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.

game blather

I've beaten five of the nine trials in the Lunar Ruins in FFIVA- the five associated with the primary five characters.

I still love this game so, so much. Compared to any of the later games, it's simplistic and shallow- but it was such a huge, integral part of my childhood that I can't let it go. It's short and simple, yes, but it resonates with me on some deep and fundamental level that makes my chest ache. The only thing I can really compare it to is the wonder I felt at first playing VII; I have a similar fondness for that game.

The Lunar Ruins are brilliant, at any rate. The puzzles and cutscenes are delightful; Edge's trial made me fall in love with him all over again, and Kain's made me ache for him a thousandfold more than I ever did. Just- when he leaves, and Cecil asked him what he found, and he says, "Nothing. ...Absolutely nothing."

He's my favorite character; always has been, always will be. It's strange, because there aren't many other characters with similarly guilt-stricken personas that I like, but Kain is just one walking mass of guilt. He has nightmares- in that respect, I suppose he's closest kin to Shadow. Perhaps I do have a thing for guilt-stricken characters, when the guilt is done properly.

It pleases me that the Lunar Ruins essentially fill in that space at the end of the game where you leave him on Mt. Ordeals; he gets a chance to prove, in canon, that he is more than his jealousy.

I've now played four different translations of this game- the terrible Easytype version of SNES fame, with its spooniness; the J2E rom patch, which took certain liberties with the script that its original writers may not have intended; the largely inoffensive FFAnthology version, which had better grammar and curious emphases on character interactions; and now this, the FFIVA, which has a few key differences to account for the extra gameplay options.

My favorite remains J2E's translation, which is no longer available anywhere that I can find on the web. Somehow changing "You spoony bard!" to "You son of a bitch!" feels incredibly appropriate.

The Advance translation puts less emphasis on Edge's Casanova-ish tendencies and more emphasis on Kain's feelings for Rosa, and I'm not sure I like either. I've never been of the opinion that any of Kain's actions were about Rosa- they were about Cecil, who outdid him in every way. I know, technically he is in love with Rosa according to all the backstory nonsense in the compendium, but I prefer to think of her as just another aspect of his rivalry with Cecil. It might just be that I've never liked Rosa much (It's always fetch quests with you, isn't it?), or that I prefer the subtext between the two men to the text between the men and the woman. The Advance translation makes me feel rather more charitable towards her, particularly after her Lunar Ruins trial; canonically, she became a white mage to be closer to Cecil, but she is finally revealed as someone with a truly selfless desire to help people. It just helps cement some depth to her character, and I can appreciate her better when she isn't just some harpy who steals all of Cecil's attention.

It's unfortunate that Cecil as a paladin doesn't develop terribly much- the idea that the light of Mt. Ordeals cleansed him of all the darkness in his soul is ludicrous. He was a dark knight, master of the evil sword. He was no better than Golbez in his actions; the fact that he wasn't happy with what he was doing doesn't make him any less of a murderer. He defeats the shadow of himself on the mountain by accepting it; it seems strange, then, that Kain should defeat his own shadow by destroying it. But then, Kain's darkness was far more pronounced; his evil was that of the traitor, not that of the mindlessly loyal servant.

Though, honestly, I'm not sure which would be worse.

At any rate, Cecil isn't completely a pure soul, or he wouldn't have had so much trouble calling Golbez "Brother," so I suppose there is still some depth to him after he becomes a paladin. I like to think he is still plagued by doubts- but now that he knows the extent of the good and evil he is capable of, he is in a much better place to make decisions.

Kain's trial in the Lunar Ruins was basically one long, extended cutscene- it would've been less painful, if I hadn't had to go through it four times. >_< CSI:Baron, essentially, and through the whole thing you can feel Kain screaming "It wasn't me!" in his head the entire time- and then, of course, it was him, and the moment when he says, "I deny my weakness!" is incredibly triumphant, incredibly beautiful. He and Cecil are fundamentally different; Cecil did terrible things, and couldn't accept that they were his own choices to make. He had to accept the darkness in his soul to become a Paladin; Kain, on the other hand, is fully aware of the evil he is capable of.

At any rate, I adore Kain and all of his unending guilt; the fact that his ultimate weapon is Abel's Lance is hilariously, puntastically appropriate. He has redeemed himself in the eyes of the brother whom he would have slain; the fact that you can choose the option to kill Cecil, and thus fail the ordeal is telling.

In conclusion, Lunar Ruins = awesome. Edge's last comments- "Maybe I should rebuild Eblan like this!" and Cecil's "..." response were comedy gold. And his last "Aww" was adorable. I'm immensely fond of Edge in all his womanizing, bratty glory. He's the oldest of the final party, but he lacks most of their maturity. I only wish the fact that he helped kill his parents were addressed- but then, maybe I really do like characters who are stewed in guilt just a little too much.