earth mother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check on the rep- yep- second to none

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

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

...

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

(Whee!)

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

let the motherfucker burn (Orrin babble)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the naming of cats- i mean, characters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

one more casualty

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

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

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

--

The rifthorror crawled closer.

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

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

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

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

The rifthorror crawled closer.

The water rose higher.

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

The water rose higher.

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

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

The rifthorror stood before him, close enough to touch.

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

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

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

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

(you are so young)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pirates of the Caribbean

Noting that the following will contain spoilers!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

not gonna be...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

za

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

shtuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

All for the love of thee

WHAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW.

In conclusion, Orrin is an idiot. AN IDIOT WITH ADD.

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

Silverlock stretched out on the couch with a treatise on arcanic engineering while Orrin explored the apartment. He kept an ear open for explosions or the sound of breaking glass and kept a pencil on hand to make notes in the margins.

"Sweet Goddess!" Orrin's head appeared over the top of the couch. "Can I marry your kitchen?"

"No," Silverlock replied, without looking up from his book.

Orrin's head disappeared. There was a clang from the direction of the kitchen before he reappeared. "Can I marry your oven-stove-thing?"

"No."

"What about the fridge?"

"Already in a committed relationship with the dishwasher."

Orrin sighed, and disappeared again. He returned a moment later, and sat next to the hulking entertainment system taking up one of the living room walls. "Can I marry your sound system?"

"No."

He sighed again, and rubbed it's sleek black side soothingly. "No one understands our love."

He wandered away again. Silverlock stared at the page he'd been reading in consternation; the margin was filled with little doodles of tiny rabbits.

Orrin came back and draped himself over the couch. "The jacuzzi and I are eloping. Just thought you might like to know."

He shut the book. "Orrin, you are not marrying or otherwise running off with any of my household appliances. I forbid it."

"Hence the eloping. You can't suppress true love." Silverlock stared at him. Orrin rolled his eyes. "Fine, I won't elope with the hot tub. Can I marry you?"

Silverlock went very still for a microsecond, and glared at the younger man. Orrin was grinning, but his eyes were serious. "No. I hate weddings."

"You must be evil. Everyone likes weddings."

His lip curled in disgust. "I don't. My sister got married- she was the most beautiful woman in the world when we were young, you know. I'm not exaggerating- there was a vote. And then she got married, and she turned fat and wrinkled and her hair fell out."

"Was she still the most beautiful woman in the world?"

He carefully placed his hand on Orrin's head, and shoved. Orrin fell off the couch with a squawk. "That's beside the point." The truth was, marriage had only made Sarila more lovely, weight and wrinkles aside. He was still bitter; there'd been a time when she had been beautiful for him.

"Fine, then. It's a shame- Faraz would've had fun being my second." His head popped up over the edge of the couch again.

Silverlock opened his mouth, and then shut it, looking thoughtful. "Would you make her wear a suit?" He was fiercely grateful to Orrin for leaving the subject of his siblings alone.

"She'd probably insist on it."

He paused a moment to savor that image, and wondered vaguely if Faraz would ever consider modeling. "How hard would you try to kill me if I had sex with her? Theoretically, I mean."

It was Orrin's turn to glare. "There is no try. There is only painful death. She's like my sister, man. And you'd have to take on El, Ravi, and Lindra, too, and Jay would totally kick your ass. He hates it when people make his work harder, and I'd need so much more therapy after killing you."

"Pity." In a way, it was a comfort to know that some things would always remain constant, no matter how much the universe shifted. Still, Faraz was one of the most attractive people he knew, and that kind of lost opportunity was a crying shame. "Oh, stop glaring. I'm perfectly capable of respecting reasonable boundaries, despite all rumors to the contrary."

Orrin held the glare for another moment, then shrugged, deceptively casual. "It's not like I really have anything to worry about on that score," he said, examining his nails. "You're far too short for her."

"Oh, that's it!" Orrin was already running, but his socks slipped on the carpet, and Silverlock performed a flying tackle off the back of the couch that would have done any of his old teachers at the Guild proud. He might be getting old, and he might be going soft, but that didn't mean Orrin stood a chance. "You're not so tall that you can't be dragged down to my level, boy."

Orrin was laughing to hard to respond, but that might have had something to do with the way Silverlock was tickling his ribs with the merciless efficiency of an Assassin High Lord. When he decided Orrin had had enough, Silverlock sat back on his heels and looked smug.

"You're such a bastard." Orrin was gasping for breath.

"And I suppose you're a saint?" he asked archly. The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them; they sent a thread of ice down his spine.

"Of course not," Orrin said, oblivious. "I am only sleeping with you for your kitchen, after all."

"That's fine. I'm not a jealous man, and I don't mind sharing." He struck an aggrieved pose and flopped onto the floor beside Orrin. "Just don't make me stand second to my stove. My pride wouldn't stand for it."

"And you hate weddings," Orrin reminded him. "Still, this is a nice place you've got here."

"Your tax marks at work."

"Hm." Orrin dug his fingers into the carpet, leaving clawmarks in the thick pile. "What is it exactly that you do for Parliament?"

Silverlock gently removed his hand from the carpet and laced their fingers together. "You don't want to know, I promise you. But if you ask me again in a year, I'll tell you."

"A year, huh?" Orrin looke down at their hands, and his ears turned slightly pink. "Yeah, sure. A year. I can do that."

--

WHAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW. Someday I'll be able to write characters who aren't thirteen year old girls. IF THEY HAD PIGTAILS, THEY'D BE PULLING THEM. FATALITY.

Let's see, things- Orrin likes to cook, and is quite good at it, hence the interest in the kitchen. Silverlock's kitchen would make a professional chef jealous, but he hardly ever uses it. He can cook, he's just too lazy to bother most of the time.

And it's not so much that Silverlock is short- he is, but you never realize how short unless he's barefoot, and he's never barefoot except in the privacy of his own home. His shoes usually lift him up to 5'8" or therabouts, which means he and Orrin see eye to eye. But Faraz is 6'6", so anyone under six foot is too short for her.

Technically, they couldn't get married- marriage is a religious institution, and the Fifth Era is currently between religions. All the old gods are gone, and there aren't any new ones- just a giant carnivorous bird thing roosting in the top of Rianna's Tower. People try to worship it, but it usually just eats them. No one even knows if it's sentient.

Civil partnerships are available for any people, and convey all the legal aspects of marriage. There are even provisions for polygamous arrangements, since Ishkhahar was hardly the only deity of the Fourth Era to encourage polyamory. It's a purely legal arrangement, and is just as often made between business partners as it is married couples or groups. But Silverlock really does hate weddings; they leave a sour taste in the back of his throat.

Guys! I'm feeling seriously omnipotent!

Um. I'm watching the GenX movie- which was made for TV, has some of the most amazingly terrible special effects in the universe, and is full of mid-90s craziness and dream sequences. Dream sequences involving dance scenes. And the movie had me kind of bored up until then, but now? Now?

OMG I LOVE ANGELO. No matter what incarnation. I. I just. Dancing. Music. Muttering angrily in Spanish. I love him. He's such a huge screaming dork- and in the movie, he's a geek in addition to being a dork.

I also love Emma Frost and her terrible wig and Sean's silly, silly vest. I mean, what? Is that zebra print? Seriously.

The movie is kind of mouthy and a little graphic for something made for TV- between the cursing and the threats of sexual violence, I dunno. A bit more extreme than I expected. And the plot is pasted on kind of horribly, and the characters are but pale shadows of their GenX selves...but man, I'm in love. This is the worst movie ever, and I love it.

(Don't trust Sean! He's only after your lucky charms!)

I'm not gonna be one more casualty

I keep listening to the music of my freshman year of highschool- the soundtrack of that year has always been particularly vivid for me.

There was a point in time, in the spring of 2000, when I was listening to The Best of Adiemus, Sting's "Brand New Day" album, and Emmylou Harris and Linda Rondstadt's compilation "The Western Wall" on repeat, day after day. I'd put them on the stereo in the family room and play Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete for hours on end, and I'd steal the CDs themselves when I figured dad wouldn't miss them. I took them to school. I took them to Norway. (Actually, of those three, the only one that made it to Norway was Adiemus.)

The other CDs I listened to incessantly that year were Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" and Sarah McLachlan's "Mirrorball." To a lesser extent, I listened to Tracy Chapman's "Telling Stories"- that was another one of dad's, and he played it in the kitchen at dinner a lot.

Freshman year was before I got a CD player that didn't suck- I was using a handmedown from one of the brothers, a giant square thing that skipped if you looked at it too hard.

Listening to Tracy Chapman again makes me think of nights in the winter, when we had dinner at seven and it was pitch dark, and I'd be grimy from band practice. I'm on the opposite side of the year, seasonally, right now- but early spring feels so much like late October- just a little warmer and a little wetter. And this is my favorite time of year to lose myself in the weather and in music.

There's always a point, towards the end of winter, when it seems as though the sun has come out. The whole word is just that much brighter. I can remember that transition first year, and sophomore year- I can't remember it happening last year, though I know it had to. We just hit that point here- unsurprisingly enough, Daylight Savings marked it, because the weather has turned and the light is practically solid.

I'm listening to "Casualty" by Missy Higgins, and the twilight is drawing itself out as long as possible- but it feels like I'm sitting in my room, playing roms on my computer, six years ago or more.

(I no longer feel as though I am doomed to fall in love with a liar, or as though I was born six years too late. My voice is still too quiet, but I've come into my own, just a bit. Not as much as I need to, but I am more than who I was.)

Since this thing is off the feed, I really need to recapture the feel and mindset of spontaneous blogging. It's something I haven't done in forever, it seems- I used to use this place as a complete brain dump, but now I tend to avoid posting unless I have something significant to say.

There's nothing wrong with posting only at least halfway decent content- one should always aspire to posting no more than 10% crap. But having a rantspace is good for me, and some of my spontaneous babbling back in the day was occasionally interesting and insightful.

I wanted to cut back on bullshit this year, to speak my thoughts and be honest to people's faces. I haven't really been succeeding. Things keep getting worse, and I'm not sure how to fix them, or if they even can be fixed, or if they're worth fixing.

I assume they're worth fixing. Most things are- I just don't know how.

It's the uncertainty that kills me, every time, and I'm just afraid that this will spiral out of control. I've always been afraid of being alone, and that's where this will leave me.

I don't know what to do.

Twofish

Twofish by A Demon of His Word remains the best Good Omens fic I have ever read. It is, quite possibly, the best Aziraphale/Crowley story out there. It is even quite likely the best romantic short story in the whole of the internet.

Never fails to make me smile, even when things are going to shit around me. A good story ought be able to do that, you know.

Sound of White

Ugh. So, I have all sorts of fragments that I need to write, at some point. But I can't quite seem to manage actually writing them. So instead, I shall write about them!

For Toggle, there's a Silverlock/Blaine scene I've wanted to write since last year. It would be the Festival of Joshel, which is an enormous, week long celebration that takes over the city- it's sort of like Mardi Gras, only it lasts for a week. Even people who don't worship Joshel get to celebrate, because Joshel is such a huge deity. There are parades and dances and masks, and the Church of Joshel sponsors the whole thing- and all the slaves in the city get the week off, or at the very least, the last day off. Silverlock does that thing where he drags Blaine out of the infirmary- and Blaine's reaction is WTF, have you looked outside, they're practically rioting out there, we're gonna get trampled. Silverlock gets a couple of the Shrive to jaunt them outside the city, up the coast a few miles, where a small-ish congregation of Joshelites are having their celebration for the last day of the festival. There's a bonfire on the beach, and everyone is dancing and singing and drumming and drinking and having sex. Blaine gets a little bit wigged out by the crowd and the very palpable presence of a god that isn't his, so he wanders down the beach to stare at the waves and lets Silverlock reconnect his soul for a bit so at least one of them can have a properly good time. (He can feel a few other leechmages in the throng, none of them strong enough or close enough to be more than a faint, uncomfortable buzzing in the corners of his soul. He can feel Silverlock, too, and the temptation to reach out is almost too strong to resist. Almost. He knows better than to try and touch what he can never really have.)

Blaine ends up meditating until the tide comes in, while Silverlock dances and basks in the joy of the people around him. Eventually he wanders off to find Blaine and wake him up before he drowns- and finds a very poisonous sea snake wrapped around him. After that it's mostly just dialogue and the two of them being cute at each other.
("I'm fairly certain that's got rather deadly poison."

"Mm. Watch where you're stepping- her nest is buried in the sand by those rocks." He opened his eyes and looked up at Silverlock. "Did you have a good time?"

"Of course. And you?" His hair, unbound for once, spilled past his shoulders when he leaned forward, brushing Blaine's face.

"Making new friends." He held up his hand, where the snake's head lay. It curled around to the underside of his arm. "She's a bit shy around strangers.")

And of course Silverlock's thoughts inevitably end up thinking about Blaine naked, wearing nothing but a giant snake. I'm thinking this image ends up in the "Potentially very hot or very weird" category. Possibly the "Very Late '80s Music Video" category, even.
--

I need to write more of the Zanadreths- I have a scene in the works where Aya has her first and third companies out on endurance training, and she's taking a bath in a stream, because the mud is pretty fierce on the road north from Shaivhen. And Liall shows up, and it looks vaguely like the set up for some bad lesbian porn. Porn does not happen, of course- Aya is more Ishkhahareni at heart than Liall is in that respect. The whole scene is mostly just an excuse for me to play with Templar's story. So the whole scene is Liall telling Aya the tale of the Templar, and Aya beginning to confront Liall about the murders.

It's possible Aya and Liall have better chemistry than Aya and Nick, so that's something I need to work on.

The other Zanadreths scene I want to write is the one where Aya introduces them both to Silverlock- who, at that point, is nearing the end of his mage apprenticeship. The meet up in a bar somewhere, and as soon as Aya and Liall get up to fetch more drinks, Silverlock gives Nick the "break her heart and I'll crush your soul and violate your body in a thousand heinous ways" speech. Nick's upbringing shows itself in rather nasty ways here- Rothcar is rather blase about same sex couples, but Akvaria tends to view them in a rather negative light. Akvaria has some strong anti-non-human sentiment, and they're not overly fond of same sex couples. Mostly, though, Nick is violently opposed to sex outside of marriage, and that's the source of his dislike of Silverlock.

This burns Aya a bit, since she wants the people she cares about to get along, but there's nothing to be done about it, really.
--

I want to write the scene where Jarrek DeLavrey walks into Theron's office and demands to know what happened to his children. Of course, the only people in at the time are Bren and Stella, and once Bren figures out who he's talking to, he goes into starstruck fanboy mode. It's kind of cute. And Stella gets to be sane, which doesn't happen nearly as often as it ought.

And I want to write the scene where Edrana Coralin drags Theron out of the city and takes him roadtripping around to all of her old stomping grounds. She's his older sister in spirit; her army of zombies actually managed to sack Shaivhen, while his just made it to the borders of Murundcar.

She feels even less guilt than he does for killing thousands of people (Theron's death count is higher, but only because there were more people in his era), even though she's more at fault than he was. Theron went crazy fairly early on; Eddy was sane the whole time. And Theron at least feels bad for screwing over Bren- Edrana killed Siegfried's entire family and ate their brains in front of him, but she never so much as apologizes.

("Woman-"

"If I touch you again you'll rip of my limbs and feed them to stray cats?" Bluish black outlines of butterflies swarmed over her arms; they seemed to shift and crawl when she moved.

He stopped short. "How did you know I was going to say that?"

She walked past him. "I said the exact same thing to Joradi when I was your age. Come on, I want to show you the place where I reanimated a dragon's corpse and made it kill its nest mates." She pointed to a place high up the cliffs.

Theron scrambled to catch up with her.)
--

I really want to write (though I'd never post them here) the first time Blaine and Silverlock have sex, and the first time Orrin and Silverlock have sex. The former has a few really beautiful moments, and the latter a few hilarious moments. And both showcase how very different Silverlock's relationships with the two of them are. Not better, not worse, just different. (Okay, Orrin may be a little better. He's happy as so few of my characters are; he leads a charmed life and knows it, and is profoundly grateful for it. He lacks the ridiculous emotional baggage Blaine had.)

It's also interesting to see how Silverlock relates to the people he cares about on a physical level...and, hey, porn. I think it's hot, but they're my characters, so I suppose I ought to.

(This is not part of either of those scenes; this is just Silverlock and Orrin being dumb.)
("So, now what?" Orrin had him pinned to the bed, with an obscenely smug look on his face.

"Well," he shifted his hips and watched Orrin's eyes briefly roll back in his head, "I was thinking you could fuck me. And then," he glanced at the clock, whose blinking numbers told him he wouldn't be getting any sleep tonight anyway, and he might as well give in to the inevitable. "I'm going to make pancakes."

"Pancakes?" Orrin seemed dubious.

"I'm hungry. And if I'm hungry now, I'll be hungry later, too." He spoke as though to a particularly slow-witted small child. He rolled his hips again, eliciting another blinded-by-lust expression from Orrin. "I'm also horny. And I will still be horny later if you don't get on with it.")

I'm a little bit in love with Orrin. He's very much who Tyrin could have become, had he survived past 16. And I love Faraz, because I needed a six and a half foot tall druid in my head. (She's so hardcore her internal organs are made of titanium.)

I want to write the scene where Orrin introduces Silverlock to the other four. Faraz adores him from the start, of course, as does Lindra. Ravi is a bit protective of Orrin and doesn't entirely approve, and Lorreth spends the evening very quietly hyperventilating, because he majored in arcane history and wrote his senior thesis on leechmagick in the Fourth Era Riftwar.

("I quoted you. In my master's dissertation. Does Orrin know you were an assassin? And that you helped acquit Theron Shanretha in the Radrezarian Genocide trials? Or that you've been sleeping with Anna DeLavrey? He's clueless sometimes, but if you hurt him I'll kill you. I'll mine your brain for research on my AD project and throw your body in the river."

Silverlock smirked and reached out with his senses; Eleth's soul was slippery and elusive, but if he could get a good look at it-

The sudden irony of Eleth defending Orrin was almost enough to make him sick. "I would sooner tear out my own eyes," he said gravely, all good humor gone. "Now if you'll excuse me, Mister Hjordiss, I need to get myself very drunk very quickly."

The others were whole and healthy, if surrounded by a faint aura of permanent bemusement- but Aya, alien and bright and beautiful, hadn't made the transition intact. The wounded shreds of her soul hung about Eleth like a shroud.)

The last scene I want to write is the one where Orrin and Faraz bust some skulls and rescue Tim from a bunch of drunken frat boys. Poor Tim- he was a baby when the tower opened, so no one realized he was one of the Soulless, until Silverlock meets him, and LOLs his head off.

this is serious business!

You know what I want? I want someone to write the fic where Jamie popped out another clone between X-Factor 11 and 12, and had sex with Ric in addition to Theresa and Monet.

...yeah, so I'm shallow, but dude. The thing with Siryn and Victoria in the first issue, Ric coming out as bisexual, all of Jamie's little asides in Mad(d)rox. (Mm, consistency of spelling. How I miss you sometimes.) In just about every issue, PAD makes some comment on Jamie's inability to make decisions because he can see the benefits of every path available. I mean, really. It's only a matter of time before Jamie comes out of the closet too. It's practically text at this point.

Also, it'd be hot. And there'd be no ridiculous drama, because Ric would sort of be all, "So, you're just a dupe, right?" And the dupe would go, "Yup, wanna screw?" And that'd be the end of it, until Jamie reabsorbed all his dupes the next morning and went "W. T. F." And then at some point later Ric would go, "Soooo..." and Jamie would kind of '>.> and then they'd have sex again. And it would be good.

I, um, love X-Factor. Because Peter David remembers that all of the characters have years worth of preexisting canon- canon that happened when he wasn't writing. I don't entirely approve of Monet being suicidal, but it works when looked at over the backdrop of everything else that has happened to her character. Same with Theresa being delusional, and Ric being sulky (oh wait, he was like that before).

I'm also maybe a little bit in love with Layla Miller, and the way she rescues people by crashing pizza delivery vans, and kills them with leaky pipes. I can't wait to see where PAD goes with the whole Singularity/Damien Tryp thing, and whether or not he fixes the decimation.

And, in other news, Peter David writing the Dark Tower comic? Makes me so happy. Peter David writing just about anything makes me so happy. But the fact that Dark Tower doesn't suck fills me with immense joy. And mmm, Steven Deschain, you sexy, angry beardy man. This comic, unlike the Neverwhere comic, is an example of how a book, or parts of a book, are properly adapted to the medium of comics.