Chaos are her technically her primary spheres of influence, but Luck is closely related to both death and chaos, so she's often called Natasha the Gambler or Natasha the Lucky. When she manifests in her primary aspect as Azal, Lord of Entropy, she represents the inevitability of death and entropy. As Natasha, she represents the random factor in every equation, the force that makes it possible for people to thow themselves at the ground and miss.

Vlad's father was an alchemist- and I say was, because he died in a freak alchemical accident when Vlad was eight. He'd been a devout follower of Natasha, who is a patron of scientists and inventors. In his will he gave Vlad to the temple of Azal; had he lived, he would have eventually sent Vlad to Natasha's half of the temple.

'Tasha picked him up eventually anyway when he displayed a temperament more suited for worshipping her aspect, despite his skill at carrying out Azal's rituals. His temperament is more suited for Natasha, but he's a little more skilled at being one of Azal's accolytes. Somewhat morbidly cheerful, he freely embraces the idea that nothing he does will ever have any impact on the universe, and that every decision can always be decided with a coin toss.

Azal is the spreading entropy that will eventually swallow the entire universe; Natasha is the peculiar, particular variations in the outcome of a cointoss. Because Vlad serves both of these aspects, his ceremonial robes are red, yellow, and black to represent Azal and Natasha respectively, and the line of nothingness that binds them together.

A number of symbols are holy to both aspects of the god, but the primary holy symbol is a coin with Azal's face on one side and 'Tasha's face on the other. Full ceremonial robes usually have dozens of these coins hanging off the hem and sleeves, and they tend to jangle quite a bit. Tasha's holy symbols include any sort of gambling paraphernalia (dice, cards, etc.) and a sort of writhing tentacular ball- it's a circle with the tails of a lion, a dragon, and a bird, as well as squid and displacer beast tentacles growing out of the sides of it. Her primary aspect is Chaos, even if she does choose to manifest mostly as a deity of Luck. Azal's holy symbols are a skull and a broken circle- or really, broken things in general. Tasha is there whenever something falls, Azal is there when (if) it hits the ground.

As for Vlad, he's a little weird, but fairly likeable. His charisma is high enough and his god is bipolar enough for this to work for him. He doesn't have a concrete moral code, but he does have something like a "live and let live" attitude towards the world. He doesn't need to proselytize, because he serves entropy- and in the end, his god is going to win. No matter what, he wins. So he spreads a little something wherever he goes- sometimes it's happiness, sometimes it's confusion, sometime's it's raspberry jam- he isn't bound to uphold any standard of reason.

And because he worships a principle of chaos, he's free to do whatever he pleases- which means that, more often than not, he's a pretty reliable, sensible guy with a slightly quirky sense of humor and a vicious streak who tends to make decisions by flipping coins and knows far too many card games for one person.

Appearance wise, he has long red-brown hair tied back and thrown forward over one shoulder, and pretty ordinary looking brown eyes. He has a small scar under his right eye from a childhood accident at the temple involving a rake and a stone staircase. He's short- five foot four- and he isn't especially tough. A little on the stocky side, but ultimately pretty frail. (No constitution.) He's actually more than a little softcore looking most of the time, honestly. His daily travelling robes are dark red with a yellow sash that has a few coins hanging from it. He has really nice boots. He wears one spiked glove, on his left hand, and primarily fights with a spear. Any Vlad the Impaler jokes will get you smote. The spiked glove is generally your first clue that there's something a little...off...about Vlad.

He and Tasha get along quite well; she acts like his little sister most of the time. He doesn't interact with Azal nearly as much; they're relationship is more of a formal cleric/deity sort of thing.

I like Vlad. He doesn't have issues. *coughcoughBrenandTheroncoughcough* People without issues make me happy.

Saturday, October 02, 2004

tired of autumn

I hate having all of my memories hardwired to musical stimuli. Hate it.

The opening bars to a song I haven't heard in over a year suddenly put me back at my desk, in eighth grade, back when my desk was against the far wall and right next to the bed, back when I'd just turned thirteen and had started playing with candles, when I wrote with a piece of leather beneath the paper, running the risk of piercing it with my pencil.

And the world smells like autumn, all the time, and I can't decide if I love it or if I hate it or if it's the only thing I'll ever want.

Angels never came down
There's no one here if they want to hang around
But if they knew, if they knew you at all
Then one by one, angels, angels would fall...

-Melissa Etheridge, "Angels Would Fall"