#Cobbled Roadway

[rosieofcorona]

Ortolan

Angels, darlings, besties, I present to you the most evil thing I’ve ever written. The first chapter of a little gothic story about our favorite vampire ascendant and his beloved consort. Named, of course, after the bird that is born and bred to be eaten whole. Horror ensues. Also on AO3, if you prefer. Thank you for reading!

All her life Tav had lived in the palm of the palace’s shadow, its black spire-fingers stretching and reaching into the corners of the city when the sun dipped low. She had never known then how it held her, that distant, haunted thing, had never thought its eyes might watch her when she wasn’t watching back.

She watches everything now.

From its high balconies, she can see all of the Gate spread out below. The streets, the shops, the city center, the painted roofs and cobbled roadways— all in miniature from here, like little playthings from her childhood. The people move like dolls beneath her, in and out of the castle’s black hand, and on the days time seems to dilate in a widening, infinite loop, she thinks she sees herself among them, walking freely in the sun. 

She could make the lower city in an hour, if she hurried. 

It’s not so far, she thinks. Just far removed.  

Half a league and a lifetime away.

*****

Where Tav feels out of place in their new home, Astarion thrives. 

He stalks the halls with newfound confidence, cold command in every step, making note of things he’ll have their servants change. He seems to know the place inherently, every floorboard, every stone, while Tav gets lost with alarming frequency by comparison. 

She only explores at Astarion’s urging– Until it feels like home, my darling – but the halls are narrow and labyrinthine, stairways twisting into darkness, secret passages that lead nowhere or loop back to where she started. When learning the layout seems impossible and makes her feel like a rat in a maze, Astarion reminds her that all the prior spawn, including himself, had done it. 

Even an animal, she wants to say, can learn its way around a trap.

It’s not all awful, she supposes. She loves the libraries and the moon garden, with its fragrant phlox and foxgloves, and the oratory, too, when she gets brave enough to enter (Astarion promises more than once that she will not burst into flames). 

In fact most of the rooms, when she discovers them, are beautiful, pristine save for a gauzy shroud of dust left over centuries. Others have fallen to neglect, or to irrelevance. There is no need now for the garderobe, the vanity, the ice house, for the dovecote where no living birds remain. 

She finds the kitchen and the larder and the buttery standing useless– though the rats, if they could speak, might disagree. They’re busy gnawing at the stock of moldy scraps still in the pantry, hardly minding her approach until she’s on them. 

Her eyes track them as they scatter, like a hunter, like a predator. An instinct she’s developed since her death.

She is stronger, swifter, sharper– as Astarion had promised– but there is violence softly shimmering beneath. She wants to tear at something, always, wants to follow something home. She wants to bite down hard enough to make her jaw ache.

She never tells him out of fear he will encourage it. 

Tav dreads the day she knows is coming, the day he’ll send her out to hunt. He loves her bloodlust when he feeds her– Such an eager little thing– and keeps her hungry to incentivize her finding her own victims. 

But a rat is not a victim, says her instinct. 

She follows one into the back half of the kitchen past the storerooms, to a passage she has never seen before. The rodent slips beneath a door that hangs half-rotten on its hinges, as if no one has been through it in a century. It is unlikely, it occurs to her, that even Astarion knows it exists.

The door creaks open with her touch, the air beyond it thick with odor– wine and earth and slow decay, with something coppery beneath. She pricks her ears toward the sound of little claws upon the stonework, of a heartbeat in the dark that’s not her own. 

The rat has vanished out of sight, but it’s no matter. She can trace it by its movements, by its scent. As she creeps farther down the passage, the metallic scent gets clearer– copper, yes, but also parchment, like the binding of a book. Hints of mushroom, hints of honey, hints of soil, mold, and… rat blood .

The realization feeds her drive and her disgust in equal measure. Turn around , she tells herself. Let the poor thing go . 

But she moves on as if compelled, down one long staircase then another, winding deep beneath the palace where it’s damp and dark and cold. At the bottom she stops to listen, stops to take a deep breath in. 

There is a foulness deep below– the unmistakable scent of death– and still, the rat blood, like a top note, rises over the decay.

She hurries blindly into the blackness, her feet following her nose until she loses track of how many times she pivots and pivots back. They move underground until the air gets moist, the stone floor slick beneath them. Her own feet stick each time she pulls them up, as if walking through mud, or through gore. 

We must be deep beneath the earth, she thinks, for it to be so wet. 

The creature ahead of her stops suddenly, its breath heavy and exhausted, running one way then another, side to side. Dead-ended by a wall, no doubt. It finds no way ahead.

She can make out the trembling shape of it, her eyes black with lack of light, and then another shape between them, and another, and another. They look like piles of festered meat left in a storeroom, long-forgotten, and for a moment she believes that’s where she is.

Tav takes a step around a pile and something crunches beneath her heel. A bone, or shard of bone, she notes, the flesh long-rotted off the marrow. Another step, another crunch, a skittering sound like a stone being kicked. 

She kneels to touch the little object, to bring it closer to her face. Another shard, it seems, an animal tooth, the one end needle-sharp and hollow…

The realization swells and hits her like a wave. 

Her single-mindedness is banished as she looks around the room, no, not a room, a crypt– the crypt!– where Cazador locked all of his spawn before the ritual. Whatever is left of them coats the floor, their blood, their hair, their shattered teeth, and Tav can smell it now, their stench, beneath the rat that she’s all but forgotten. 

Her own voice screams above the instinct. I should not be here.  

She turns and runs in the direction she came from, at least, the direction she thinks she came from– and should she turn left here, or right? There should be stairs, where are the stairs, where are the stairs? 

She runs until she can run no more, until she corners herself in a corridor, caught between the way she came and a bolted door. She tries to stop herself from shaking, not from cold or damp, but terror, the idea she might be left in here until she is nothing but rot. 

But what she has learned from getting lost is that he will find her. 

She’s never asked him how he does it. She isn’t sure she wants to know. 

He always does, she reassures herself. I only need to wait. 

She doesn’t know how long she huddles there in the bleak and soundless gloom, doesn’t know how long she listens for his footfall. 

At last a voice slips through the darkness. A pale hand reaches for her own.

“You’ve wandered far this time, my darling. I could hardly trace your scent.”  

A horror scurries down her spine like little claws upon the floor. That’s how I tracked it when it ran, she shivers. Parchment, mushroom, honey.  

It’s how he finds her now, no matter where she runs.  ***** It is hours later when she asks him, with his blood still on her lips, how it feels to wring the life out of a creature, drop by drop. 

“You ought to know,” he answers absently, completely unperturbed. He is preoccupied, deciding on the perfect place to bite her, fingers tracing every vein beneath her skin. “You’ve killed a thousand times, my love, have you forgotten?”

“That was different. Not for blood.”

“No, gods forbid,” Astarion laughs. “Most times for gold.” 

She feels annoyance, like a spider, creeping up the back of her neck. “Do I hear judgment?” “Certainly not.” He makes a show of looking scandalized, a hand fluttering over his heart. “I’d never begrudge you a little violence, you know that.” 

As he moves further down the bed his touch trails with him, hands and mouth mapping a blue line down her body, along her breast and hip and thigh. He settles there and moves her legs apart so he can kneel between them, makes her shiver in familiar delight.

She wants to lose them in this moment, those poor creatures in the crypt, wants to put them from her mind for now and always. But with every touch she feels Astarion’s hunger, still unsated; with every kiss, she feels the sharpness of his teeth.

Like animal teeth, she thinks. Like theirs, like mine.  

“But do they suffer? When you drain them?”

Astarion sighs like rustled velvet, looking up at her from his knees.

“Such a soft heart, still,” he murmurs. “Did you suffer, my beloved?”

How easily, how often she forgets that he has killed her.

If there was suffering she can’t recall it now, no matter how she tries. The memory’s far off in the distance, formless, fogged by ambiguity. If she moved toward it, maybe she could make out certain details…

But his tongue is on her now, and she welcomes the distraction. It is unpleasant, after all, to relive dying. He drags it slowly over the soft flesh of her thigh above the artery until she hums a little sound of satisfaction. 

“Would you like to?” He asks, in that same, soft voice. His eyeteeth shine like pearls in the rising moonlight.

“Please,” she whispers. It is all the urging he needs. 

She cries out at the breaking of her skin, the rush of blood into his mouth. The feeding has always been pleasurable, even when she was alive, but it is heightened now that they are bound together. She can feel him from the inside now, coursing through his body, she can fill him and fulfill him with blood alone. “More,” she pleads, when he pulls away to look at her. Already he is bright with her blood. “Astarion, more.”

If this is suffering, she wants it– every evening, every hour– until whatever light still shines in her eyes goes out.  ***** In her dreams she finds her way back to the black mouth of the crypt, its iron gates swung wide on their hinges as if to swallow her entirely. She’s running frightened, like a rabbit , like a rat from something watching, someone whispering her name into the dark.

[telomeke-bbs]

สวัสดีค่ะ Hi telomeke,

I'm new here... just because of you! 😅 Found your blog month ago while I did some BBS research... and I'm really impressed by your research skills, your amazing eyes for details and your patience in finding locations.

Now it happens that in 14 days I am flying to Thailand for 4 weeks. And in preparation for this, I saved alll the locations you mentioned on google maps. 😇 I think, I'll take a tour through Bangkok to all the locations.

I couldn't find out how long ago post no. 12 was and wether there will be any new ones to follow. But I think there is at least one location missing. (the companies of Pat's and Pran's parents)

Are you still searching for locations or is your work completed?

If you are interested, it would be my pleasure to talk to you about the serie. If not, it's fine too. I just wanted to make you compliments for your work! Thank you so much! ขอบคุณมากๆ น่ะค่ะ 🙏 I really enjoyed reading it and I've still many post to read. 😊

Okay, that's it! Hope your fine and still in love with BBS! 💖

เจอกันค่ะ คุณบี see ya, Bee 🐝

Hi dear @honey-beebs! สวัสดีครับ and welcome!😍

Awww, thanks so much for this lovely Ask. Any fan of BBS is immediately a friend in my book. 🥰 Thanks so much for appreciating my BBS research and analysis.

I can tell you also have a keen eye for research, because you saw not just what was there in my location posts, but also what was missing – Pat and Pran's families' shops. 👀 And sadly, that is the one location that I have been desperately searching for over these past two years, but have so far been unable to find. 😭

It's gotten me all worked up because there are actually a lot of clues, and I've been able to deduce quite a lot about the Jindapat and Siridechawat hardware stores:

It looks like the Jindapat one (belonging to Pat's family) is actually a construction material shop; the shelves and the items all around have been there for some time, not likely to have been cobbled together just for the show.

The Siridechawat shop though (belonging to Pran's family) looks like a covered vehicular park or outdoor storage, that BBS dressed up just so it could masquerade as a shop (not too successfully, in my opinion 😂).

The general location of the shops is likely to be not in Rangsit, but rather somewhere closer to central Bangkok (though not in the absolute city center). I say this because the outside shrubbery on the central road divider is very well-manicured (you see that more in central Bangkok, less in Greater Bangkok), and the lamp-post has markings that make it look more like central Bangkok ones. But there aren't any tall buildings visible, so it's not likely to be in the absolute city center where skyscrapers abound (and intrude on every view).

Actually, the road, trees, lamp-post and shrubbery look a lot like what you see at Phet Kasem Road, where the Boonyavej Hospital is located. There are lots of semi-industrial properties there that would fit the bill (including the wide gate and sturdy fencing), and the area is also more low-rise without being truly suburban (which would be the right setting for a shop that has giant billboards, that we can see in Ep.1 and Ep.3). Unfortunately, I've crawled the road several times over on Google Street View (it's hugely long) but have yet to find any matching property. 🤷‍♂️

If the shops are not on Phet Kasem Road, then it's very much a needle in the haystack search because Bangkok must have hundreds of roadway miles that fit the above description… 😭

Anyway, I'll still continue searching, and will post the location if I can find it. But with every day that passes, it seems less likely that the location will be found (because it seems ripe for redevelopment).

My location post no. 12 was dated 18 June 2023, and it's likely the penultimate one. I have just one more planned to identify the remaining minor locations. And if I can track down the hardware stores, then maybe I'll post a 14th one (but I don't know if that will ever happen 🤷‍♂️).

If my schedule permits, I'll try to write-up the few remaining locations that I've identified in the coming two weeks, so you should be able to refer to them by the time you're in Bangkok. But my work deadlines are looming, so I can't promise the post will be on time!

Please do post photographs of your trip and tag me, especially for the BBS locations. 😍 I would so love to see them. Other fans have also been visiting various BBS locations too, so you may wish to refer to these posts for additional information:

‌

Here are a few more pointers that I've gleaned from the above posts, and from interacting with other BBS fans (especially @tiistirtipii), since I made my own location posts:

U Café is no longer at the base of the block where the fight scene in Ep.5 took place (somewhere close by the Environmental Engineering Dept), so the setting looks a bit different now. But it's near the white tiger mural at the College of Engineering.

Gram Café and Pancakes is no longer at Level 2 of The Promenade; it moved to the foodcourt (in Fashion Island?) some time back.

The 112 Chemical Room 1 in Ep.1 (where Pat covered Pran's mouth while putting a finger to his own lips, after yanking him into the alley to escape the other Engine boys) is most likely somewhere in Rangsit University (probably the College of Engineering, near the workshops) but I've never been able to pinpoint the exact location (Google Street View doesn't do all roads and side alleys in RSU 😂). Do let me know if you find it.

As for your other questions, I'm always down to chat about Bad Buddy. Still very much a BBS boy at heart, and time hasn't dimmed how much I love the series! 💖 So feel free to send me Asks and messages if you'd like to converse about Bad Buddy. The only caveat is (as I mentioned above) my work has been building up lately (this week has been a bit slower, but it is expected to get busier after mid-April 2024 😭), so my responses to Asks and messages will sometimes be delayed (as my other friends on Tumblr have also experienced).

Have a great time in Thailand! Your Tumblr header makes it sound like this might be your first trip there. Do take care! Thailand is an amazing place. The usual precautions apply, but the place is full of wonderful sights and delicious food. I've always enjoyed every trip there. 😍

Warmest regards,

Tel 💖

P.S. Can I say how much I also love your Tumblr name? My first instinct is to read it as Honey Beebs, but then on looking closer I can tell it's also Honey Bee + BBS, which is really clever. 🤩

‌

[sim-ply-lilacs]

Bea's nausea didn't abate in the coming weeks. If anything, it worsened, and she often found herself ducking behind bushes or to the chamber pot in her mother's room to hide her sickness.

It wasn't that she didn't want to tell Josef about the possibility she was pregnant, it was the possibility part she was worried about. Now that she'd calmed herself down and realized that she wasn't deathly ill, she wanted to be certain that she was expecting and not, say, reacting to some questionable cheese before she shared her hopes with Josef. He so dearly wanted to be a father. Often, when he thought she wasn't looking, Bea spied Josef's sparkling eyes at playing children or mothers with babies. She wanted to fulfill that unspoken dream for the both of them. She just needed to find a moment to slip away to the midwife in town and see if her suspicions were correct.

Her opportunity presented itself one day when Josef had to attend a Grange meeting. He was to be gone all day, and offered some local boys a dollar each to complete the farm chores. In his quiet way, Josef was asking her to rest. Despite her efforts, Bea's pallor, lack of appetite, and exhaustion were evident. It was impossible for it not to be, so long as she was grimacing at the smell of eggs and falling asleep in her rocking chair in the middle of the day.

Relating all of this to the midwife later that day, Bea was almost embarrassed it had taken her so long to put two and two together—especially when she noticed the burgeoning swell to her abdomen during the quick examination. Still, it was with some measure of dazed awe which saw Bea leaving the midwife. There was no question; she was pregnant.

The rest of the day dragged on with agonizing sluggishness. Bea tried knitting, tidied the house, read, but after making dinner, nothing could keep her mind off of the news she was desperate to share with her husband. She couldn't even share the news with her mother. Madeline was out walking with a local widower (who she seemed to be growing closer with by the day), and said she would stay with friends in town that night.

Finally, while Bea was taking a walk to visit the animals the telltale clip-clop of the horses pulling the buggy sounded across the newly cobbled roadway near the house.

Bea shot forward across the yard and into her husband's arms. "Josef!" she cried, "Oh, my darling, I've been waiting for absolute ages for you to come home!"

Taken by surprise (but not exactly displeased by having his wife fling herself at him), Josef stumbled back. "Ah, Bea? Are you well, my dear? I only left this morning."

"Fine, everything's fine," Bea laughed, holding onto him, "I've been to see the midwife today, that's all."

Worry creasing his brow, Josef stepped back to look at her. "You are alright, ja? It is not something serious, is it?"

A full-throated laugh bounded up from Bea's throat and escaped into the air around them. "We're such worriers, the two of us. I'm quite well, I promise. I only hope," she intoned slowly, a sparkle in her eye, "that our baby doesn't suffer the same affliction."

Josef stood as one who had been struck by lightning. "B-baby?" He brought up his hands to cup Bea's face and she laughed again. "Do you mean...?"

Bea bit her lip and nodded, grinning. "Yes, Josef, I'm having a baby."

He pressed his forehead to hers, hands still cradling her face. "Bea. My darling, darling Bea. You have made me happier than I think I have any right to be. A baby. Truly?"

"Yes, Josef, truly. You're going to be a papa. It seems the crops and chickens aren't the only thing that have been growing on this farm," Bea teased.

Josef exhaled a watery chuckle. He pulled her in for a tighter embrace. "I do not say it enough," he began, his voice wavering, just barely, "It is not usually my way. But I love you. Very much."

"Oh, my dearest man, I love you, too."

They stood as one, swaying in an early spring breeze on the land they worked together, bound by love and the child between them.

As they always were, always would be, Bea and Josef were drawn to each other. Quietly, and without preamble, their lips met, sealing something between them. It was a kiss that spoke of hope, a kiss that tasted of promise.

"Thank you," he seemed to be saying with his kiss, "for giving me everything I've ever dreamt of."

"Thank you," she seemed to say with hers, "for giving me this life, for loving me, for making me your wife."

They broke apart, simply holding each other and whispering about their hopes for each other, for their child. Though a drizzle of rain began to fall, they stayed there, together, as though in the middle of a bright, sunny day. Bea tucked herself further into his arms, thanking God that this man was the father of her child.

Prev ~ Next ~ Beginning

[sentanixiv]

The Angel On His Arm What happens when I run around RDO too often with @sweet-by-and-by, who runs an adorable Mary-Beth rendition.

Leaves scurry across the half-cobbled roadway, signs of industrialization meant to take this one-horse town from an inconsequential speck into some place worth a telegram home to mention. Arthur takes stock of all but its name, this town ain't no more, nor no less, than any other shithole he's been to. They got a sheriff and a deputy, both too big for their  britches, and a stagecoach outpost that's more afterthought than thoroughfare. Way he sees it, they ain't too long for this area, seeing as there ain't much worth stealing to keep them 'round.

'Bout the only thing that matters is the fine tailor that's managed to set up shop. Driven out of bigger cities by bigotry, the fella runnin' it has no problems with authority, but plenty of problems with thieving. No one's welcome to it in his workshop and it's that unwelcome attitude what sees Arthur here, entering with Mary-Beth on his arm, fussing at him that things will be fine, she doesn't need to buy a new dress.

"You don't be worryin' none, Mary-Beth," he assures her with a quick, warm smile - the sort saved for them that he cares about. "You ain't needin' nothing, but you's deserving of it."

That puts a damper on her protests and turns her lips into a smile, bashful and sweet. Real dangerous thief, Mary-Beth is, because if she ain't able to steal a man's heart with one soft smile, she can empty his pockets in the moment of distraction it causes.

"You're too good to me, Arthur," she says demurely.

"That's about all I'm good for," he replies. Guides her towards the tailor, a man with a pensive look on his face that seems turned on the lady. Seems Mary-Beth may've been plying her trade here earlier.

The smack on his forearm, light, earns her a raised brow. "You're good for so much more than that," she chides.

"Maybe," he allows, tipping back his hat, "but that don't make me no good as a person."

"You're all that and more as a friend," she says, standing tiptoe for a chaste press of her lips to his cheek.

"Can I help you?" comes stiffly from the tailor.

Arthur coughs once into the back of his hand, then looks over the man. "Me? Nah. I ain't got no need for fancy things." He nudges Mary-Beth forward. "This lady, though. She's lookin' for something fine. Think you got anything worth her time?"

The flicker of annoyance in how the man looks at Mary-Beth has Arthur leaning back his weight on his heel, resting his hands along his gunbelt. That draws the focus back to him and he gives the man a slow, leisurely sort of nod to help encourage him along.

"Seeing as she helped herself in our last encounter," the tailor starts with a disdainful sniff, "I've no idea why she suddenly needs my help to enrich herself."

Ah, seems his assessment is right and Mary-Beth already danced about this man's wares and wealth. Arthur feels a surge of pride for that, and irritation at the reticence. "Now, I know you ain't saying nothing foul about my lady friend here," he warns.

Mary-Beth steps up, a bolt of fine burgundy fabric in her hands, and she smiles sweetly at the tailor, gives Arthur a quick glance asking to let her handle it. He steps back, always mindful to give a lady what she wants. Then her smile is fully brilliant, turned on the tailor as she lays the fabric out on the counter. "I'd like this in a skirt, please," she says, light as day, as though she's not come through and picked his register clean at least the once.  "And a vest, for my friend," she adds with a gesture to Arthur, just enough promise in it to be threat. "Blood is so very hard to get out, stains the material quite badly." Bats her eyes all innocent, the picture of an angel here on earth. "I'm hoping that starting with red will mean less stains in the future. Do you think that would help?"

The very picture of an angel, but Arthur chuckles as the words settle in and prove the lady equally capable of being quite the devil.

[pokelec]

It was supposed to be a joke. It was supposed to be a joke!

A runaway mayor hired me to rid his town of zombies. Since a blood moon shined down on the area, any person who died under it would become an undead. As long as no one else died, even I could rid the place of this plague without my usual entourage.

I stared down Main Street at the zombies trying to crash their way through the doors. The sounds the monsters made, the wooden houses with cobbled-together roofs, the dirt roadways, and the hills of green and stone in the distance... it reminded of the times before I entered this world. I longed for the nights of sitting at my desk, eating chips and cookies while waiting for my ores to smelt before I could continue building.

I held out my hand. A turquoise magic circle appeared on the ground. I was just planning to summon a simple sword or something, but nostalgia made a stupid idea pop into my mind.

I expected nothing to happen. But to my surprise, the circle hummed and a short but distinctive shape rose from my magic circle.

It was a diamond sword.

The sword was shorter than I expected, barely reaching up to my knees. It wasn't a more realistic version of the weapon either; each pixel was the size of a sticky note. I grabbed the handle. It was so flat that i worried I'd get a paper cut from just holding it. But no, my hand was as comfortable as holding a cardboard cutout of a weapon could possibly be.

A zombie noticed me. it stumbled with arms reaching out. I charged forward and swung the sword at its neck.

The zombie made an "oof" sound on contact. I expected the head to fly off or something, but no. The zombie fell sideways like a mannequin and poofed into smoke, leaving behind a small pile of rotten flesh.

I looked at the weird sword again. A faint shimmer rippled across the blue blade. Must've been enchanted with Smite.

I'll figure out what the hell this all means for me after I make like an iron golem and destroy all these zombies.

You get isekai’d into a typical fantasy world with the ability to summon any weapon. You often summon typical weapons like swords, spears, maybe a gun if you need it. You finally realize fictional weapons can be summoned.

[wanditultra]

internet status in t. d. is currently in its early 2000s stage where its not considered a major part of society and is not as advanced or advancing as quickly as it were in our world. tech avaliable to the public overall is not "advanced" - rotary phones and flip phones, dvds, faxes, clunky tacky houseware, yknow. huh? im not projecting my aesthetics what are you talking about. video games are about at the same stage where they're not like super high quality for our standards.

there's also no cars in hiriame, the main city I'm focusing on (no car drawing win) .. but there's bikes and motorbikes and free public transport like buses and trains that have their own elevated roadways. streets have this cobbled together look which is a bit of a health hazard but it's okay. it's fine.

aircraft- only insurgency and other powers have access to them. the public services board have a few helicopters, mainly for medical related incidentally.

[poleteli]

Винницкий район, Винницкая область, Украина 

Люба Ивлева | Фотография | Карта

[dcviated]

“Haha! Awh it was nothin’, don’t even mention it. Crazy how much lays around when you don’t have to worry about puttin’ a roof over your head every night. Not that I minded camping but… you get what I mean.” Hopefully. Maybe. Even in his younger days Dogi was a more frugal sort out of necessity and character. Now that those circumstances had changed he was amazed how that ethic could be put to use for enjoyment! And being able to share it with others.

“Where to next… huh… you didn’t have anything you needed to take care of? Y’sure? Well. Didn’t realize I’d get to keep draggin you around all day. Hope I don’t tire you out too much.” An offhand remark made in good spirits as the pair depart the atmospheric café for more platonic streets. The rough and tumble cobble of the roadway has its own charm, leading up into the rest of the district and away from the skyship harbor. Dogi rubs his chin.

“Anything you wanted to check out? I don’t wanna make this all about me. Uh. Unless you wanted to look at clothes and such. Not sure I’d be able to help much there…”

    When he boldly tells her to stay put, Herja would blink with widened eyes... clearly not expecting him to be so assertive about footing the bill. Considering this wasn't even supposed to be a date, however, him acting so gentlemanly was enough to spark a blush along her cheeks; what's more, all eyes were suddenly on them, to the point where she couldn't help growing self-conscious by the minute.

    "E-Eh?! But Dogi-dono, you doing so would mean...!" she attempts to protest; only, so flustered was she by the hand that had settled over her shoulder, Herja couldn't even bring herself to finish the rest of the sentence while sputtering on the spot. Honestly, in the end, she'll just watch him retreat back inside the restaurant before slinking back down against her seat with a sigh.

    Why, oh why were men from the captain's crew almost always so dashing, she wonders? Seriously, to this day, Herja still had no answer for this question, but the moment Dogi returned, she'll soon emerge from her seat. "Ah, th-thank you very much for handling the bill!" Sure enough, she then proceeds to initiate a half bow to express her appreciation. The whole entire time, though, her cheeks were practically burning from how gallantly he behaved, yet upon not wanting to linger on her embarrassment much further, she'll proceed to change the topic of conversation.

    "Um... was there anywhere else you wanted to go next, Dogi-dono? If so, I shall gladly take your lead," Herja finally nods rather determinedly.

[heroineimages]

World-Building: Calendar

I’ve been meaning for a long time to sit down and establish a calendar for the primary culture in First Empress. Mostly it’s for my own reference, helping me keep track of season changes and travel times. Though, I’m also thinking about revising it as an appendix to the novel and having Zahnia toss in pithy commentary. Calendar and discussion below the cut. The parenthetical notations of what Julian months each Tollesian month corresponds with are entirely for my reference and will probably be removed on revision. Any feedback is welcome!

Appendix B: the Tollesian Calendar, discussion and analysis by Zahnia, the Chronicler

As most know, the Tollesian year is divided into three-hundred and sixty-two days, the year beginning and ending with the Spring Equinox. Ferra’s Month and Arr’s Month, the first and last months of the year, have thirty-one days. The remaining ten months contain thirty days.

Seasonal effects

Unlike more northern climates, the Vestic and Istartus Seas have relatively mild summers and winters. Their summers are hot and frequently humid and winters rainy and cold, with moderate rainy seasons in between. As well as effective growing seasons, the lack of snow allows for the limited growth of winter-crops, in particular winter-wheat and winter-barley. More pertinent to Tollesian culture is how the four cardinal seasons affect agriculture, travel, and warfare.

Agriculture

By and large, only spring and autumn are thought of as agricultural seasons in Tollesian and other cultures on the Vestic and Istartus Seas. Landowners and their slaves and hired hands tend to plant and work ground during the early- to mid-spring and harvest during the late-summer and early fall. Once the campaign season starts in late spring, the yeoman and aristocrat farmers tend to trade shovels for spears and leave the day-to-day tending of the farm to their kids, slaves, and hirelings. The regular rainfall around the Vestic Sea helps facilitate dryland farming, though a few areas, particularly along the northwestern shores, have imported Kossôn gravity-irrigation techniques to supplement less dependable rainfall.

Additionally, the relatively mild winters with their steady rains and infrequent snows allow farmers on certain parts of the Vestic to plant winter-grains. Since this discovery, these crops have frequently been used to supply armies during the campaign season or supply cities besieged by invaders.

Travel and trade

Though only the northern and more mountainous regions around the Vestic Sea receive an annual snowfall, travel is still severely limited in the wintertime due to constant rains on land and violent storms at sea.

Though cities and townships manage to offset this somewhat with cobbled roadways, rural roadways are nearly untraversable during the rainy season. Occasional efforts have been made to cobble some of the major trade roads, but winter rains tend to cover up their efforts within a few years. While travelers on foot or on horseback can generally traverse the roadways with moderate-to-considerable difficulty, the mud renders wagons completely unusable, reducing overland trade to almost zero.

The regular winter storms and squalls render the seas similarly unusable. In addition to the heavy rain and treacherous waves, the overcast skies significantly compound navigation. Warships, merchantmen, and courier ships, no matter how sturdy, are forced to cling to shorelines for safety, and even then are risking a great deal by setting out. Island city-states, meanwhile, receive virtually no travelers or trade during the winter months.

Warfare

The reliable rainfall and prevalence of slaves and workmen allows yeomen farmers and aristocrat landowners plenty of free time over the summer months to wage war. Leaving their children, workers, and slaves to tend the farms after planting, yeomen and wealthy hoplites don their armor and shields either to plunder their neighbors’ land or defend their own. That the farmlands are most vulnerable to raids from rival city-states influences many farmers to thus take up arms, while the promise of gold, luxuries, slaves, and other spoils encourages others to invade their rivals.

Though skirmishes and raids may continue until well after the harvest season, this is when the bulk of hoplites put up their spears for the winter. Campaigns and sieges must take harvest into account, in terms of travel times and food supplies. Many a besieged city has spent its summer counting the days until the attacking hoplites are forced to return home for the harvest season.

This has been the norm for Tollesian city-states for over seven hundred years, but the increased presence of Gannic, Verleki, and other non-agricultural invaders has necessitated a paradigm shift in military organization. Unhindered by planting and harvest seasons, more and more encroaching barbarians have begun increasing their raids during spring and autumn. And being from northerly climates, the Gan in particular lack the Tollesian reluctance to fight during the cold, rainy winters. These non-seasonal attacks have forced many city-states, particularly along the northern coastlines, to attempt to keep standing armies year round, paying commoners, freed slaves, and disenfranchised yeomen to patrol the trade roads and protect the borders during even the coldest, wettest winter months.

This has in turn slowly created a class of professional soldier in some city-states, with yeomen selling their farms for linothorax and restless nobles using their savings to buy top-line weapons and armor. While many of these fight for the defense of their city-states, many others have taken up as sell-spears, fighting for whoever offers coin. Some military experts argue that with agricultural seasons and farming schedules no longer dictating troop deployment, far-reaching conquests may be in the future for the Tollesian city-states.

Months

The calendar year is divided into twelve months. Most months have thirty days, except Ferra’s and Arr’s months, which have thirty-one. Ferra’s Month is also unique in that every seven years a Leap Day is tacked onto the end. The day is generally celebrated with feasting and libations, and children born on Leap Day are often considered good luck for their city-state, town, or village.

Ferra’s Month (late March–late April)

Named for the goddess of rebirth, medicine, and fertility, the first month of the calendar year begins on the Spring Equinox. Around the Vestic Sea, Ferra’s month is mostly rainy, but the first two weeks also see the final tapering off of the winter storms that make sea travel on the Vestic basically suicidal for nearly four months of the year. Early crops are typically planted by the Feast of Ferra on the 20th, and planting and irrigation season is usually in full swing by the end of the month.

Suvie’s Month (late April–late May)

Suvie’s Month is the second month in the calendar year and is named for the hermaphrodite deity of the forest and wilderness. The last of the summer crops are typically planted by the end of the first week. The Tollesian campaign season generally begins by the second and third week, the yeoman hoplites having finished their planting and the seas generally safe enough to transport soldiers. The second week is considered the beginning of the ‘Dry Season’ on the Vestic’s northwestern islands and rim, as rainfall tends to basically shut off until autumn. Most of the rest of the islands and surrounding mainland continue to get sporadic showers throughout the summer, however. Feast day is on the 16th.

Zupor’s Month (late May–late June)

Named for the Tolleisan god of war and slaughter, the Tolleisan campaign season is typically in full swing by Zupor’s Month. As such, the month tends to see more warfare and bloodshed than any other month of the year. Additionally, the previous year’s winter crops are close to ready to harvest, often providing a plentiful food source for besieged cities or for raiding and besieging armies. Zupor’s month ends on the Summer Solstice. Zupor’s feast day is on the 8th.

Nyrus’s Month (late June–late July)

Named for the patron god of the Vestic, Istartus, and Tornis Seas, the Month of Nyrus begins upon the Summer Solstice, which is also the Feast of Nyrus. Many island city-states maintain a tradition of blessing ships built during the springtime during the first week of the month. Summer raids, skirmishes, and sieges are still ongoing. Most winter crops not stolen or destroyed are harvested during the second and third week of the month.

Avilee’s Month (late July–late August)

Named for the goddess of protection, fallen soldiers, and bereft families, Avilee’s month marks the winding-down of the campaign season and the start of the harvest season. Most armies are withdrawn from enemy territory and disbanded to allow the farmers in the army time to return home for the harvest. Avilee’s Feast Day on the 28th is a feast of mourning, commemorating the soldiers and civilians killed or missing during the campaign season.

Cibades’s Month (late August–late September)

Dedicated to the god of agriculture, farmers, planting, and the harvest, Cibades’s Month is when the bulk of the harvest is conducted. By this time, raiding, skirmishing, and all but the most belligerent of sieges have been called off to allow the yeomen farmers who make up the bulk of hoplites to return to their fields. The Feast of Cibades is technically on eve of the Autumn Equinox on the 30th, but many city-states put it off until the last of the harvest is hauled in over the next few weeks.

Andiva’s Month (late September–late October)

The month of the goddess of order and justice begins on the Autumn Equinox and marks the end of the harvest and transition to winter. Though post-harvest raids and skirmishes between belligerent city-states aren’t uncommon, there isn’t a dedicated season, and most blockades are kept short and sieges are almost nonexistent. Regions able to support winter crops tend to plant them around this time. Andiva’s Feast Day is the 16th.

Kralor’s Month (late October–late November)

God of knowledge, science, and art, as well as father of the Muses, Kralor’s month marks the beginning of the winter season. The regular rainstorms on land and sea compound both aquatic and overland travel. Though rural villages and townships continue to send out hunters to supplement their winter supplies, most city-states rely primarily on their harvest food-stores to get through the winter. Trade tapers to almost nothing, and few battles or skirmishes occur. The Feast of Kralor is on the 18th.

Orova’s Month (late November–late December)

As goddess of darkness and shadows, it’s fitting that Orova’s month is the darkest of the year. All of the Vestic Sea remains mostly overcast and rainy while frequent storms wrack the waves and coastlines. The mountains around the Vestic and islands with high enough elevations receive most of their snow during this time. Orova’s Feast is on the 30th, during the Winter Solstice when the Tollesian world is darkest.

Vepu’s Month (late December–late January)

God of the afterlife and the Underworld, Vepu’s month begins following the Winter Solstice. As with Orova’s month, the Vestic Sea remains mostly overcast with frequent rains and storms. Higher elevations continue to receive more snow. The Feast of Vepu is on the 24th.

Thanusa’s Month (late January–late February)

Mother of the gods and patron of death and rebirth, Thanusa’s month is marked by a gradual warming in the Vestic’s climate. Storms become noticeably less violent, and the higher elevations may experience cold rains that lead to early melt-offs. Thanusa’s feast is on the 10th.  

Arr’s Month (late February–late March)

Father of the gods and patron of fate and destiny, Arr’s month is the last in the Tollesian calendar. Marked by warmer rains and less-frequent storms, Arr’s month ushers in the coming year and rebirth of spring. His feast on the 31st is a celebration of the Spring Equinox and well as the possibilities of the new year.

[juniper-tree]

The Waking - 1

The Outer Worlds - The Captain/Vicar Max

Plans change, even Grand ones. So do people. Your captain on this flight is cryo-sick, dissociating, and might be dead. Prepare for turbulence.

Full chapter on AO3

Whatever thin enticements Edgewater might yet offer for its residents, its paltry handful of disappointed and hasty visitors, the climate was not first among them. The preeminent adjective to describe the miasma which engulfed that edge of Emerald Vale was salty. Sticky was a tight second place. It rolled in from the coast and the town was its first and favorite stop.

The air—if it could be called such, though it shared no other qualities with that element than breathability, and that assessment, too, was debatable—clung and gathered in a soggy fog. It coagulated in puddles and soaked any chipped cobbles left to make up the roadways. And, worst of all its crimes, the fume met and mingled with that wretched stink sent up from the mechanized, oily, endless deconstruction of saltuna, the searing, metallic sealants of its cans.

Hot fish and boiling aluminum and fetid salt spray. That was Edgewater. Maximillian DeSoto could not decide which was worse: the stench itself, or that he was growing accustomed to it.

[breweress]

@but-master​

There was an elk in Camelot. A perfectly normal, entirely uninteresting elk wandering down the cobbled roadway, nose in the air as she sniffed. Some old man’s beard moss hung from her antlers, and her hooves click-clacked as she followed the scent of sweets. Bakeries at work. And, most importantly, magic.

Someone here was more than just a wizard. Someone here smelled. And she was going to find --

Oh. There he was. She walked right into him, nose bumping against his head, and she stepped back in surprise at how weak the scent of magic was on him. What was he? The elk looked down at him curiously, head tilting and eyes glinting with unexpected intelligence.

[carterhaughs]

Creatures Like & Unlike

This is fic for a very underrated Image comic series, Moonshine. I can’t recommend it highly enough (and I will be blogging a great many panels from it). Without getting into spoilery detail, if you’re interested in the deep-rooted trauma ouroboros of America as a nation and want a glimpse of how that plays out among rival bootleggers in the late 20s/early 30s, and are intrigued by the idea of blood drenched horror-noir that doesn’t shy away from soul-wrenching romance...you might be a Moonshine fan. It’s got mafiosos and werewolves, and mafiosos who are werewolves, and Appalachian bootleggers. What’s not to like?

The main couple in the series, Lou Pirlo and Delia Bane, are a werewolf and a witch with a mysterious relationship Lou himself cannot explain due to gaps in his memory. At one point, they head to New Orleans to lie low and try to figure out how to break Lou’s curse. This story is meant to take place within that time frame.

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“Lou...” He could hear her, of course he could, and see her, a lone figure clad in white against the dark. The dress she’d bought with his money–he could make out the floral embroidery on the bodice.

“Lou!” Her cry pierced the night and he shrank from it, whining audibly. He wanted to run to where she couldn’t see him, but this part always rooted him where he stood despite however much he might fight it. He had stopped it once or twice, and slowed it, but any control he had managed to exert was never something to be relied upon. Still he tried, breathing hard, unable to tell if his expanding lung capacity helped him slow the process or actually quickened the disease that pumped through his veins.

“Delia! Don’t!” It was all he could manage, and he wasn’t even sure if it came out right, garbled as his voice was by his lengthening muzzle and swelling vocal cords. He closed his eyes, trying to center himself somehow even as he avoided the sight of her all-too swift passage of the swampland between them, arms outstretched to a man who was no longer there. It was getting hard to stand up straight beneath the curve of his spine, so he leaned forward, grateful for the relief it granted his creaking, rapidly expanding torso when his knuckles scraped the ground. His limbs bristled with fur, and he felt the prickle of it on the margins of his already ill-shaven face. He cowered where he stood, unable to flee her advance, and she was close now, reeds whipping her ankles as she came.

A traitorous part of his brain reassured him he’d remember none of this, so what did it matter? It would all vanish into oblivion like everything in and around a drinking spell. But of course it mattered, because he killed people inside those stretches of oblivion, hard as it was to imagine anything killing her. He’d never directly seen her work magic, but her foreknowledge and insight through her association with the dead were indisputably real, and he’d never seen her afraid of anything. Except the things he did to himself.

His breath came fast and harsh now, around the jagged edges of his lengthening canines. He was afraid of what would come out of his throat if he tried to speak so he held his tongue. Slaver begin to drip from his jaws, and the long hard nails of his toes and fingers dug into the soft, muddy earth. He couldn’t recall ever holding onto his consciousness this long and feared losing his grip if he tried to take in his immediate vicinity, so he kept his eyes closed and controlled his breath as best he could, slowing his heartbeats as he felt his long, leathery ears swivel towards Delia’s approach. Her breathing was even, but her heart hammered in her chest, which made his own pulse quicken. He tried not to think about why when he realized that if anything would protect her, his own opposition to his darker nature was the least he could muster. But as it turned out the wolf in him was merely intrigued and eager to take in this stranger’s delicate scent, a current of honeysuckle on the sticky breeze, with the gait of a soft-stepping deer. It was hard, he found, not to slip out of himself completely when he turned his lupine senses on her. She stood right in front of him now, her warm breath on his skin, and he heard her reach towards his face. He wanted to turn away, but couldn’t afford to break the spell of concentration miraculously allowing him some measure of control over himself. He remained still, eyes closed, and she cupped his cheek with a warm, calloused hand.

“Lou,” her voice came from far away, low and gentle and the only animal sound in the swamp nearby except his own ragged breaths. He whined. “I know it hurts. You can’t go back and it will hurt you not to go forward. But it’s alright so long as I’m with you. Just stay with me. Please. You’re safe here.” She ran her fingers down the length of his muzzle and he shivered. Her permission was all the wolf needed, and Lou Pirlo faded away.

His eyes opened directly across from her own, wide and dark and slightly wet. He could smell the faint brine in them, and a coppery whiff of blood rising from her lower limbs, whipped and torn by the foliage. His nose twitched at the scent and he lowered himself so he was level with her legs, licking the wounds and staunching the flow of blood from them. She stood completely still, and he smelled hot white fear on her for the first time even as she stroked the crown of his head, smoothing his ruff of fur back from the sinewy base of his skull. He lowered himself further, and curled up at her feet, making himself smaller so she would stay. He wanted that more than anything, and it rumbled low in his throat. Her pulse began to slow, and the fear ebbed, replaced by the musk of the swamp that clung to her and something that was only hers and radiated from under her limbs and within her secret places, rich and sweet.

“You may bury my body down by the highway side...” she sunk down into the mud next to him against the base of a black and twisted live oak, singing and running her fingers through the hair on the back of his neck. “Yeah, my poor dead body down by the highway side...” Carefully, he lay his head on her lap, alert to any hitch in her breath, any change in her pulse. But her vitals were soft and slow. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of her voice and words that on some instinctual level he knew and remembered even if they had no distinct meaning in his lupine mind. He knew this creature, her scent and her touch most of all, and felt that he was as much hers as she was his. The wolf sighed, deep and low, and she lowered her face to brush his brow with her lips, and this was a touch he knew.

His sight dimmed, and he slipped into dark dreams chasing quarry he could not best through cobbled streets and muddy roadways, but the sounds she made led him through to the light of day. Nothing stirred in the clearing except his own nose and ears taking the measure of his surroundings. She had fallen asleep with her hand at the base of his neck, fingers deep and loose in his fur. Without the cover of darkness, he felt exposed, and if he was exposed, then so was she. He slipped from her grasp, picking her up in long corded limbs unaccustomed to use independent of his haunches, and she stirred fitfully.

“Shit!” she cried, startling him so he nearly dropped her. She clung to the fur on his chest and he whined at the sensation. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I didn’ mean to–” She let go and looked up at him uncertainly. They stood like that for a moment, neither understanding the other’s intent, the wolf uncertain what to make of her reaction. “Lou, why are you still...” She trailed off, and her brow creased with concern. He turned to carry her deeper into the swamp, taking her silence and gentle grasp around his neck as her assent.

There was a cave there, cool and dark, providing the safety of night in the harsh light of day. He lay her prone on the long, low stone shelf within, and sniffed at the wounds up and down her legs from the night before, dry and scabbed over. She would heal. Turning his attention to her dark eyes and lips, now silent, he loomed over her where she lay, quite still. Her pulse quickened a bit and his with it. He lowered himself down the length of her small frame, nosing at the hem of her dress. She pulled the edge of it down and quite suddenly he smelled fear on her again. He leaned back onto his haunches and whined, confused and aching with want. She drew herself up to her full height and for a moment he thought she would run from him, but he felt her breath even out, and she walked toward him and leaned up to place her lips on his cheek, again in a way that he felt he had known the touch of once.

“We can’t like this,” she said. “Perhaps there is a way...I would have to ask my sisters.”

“Even if we knew such a thing, we would certainly not tell you!” He snarled and jerked toward the mouth of the cave to see two women approaching them, having somehow completely avoided detection. The girl ran to his side, placing herself between them.

“Don’ worry about them; jus’ stay near me.” Her eyes pled with him, and he lowered his hackles, but his growl stayed low in his throat.

“What are you doing out here with that creature? No man is worth this amount of trouble.” He understood their clipped tone and high-browed sneers well enough, and felt his lips curl back in an involuntary snarl he did nothing to suppress. The girl held his left arm, gently but firmly, running her fingers along the arch of his shoulder. The women looked at him with barefaced reproof, hands on their hips, making clucking noises. One of them waved her finger at the girl in a way he didn’t like, but he knew she would let him loose if she needed him. He settled back on his haunches and was still.

“I’m no friend to your choice of man but I must admit surprise at his obedience.”

“He’s gentle towards those he knows well.”

“Especially those he’s known biblically, I imagine.” The shorter one raised a heavily bangled arm to her brow and rubbed as though her forehead hurt. The girl rolled her eyes. “Best be careful if you don’t want a bellyful of fur and claws.”

“Can that even happen?”

The woman blinked slowly. “I must also admit a complete lack of knowledge on that subject for obvious reasons.”

“Sisters, why have you come?” The girl seated herself beside him, but kept her arm on his. 

The taller woman crossed her arms. “You were both missing; how could we afford to let matters lie? Now you are found. Come back to the city with us and let this one–” she jerked her thumb toward him, “come to his senses in the silence of the swamp.”

The girl shook her head. “I won’ leave him. He needs me. I can keep him calm until he’s himself again.”

The woman harrumphed. “Don’t you think he might remain in this shape precisely because of his desire for you? There is very little to divide the wolf from the man in this one.” The girl looked up at him, her dark eyes limned with the wetness he’d seen at their edges before. He cocked his head to the side and gazed down at her. She turned back to the two women, her mouth a firm line.

“He stays with me.” They sighed.

“Then we must find some way to get him into the city without making a fuss, I suppose.”

She lay her hand against the ruff of fur at the base of his neck as she had before, and he leaned into her touch. “We’ll go at night.” The women nodded after some hesitation. “Alone.”

“Absolutely not! While he’s peaceful enough alone with you here, there’s no telling what mischief he’ll get up to in town!”

“I know New Orleans as well as you do. I know where we can get in and out quickly and make it to our home unmolested. And he will listen to me. Your presence will merely complicate things.” They narrowed their eyes at him and he glared back at them in silence.

“Someday, you will take our trust in you too far. Be sure it is not tonight that you do so.” They wrapped their shawls tighter around themselves and stepped gingerly back out into the swamp. He watched them go, and she turned his face down to hers with a tilt of her hand.

“I’m not sure how well you understand my words, but I hope their meaning will reach you. Tonight, you must follow me. You must hide yourself even as you keep yourself close or you could be hurt, or lost to me and to yourself.” The wetness in her eyes was still there, and it leaked out of their corners. She pressed her face into his shoulder and wrapped an arm about him. He could smell the metallic edge of anxiety and unease on her and whined softly. They sat like that for a long time.

Eventually, and too soon for his liking, she let him go and walked towards the mouth of the cave. He followed behind on all fours, smelling and listening to the sounds of the daytime forest as he went. She gazed out at the swamp, thoughtful, and headed for the base of a nearby oak, rummaging in a satchel draped over her shoulder to withdraw meat, dried and old. She held a strip out to him and he wrinkled his nose at it. She did something strange with her voice then that shook her whole body. It would have distressed him if she didn’t smell so good. The metallic scent was gone, and the honeysuckle was back, under the stink of the swamp.

“I never knew werewolves could be so picky!” She took a bite herself and smiled at him. “I suppose you like your meat pretty fresh, huh?” His ears twitched and he stared deeper into the swamp, beyond where she could see, and looked back at her. She chewed her lip, considering him.

“You can go. I trust you. But come back soon.” She nodded her head in the direction of the forest, still smiling, but she was worried and he could smell it. When he left, she began to sing again, and the sound of it cut through the sensory overload of the daytime forest, leaving him with no greater desire than that of following it back to its source. He ran down a deer with little difficulty and dragged it back to the cave, where she sat at the edge of a nearby pond, frowning into the depths.

“It musta be that old evil spirit, so deep down in the ground...” He left his kill by the cave’s mouth and she fell silent at his approach. He settled himself at her side and looked in over her shoulder. The cloudy water was clear enough that he could see her dark eyes and shapely mouth, the strong, high bones of her cheeks, set off by the halo of her hair. Another face loomed out of the muddy dark over her shoulder, leathery and fanged, staring through pale yellow eyes set deep beneath shaggy brows, lower jaw dripping with blood and drool and jutting out far enough to brush the girl’s shoulder. He had never seen himself before, and backed away from the sight, a low rumble in his throat.

“Lou...” He shuffled over to the deer carcass and tore into it with relish, letting the blood soak his paws and arms and snout, drowning himself in the pleasure of the kill so there was no room for anything else. She kept her back to him. When he was done, he lay himself in the cave to sleep off the rush of the hunt, but he could find no lasting rest in the dreams that hounded him into and out of shallow slumber. He woke to find her dozing against the cave wall beside where he lay in the scrape of leaves and reeds he’d gathered the few times he’d spent the day here without her, in a past he recalled by scent alone. Her arms were crossed, and she shivered slightly in the damp, dark air. He lay his head in her lap and felt her skin warm around him as he finally fell into dreamless sleep.

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The wolf woke to the crackling of wood and bubbling of water in the gathering dusk, and trotted out into the swamp to find the girl tending a fire, and beckoning to him. “You need a wash,” she said, crinkling her nose. He settled in front of her and watched as she drew water from the pot over the fire, dousing a thick white cloth in the liquid pooled in a ladle she removed from her satchel. “My mothers left us the pot. I don’ have any soap, so this will have to do.”

She extended a hand to his muzzle, not hesitant but measured and slow, mindful of sudden movements on her own part. He snorted when she touched him there, but leaned into her hand, patient, if confused. “Just getting the worst of it off. Easy now.” She kneaded the cloth over his snout and brushed it dry. He resisted the instinct to shake himself, and she moved to his side and grasped each of his front paws in turn, wiping them clean of what blood was left clotted there between his claws. “There. You didn’ do anythin’ unnatural, Lou.” Her gaze was focused and steady on his own as she raised a hand to his face to smooth back the fur she had mussed with the washcloth. “You don’ have to hide your needs from me.” Something in his chest loosened, and he let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. The girl looked to the twilit horizon and turned back to him. “Let’s go.”

They picked their way through the swamp with her in the lead, weaving around clearings and trudging through shadows. She could not make her way through the world so openly as he did after dark, so he traded the freedom of the night for a careful vigil over her movements through the deeper waters and between the boles of trees, impressed by the extent to which she avoided the beaten path of a prey animal even as she crossed and recrossed trails larger and crueler creatures staked out. Creatures both like and unlike himself.

They reached the outskirts of the city at full dark, and she paused at the low waterline of the copse of mangroves standing sentinel at the forest’s edge. She looked up at him, putting a hand on his shoulder and bringing his face down to her level with the other. “We have to stick together. You can’t stray. And please, harm no one except at my say so. That’s for your benefit as much as their own. We need to get home safe.”

Now, she walked in the light, keeping to the dirt path through the outlying shanties while he kept to the shadows. He huffed restlessly, more than once. Even here, far from the beating heart of the city, the air was as thick with desperation and malice as in any such place where humans dwelled, only more so. There was no sweeter meat. While he could not fully grasp the meaning of her words, her body and scent conveyed well enough that she was asking him to abstain, so he stayed as close to her as he dared while remaining out of sight.

They reached a vacant lot, and a sudden inhuman wail startled Delia so much she had to stifle a gasp even as she retreated to the flat darkness of a nearby storefront, the facade facing the cobblestone street lining the lot and the streets beyond. The wolf was at her side at once, hackles raised and a warning growl in the back of his throat. She raised a finger to her mouth and pointed out to the field, a smile playing across her lips.

A bird strutted across the flat green, stark white against the starlit velvet of the night, its long, unwieldy tail trailing in its wake. It came to a stop within a grove of cypress trees, its elegant silhouette plain against their tall, straight trunks. “Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk...” She crouched down in the shadow of the streetfront hedges to get a closer look at the creature. “Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost...” The bird’s large, dark eyes were half-closed, and it no longer seemed agitated by whatever had roused it. He crept down to the hedge with her, silent despite his size and watching the bird through her eyes. To his own, it was simply an unusual variation on a prey animal, only appetizing if he was truly hungry and there was no human meat to be had. To her it was remarkable and wondrous, and if he could not appreciate it through his own senses, she made it easy to marvel at it with hers. “Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars...And all thy heart lies open unto me.” She took his paw–his hand–and squeezed it. A shiver went through him, and he doubled over, eyes shut against the pain, biting back a whimper. He shrank beneath her touch and his strength left him, but she did not let him go, trembling and shaking as his chest caved in, his bones crunching and grinding against each other while his fur grew fine and sparse and finally receded into nothing. Lou opened his eyes to see Delia above him, his head in her lap and her hand in his. He grinned sheepishly.

“I ruined your dress.” Delia cast a glance at the mud-encrusted embroidery down her front, then nodded toward the state of his own undress with one eyebrow raised.

“I can hardly complain next to you. Those pants of yours don’ have much to hold onto anymore.” She reached into her satchel and drew out a length of rope.

“You think of everything, eh?”

“Probably for the best since you’re not known for it yourself.” There was a smile in her voice. She threaded the rope through what was left of his belt loops and he tied the knot.

“What was that poem you were reciting?”

“Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal. It’s a sonnet. Tennyson. I’m glad you remembered.”

He scratched his head. “Yeah...don’t remember much else but I’m glad that was still there.”

She considered him, smiling wryly. “I think it helped. Maybe you should keep my copy of The Princess on you, just in case.” He chuckled.

“That was all you. Hopefully, we won’t have to worry about this much longer, what with the cure and all.” She chewed her lip.

“It’s going to cost us. Everything does with my mothers. Matters may remain unchanged for a while yet.”

He looked through the hedge again to find the peacock still there, dozing off under the stars. “Didn’t figure there were peacocks in New Orleans. He’s really somethin’.”

“Rich white folk brought them and some of them escaped into the streets. They’re still mostly tame, just more assertive about their right to roam freely.”

“And this one’s...albino?”

“No, just bred to be white, possibly by those who owned it or its ancestors, possibly by someone centuries past on another continent, white or not. I don’ often see them in this part of town. This one’s wandered pretty far. And so have we. We should get back.” He nodded. “It’s not far now.”

They walked side by side and the storefronts gave way to a shabby but well-kept residential area, balconies hung with flowers fronting plaster-peeling facades. Lou had never smelled anything so fragrant, though he had smelled something sweeter. He watched Delia sidelong and considered all the ways in which he’d come to know her. First, by the way she danced in dying firelight, by the brush of her lips against his brow, by the gentle resonance of her singing voice, by the floral scent that clung to her even under the muck and the mire. With the lupine senses that were now an inescapable part of his reality, he knew her more intimately than perhaps anyone had known her, and yet he knew her not at all. Perhaps the wolf knew her better than he did.

“Delia, I didn’t...” She came to a stop beside him alongside a weather-worn porch, the street silent and empty apart from their own footsteps. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

She placed a hand on his shoulder. “No, you didn’ do anythin’ wrong. You stayed with me.”

“I tried my best to stop it. I know it seems like it came out of nowhere but there was a reason for it. Not a good one, but–” She held a finger to his lips.

“I know. Annabelle told me. There’s a lotta still, dark water here in New Orleans, and that always would have been hard for you, but it’s even harder now.”

“Yeah, I...Delia, I feel everything. The sounds and the smells and the noise...it’s constant, and I can’t drown it out. Well, I can, but it takes a helluva lot of booze to pull it off.” Her brow creased.

“It’s hard, living like that.”

“As a werewolf? Yeah, you’re tellin’ me–”

“No, living haunted. The minute we walked down that street past the port, I knew it was a mistake. You can’t see to the bottom of that harbor even with a wolf’s sharp eyes. I’m sorry I couldn’ stop what happened after.”

“It’s not your fault, and there was no harm done anyhow, right?”

“Right.” But there was something distant in her eyes, and broken in her voice. He tucked a wisp of her hair behind her ear and smiled.

“Then it’s all gravy.” She didn’t return his smile, but she did lean up to kiss him on the cheek, like she had what felt like ages ago, pressing a silver switchblade into his hand. It had seemed undeserved then and was certainly undeserved now, but he badly wanted to return it, on the cheeks, on the lips, anywhere she would allow it. And she would allow it, he imagined, but he wouldn’t deserve it.

So they made their way back to Rue Garnier in companionable silence.

————————————————————————————————————————

The sparse guest room in the back of Delia’s mothers’ house contained little more than a twin bed and a pitcher to wash up with, but the view from the shuttered window that opened to the row of backyard gardens and brick walls on Rue Garnier was pleasant enough, and the gentle breeze it offered more than welcome. Lou offered to sleep on the floor but Delia said there was no need for that.

“You mean...?”

“No need for that either. That part’s really up to you.” Lou quirked a brow at her, askance. “Meaning we don’ have to do anythin’ other than sleep if you don’ want to. I won’ take offense either way.” Her words were plain but her tone was gentle. She continued to bamboozle him.

“Well, if it makes no difference to you, I’d rather just sleep tonight. But I’d like to...someday. If you want, of course.” She nodded and headed to the bathroom to change and he sat at the head of the bed and considered the utter ineptitude of his attempt to convey his feelings for her before he set about scrubbing the stink of the swamp off. There was a bar of soap on the nightstand, and she’d laid out a set of flannels for him.

Soon enough, she joined him on the edge of the bed where he sat facing the window and taking in the night air. He could smell jasmine somewhere, and all around the loamy scent of fresh-tilled earth. She wore a cotton slip and a shawl around her shoulders, and in her hands she shuffled and reshuffled a deck of tarot cards. He nodded towards them.

“What do they tell you about me?” He’d asked in good humor, but her measured, lingering glance up from the deck turned his stomach.

“That your head and your heart are at war with each other. That darkness dogs your steps like a clinging shroud. That you’re a danger to yourself and everyone aroun’ you.”

“Cripes!” he laughed, his voice cracking a little. “Tell me somethin’ I don’t know.”

“I can tell you things I know; matters on which the cards are silent, if you would hear them.” Her face was unreadable beneath the fringe of her hair.

“Alright...I would.”

“You’re charming, and quick-witted, and insightful to a degree. But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You hold yourself back and make judgments from a vantage point that underestimates your own power. Despite your recklessness in other matters, you rarely overplay your hand when the stakes are high, and you always undersell yourself. You’re a man with a worth rarely assessed, and almost always incorrectly, by no one so much as yourself.”

“Reading me like a Tennyson sonnet, I see. I’ll take charming though.” She laughed.

“But not quick-witted?” He grinned and half-bowed from where he sat.

“That depends on my audience.” She smiled, then placed a hand over his. He sat still, uncertain if accepting or rejecting the gesture was what he deserved. Accepting so as to respect her feelings, rejecting so as to spare her his. Her gaze was direct and unwavering.

“My sisters will be your audience tomorrow.”

“I’ll be sure to rein in my comedy act then.”

She squeezed his hand. “Lou. They will ask you uncomfortable things and they will likely cast aspersions on you. Know who you are before you sit down with them, or at the very least, know that I know who you are, and will be there with you. Hold your tongue, respect our ways, and it will all come out right in the end.”

She held his hand in both of hers now, and her shawl had fallen from her shoulders, prickling with gooseflesh. He slid his hand from hers to wrap her shawl about her again and she drew closer to him, until her head rested on his shoulder. He was deeply tired all of a sudden, but did not want to move from this spot, the warmth of her all down the length of his side and the moonlight unspooling itself in the coils of her hair. He smiled for her, one more time.

“I’ll behave myself. Promise.”

“Good.” He finally allowed himself to wrap an arm around her where she leaned against him, and she settled against the bend of his elbow. He looked down into the gardens below.

“How does our peacock friend survive in the big city, I wonder?”

“The same as any do. He seeks out friends and knows his enemies. He’s welcome where he’s wanted.” She looked up at him, the deep gold of her eyes backlit by the cool shades of the half-moon light. “You are welcome here, Lou. Wherever I am, you are wanted.”

There was nothing he could say to match that, so he kissed her.

[gem-quest]

[ O P H E L I A ... ]

“There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free, if you truly wish to be.” 
- Pure Imagination

Real Name: Catriona “Cat” Walsh Age: 20 FC: Saoirse Ronan Species & Class: Specter Bard Guild: Moonstone 
 Description of In-Game Powers: Specters are Gem Quest’s non-corporeal undead player race.  They’re notable for only having 9 stats instead of 10, with Strength being omitted from their stat lineup because they literally have no physical bodies.  Instead, their Willpower stat serves as their Strength equivalent.  This means they have a rechargeable meter of how much they can possibly interact with physical objects before taking a rest or recharging with a spell or potion.  Beyond that, Specters are distinguished by their inability to be damaged by non-magical weapons, increased susceptibility to light magic, and inability to be healed via healing potions or traditional physical healing spells (only a period of rest or spells/potions aimed at restoring mental wellness can heal them).  The non-magical weapon immunity is amazing lower levels, but it’s not long before everything thrown at you seems to be enchanted or blessed or cursed or whatever.  Weirdly enough, as far as the whole “incorporeal being” conceit is taken in other aspects, Specters can indeed take potions, as well as eat and drink.  They get decreased buffs from some potions and foods, though.  To balance this out, spells that provide small buffs and aren’t explicitly light-aligned are extra effective on them.

There’s a lot of frustration with the class because of its “fake” weapon resistance, since any old dagger with any mild enchantment or magical effect at all on it can hit them.  They can’t viably hit physical things in combat without specifically taking Knight, Rogue, Rider, or Mage-Knight as their class.  And even then, they’re arguably the weakest race choice in the game for non-magical melee combat.  Meanwhile, a lot of physical things and all magic can still hit them very hard very easily. 

All of this said, there ARE skills to really like here, too - namely, superb mobility.  Specters can pass through physical materials five feet thick or thinner as long as those materials aren’t specifically enchanted to prevent phasing.  They float slightly by default and have a rechargeable flight ability that allows them to lift much further off the ground in short bursts.  They also have a rechargeable ability (with more uses per charge than flight) that allows them to teleport from where they stand to any spot they can see within 20 feet without a spell as long as they haven’t been hit with an attack in the past 5 seconds.  This gives them excellent mobility even in the heat of battle and allows them to have a lot of control over their position and angle.  It also means that it’s often smarter for them to worry less about defense than about being hard to hit in the first place.

Place of Birth: Dublin, Ireland

Appearance: Ophelia has a Specter’s signature slightly translucent skin, under-saturated color palette, and skirt hem/legs that trail off into mist.  Her eyes are a stormy gray, and her wardrobe is almost exclusively black and white.  When it comes to fashion, she prefers some of the more dark Victorian-inspired looks in the game as opposed to the high fantasy, renaissance, or medieval looks that a lot of other characters favor.  That said, she’s got a pretty extensive and well-curated wardrobe behind her.  She considers it highly important that she have at least one appropriate black and white ensemble to wear in each and every level in order to fit in with the theme.  That said, she also has her own signature look that she uses as her “default” (the outfit she’s wearing in her pic at the top of her audition - full-body edit to be shared later!).  Oh, and she loves gloves and capes.  LOVES THEM.  And kind of hoards them, tbh.

Places Most Likely to be Found In-Game: Ophelia’s favorite haunt at the moment is the City of Magic in Level 11.  It’s the logical home base for a character who’s both a crafting/magical class AND a ghost. There’s a high enough concentration of both useful items and ingredients AND sufficiently gothic-flavored areas and NPCs to suit all her needs, both practical and aesthetic. She’s set up her own little shop in one of the many background spooky haunted house locations within the shadier-looking part of the city, and her Aesthetic demands she sometimes hangs out at the city’s main graveyard.  

Beyond that, she can sometimes be found in various libraries and shops across the levels she can access, looking for interesting bits of crafting knowledge, hints of new items she could try cobbling together, and items that she could modify or combine with something to make can even more useful item.  She’s also been known to turn up in random wilderness or roadway portions of levels in the first half of the game, foraging for crafting components that grow or randomly generate within those environments.

Current Inventory:

Screaming Lute (x1): Ophelia is very, exceedingly proud of her combat lute.  She crafted it herself out of her bardic starter instrument.  Specter Bards begin the game with an instrument they are capable of interacting with consistently.  Cat has decided that, within Ophelia’s story, this was Ophelia’s lute in life, and it was destroyed shortly before her death as a way of intimidating her.  Anyhow, Ophelia has heavily modified her starting weapon to the point that she thinks of it as an entirely new item.  It’s covered in strange etched carvings and shifts between glowing with an eerie red light from the inside and constantly trailing wisps of white smoke.  She uses it as her primary weapon in the game, as strumming specific notes and chords on the lute lights up some of the etchings and fires off various spells and magical effects and spells Ophelia has been able to learn.  The lute downright shrieks whenever she uses it to cast a spell.  How does it work, you might ask?  That is a very long story, and one I’m saving for another post XD  Most of the spells Ophelia has at her disposal are cast through her rune-covered lute and will be catalogued in her lute info.

Whispering Flute (x1): Ophelia likes rhymes and the aesthetics of symmetry.  A secondary combat and utility weapon of hers, this is a flute enchanted to fire off up to three charges of Ventium per day, and one charge of Murmurationium per day.  A good insurance weapon to sneak into a dangerous social situation, as it’s a perfectly normal and usable flute until she uses it to unleash the fury of the cold cruel winds of death upon you XD

Empty Unbreakable Bottle (x5): Ophelia favors magical items strongly because Specters can interact with non-martial ones automatically, without having to expend any extra effort or have at least X amount of Willpower to do so.  Unbreakable Bottles are the cheapest magical container commonly for sale in game that’s capable of reliably holding liquids, so Ophelia likes to store all liquids important to her in them.  And she likes to have at least a couple of empty ones on her at all times in case she wants to take a sample of something or otherwise just needs one.

Unbreakable Bottle of Rune Ink (x5): Rune Ink is an item that can be used as permanent and unfading ink that’s nigh impossible to remove or cover up.  More importantly, though, it allows a PC with knowledge of the game’s runes, basically a language of magic that appears in a level or two and on some items, to write runic symbols that absorb nearby magical energy and store it within the object with runes written on it.

Enchanted Carving Tools (x1): Basic carving tools, enchanted to be able to create magical items and inscriptions.  Ophelia uses them for crafting both magical and non-magical items, since any given item needs to be enchanted for her to be able to actively use it for long stretches of time anyway.

Enchanted Mending Kit (x1): Enchanted mending/tinker’s tools able to repair magical items without damaging their magical properties.  Ophelia uses these to repair any repairable item sent her way, for the same reason she also uses enchanted carving tools for everything.

Paxanimi Potion (x3): A potion that mitigates psychic damage or corruption and provides a temporary boost to a player’s Psyche stat.  For Ophelia, as a Specter, this is the closest thing she gets to a reliably available health potion.

Psychometry Scroll (x1): Allows caster to make one inquiry about the past of an object or place, then projects a scene or quote from the object’s or place’s history that provides a relevant answer to that question into the caster’s mind.  Without crafting very specific questions, the results can often be vague and unhelpful, as the game will take the path of least resistance in providing a vision that meets the requirements of the inquiry.

Ictuium Scroll (x1)

Second Sight Scroll (x1) (Learning)

Assorted Random Crafting Bits and Scraps

She actually has more inventory kept hidden away within her home base rather than coming with her everywhere.  Most of it is just more tools and materials and many, many changes of clothes.

“How much does it weigh?  Can I touch, smell, and taste it?  Can I put it in my inventory?  Is it magical?  Is it combustible?  How many knowledge checks can I roll on it?  Does it match my outfit?  Can I keep it?” - Catriona, literally every time she sees any new item in D&D

Strongest character trait: Imagination

Strengths: Ophelia is an immensely imaginative and resourceful person who comes to Gem Quest from a background of extensive fiction reading and making famously effective TTRPG characters.  It helps that she researched Gem Quest *extensively* before starting and continued to be active in forums and the GQ Wiki right up through getting stuck, along with getting early advice and support from a beta tester acquaintance.  Her ideas are typically wildly innovative and a bit risky, but to her credit, they pay off more often than not.  She’s slow to trust others with much critical personal information, but pretty open to giving others a chance and to judging people based on her own experience rather than on gossip.  Thinking on her feet is second nature to her, and she’s rarely at a loss for ideas.  Her devotion to her character and planned story arc have helped her to maintain a degree of focus and stability that’s thus far proven to be her most valuable coping mechanism. 

She’s generally friendly and pleasant despite her spooky aesthetic, story, and demeanor, and she will genuinely try to help anyone who asks her for it.  In business and in social encounters, Ophelia is considerate, well-mannered, and often downright chatty, though she usually knows to take a hint when people make it clear that they don’t want to talk.  She makes and offers a selection of odd but useful items at very fair prices because she’s not here to make a profit - she just needs enough resources to keep going.  She’s earned a bit of good will based on that.  Her skill in puzzle and strategy-based quests and willingness to dispense hints on the above, along with her crafting, has garnered her a good reputation as a support player and PC shopkeeper within her guild.

Weaknesses: Even knowing that the game is now a matter of life and death, Ophelia still seems to care more about her in-game narrative and goals than practicality, survivability, or winning.  A vibrant creative type who wishes no irl harm to anybody, she has a hard time conceiving that even the most blatantly destructive PCs would truly do harm to anyone outside the narrative.  She catches most of the references you make and then obnoxiously, steadfastly denies that she has caught them if you inquire, because Star Wars doesn’t exist in the world of Gem Quest and of Ophelia, dammit!  While her coping methods might be working for her internally for now, her devotion to staying in-character makes her a bit of an acquired taste.  She is very, very particular about sticking to character, even when it’d be more practical and less annoying for her to drop it. She’s been known to make important decisions that risk her safety (and sometimes, indirectly, that of others) in the name of “authenticity” to her character and story plans. 

Far, far too curious and adventurous for someone with a Defense stat of 2.  She has lots and lots of interesting ideas, all of which she gives equal chance to, plenty of which aren’t good.  Just because her creative ideas pay off more often than not doesn’t mean that there aren’t times when they don’t pay off.  And when they don’t pay off, they tend to not pay off SPECTACULARLY.  Reasonably likely to get herself killed enacting some inventive and exceedingly high-risk scheme to take out a dangerous boss before it can do damage. 

For some folks, the mix of creepy aesthetics and backstory and acting choices with effusive goodwill and pleasantness is more off-putting than inviting.  Arguably talks too much, especially when she’s nervous or upset.  Has a weakness for getting emotionally involved with NPCs, particularly minor NPCs with chains of side quests or that can serve as temporary companions, despite theoretically knowing that they’re just chunks of code.  Seems physically incapable of just sitting back and relaxing for a few without having to start some new project or come up with some new big subplot or plan. 

Plenty of folks are happy to buy her crafted items, but she has a bad reputation as an active combatant due to a few infamous Incidents.  At this point, only the truly uninformed, the truly desperate, the truly experimental, or the truly crazy in Moonstone would willingly party up with her XD

“Death has made me less than kind.  And very, very creative with a broken lute, who knew?” - Ophelia

Player Stats: Ophelia’s defensive strategy in combat is just to not be hit at all.  Her Defense stat is dangerously low, with any points that could buff it up as she’s gained levels and experience instead going to Agility and Luck.  She prefers to draw her “defense” from stats that she can get more versatile use out of.  She’s unusually low in Charisma for a Bard and has only enough Willpower to allow her to craft with physical items.  She can’t wield non-magical weapons at all.  However, she opted to invest a bit more in Psyche than a lot of other players did since a lot of a Specter’s durability lies in their emotional stability.  She also has uncommonly high Intelligence, which combines with her Psyche and Luck to equip her well for puzzle-based and strategy-based challenges.

STRENGTH: X

DEFENSE: 2

CHARISMA: 6

PSYCHE: 7

WILLPOWER: 7

CAUTIOUSNESS: 4

AGILITY: 8

ENDURANCE: 5

INTELLIGENCE: 9

LUCK: 8


Personality: (A lot of this is already in her strengths and weaknesses, so I’m putting a bit of a summary and some extra detail in here.)

She eats fictional media for breakfast, means well, talks a lot and talks often, has an overall spooky quirky nice one vibe (you know the type), fancies herself an actress regardless of the feedback she might receive, will (un)live and die in-character out of a fruity cocktail of artistic integrity and spite, is the Bard equivalent of a TV mad scientist who tends to cause the problem at the start of the episode with an experiment and then solve it in the last 2 minutes with a crazy genius plan that’s then shown to have not *totally* worked in a post-episode stinger, and is too smart for anyone’s good.  

Building a clear narrative here helps her bring some degree of organization and order to the wild creative whirlpool that is her brain.  She’d never considered herself much of an escapist until she discovered GQ, where she hasn’t escaped from responsibilities and work and struggle so much as she’s found an intoxicating degree of control over what her responsibilities and work and struggle are.  She can write a meaningful story here, be its central driving force, have the impact she increasingly feels like she’ll just never be able to have in real life, and stick her epic quest out to a glorious conclusion.  Ironically, she’s a weird mix of always needing an outline and a sense of narrative while ALSO constantly bursting with new ideas and clever but risky plans that she takes quite seriously.  Cat harbors perpetual mild guilt for feeling so restless and unhappy - after all, she’s lived comfortable life and has a family who loves, and it’s not like people have to like anything she makes or does or says in order for her to have a high quality of life.

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” - James Joyce

Biography: Catriona Walsh was born in Dublin, Ireland to an Irish mother and an American father of Irish descent.  The family moved to New York City for her father’s job when she was just 5, but she and her mom remain close with her mom’s side of the family back in Ireland.  After 3 years in New York, the family moved to Columbus, Ohio, where Cat spent the rest of her young life, except for summers.  Most summers since she was 13, she’s stayed a couple months with an aunt and uncle who own a small tour company in Dublin.  From 16 on, she’s been helping with business while there.  Now she’s at college in Dublin and working at the company on the weekends, in exchange for staying with her relatives. She’s studying business for her parents and literature for herself.  

Cat has always had a great fondness for the tour company, though mostly for the actual tour guide end of it.  She’s a natural storyteller and explorer who delights in going off the beaten trail and sharing all she knows about xyz subject with anyone who seems interested.  Unfortunately, her improvisational bent has landed her in trouble with her aunt and uncle more than once.  There are schedules to keep and itineraries people pay to be taken through, after all.  This landed her behind the front desk of the office answering phone calls and administering group ticket sales, which she very nearly hates.

School is hard, especially with her true interest pushed to the side by necessity.  Feeling like none of her ideas ever get taken seriously is hard.  Making friends that last beyond one semester sharing a class is hard, and as she gets further into her college career, her future looks increasingly stifled and bleak to her.  Attempts to get some poetry and original music off the ground haven’t gone anywhere, ending in some spikes of faceless nastiness that prompted her to delete her one YouTube account and take a step back from social media about a year and a half ago.  Sure, she knows she’s supposed to have a thicker skin than that if she wants to go anywhere, and she *does* want to go somewhere.  But she can’t seem to make her skin much thicker.  She wants to argue with her uncle and aunt a bit more, as she increasingly disagrees with them on quite a few things, but they’re both extremely conflict averse, and she can be extremely lacking in tact about things she’s suitably worked up over.  

Through it all, she knows full well that so so many people have it worse, and that she has no reason to feel restless and dissatisfied and unhappy.  It’s just that she has a hard time connecting with people and feeling heard. She’s not alone, so why is she lonely?  Cat takes refuge in being the zany, intensely individualistic artist who’s sometimes worth inviting to a party for the interest value and who surely has friends somewhere - you just haven’t ever met them.  

For the past year or so, all the time Cat has for herself and an increasing amount of time that used to go into schoolwork has been split between her long-time refuge in tabletop roleplaying and her new favorite place: Gem Quest.  She’s part of two Dungeons & Dragons games currently being run on Roll20 (well, was a part of them, anyway), both of which she plays as a multiclassed build with some degree of casting put together for a mix of strong utility and intricate storytelling.  Gem Quest continues a years-long trend of being in love with exactly one fantasy video game at a time and playing it as much as possible, though it’s her first MMORPG.  

Catriona researched Gem Quest *extensively* before ever getting it or creating her character.  She heard about it from a fellow member of one of her online D&D groups, an avid gamer happened to be a beta tester.  Cat was drawn in by the idea of being able to entirely occupy the space of a created hero within a sprawling fantasy setting and be a version of herself designed as a protagonist in a world designed to be impacted by her.  She had a cousin who had a VR headset but decided it just wasn’t really his thing, so it wasn’t hard to convince him to let her use it for this.  After waiting to see more setting and story info during the early general release and researching everything there was to know about GQ thus far, including via discussion with her beta tester acquaintance, she entered into the game a short while after launch. She’s had time to level up, mostly in being an item crafter and utility character with a surprising capacity to serve as a highly mobile glass canon blaster (and inexhaustible source of very creative and very insane plans) in combat.

She also has a whole, novella-length backstory for her character - a summary of which I will post later! - that she treats as her character bible and guide for all in-game interactions.  It’s based on a single image of a skeleton in a black and white dress in some official art of one of the higher levels where there are a lot of scenic skeletons lying around.  This is the sort of brain Cat has XD



Ophelia, as a character, is the ghost of a minor noblewoman and court musician who was betrayed when she starting poking around into the disappearance of her older brother at court.  Her desires to find her brother and for vengeance brought her back as a Specter, but she came back a world away from the place she died and has to go on a quest to make it back and finish her story.  Cat built the character to be tied to a mid-to-late game puzzle-heavy level so she could have a big climatic Moment there.  Then, she’d continue to the end in search of her fictional brother.  Ophelia wields a spectral lute as a spellcasting focus and spends a lot of time pursuing leads about both her brother and her murderer (aka quests Cat finds thematically/aesthetically good for Ophelia).

Cat is VERY set on seeing this plot through and being the hero of her story, from start to finish, despite what’s happening with the game now.  She does her part to provide puzzle guides and crafting support for those working to beat the game, but she’s not going to rush through her story and suddenly snap back to being poor little ungrateful and inexplicably depressed Cat who has no place in anything and can’t do anyone much good with what she’s got.  While she’s in the game, she’s going to be Ophelia.  At least Ophelia has a *reason* to be unhappy and restless, a wildly creative and wildly striving brain tied to the world with a few wisps of smoke.  And at least Ophelia is good at what she does.

Never mind how much she adored aggressive exploration and creative combat at first.  She’s learned well enough that she’s just a liability there, she’s bad at being in a group, and, not so different from real life, she’s at her best when she’s just at the shop counter being support.  She’s already been booted from a couple of parties over her crazy plans, play style, and general personality. And there have been more than enough incidents with her pulling something crazy because it was in-character and genuinely seemed like a good solution with the resources given, usually with at least decent results but always with high risk, that no one in the know is willing to party up with her anymore. 

She’s kind of stuck either in her shop or going solo.  At least she makes good things, though, right?  And she’s just taking her plot slow because of she’s savoring and developing her story, not because people don’t really like conquering life beside her out here either, right?

Right?

Relationships: I’m very much open to some plotting and planning with anyone who’d like to try working something out!

In regards to side characters or such of my own, I have some ideas already for this.  I’ll fill these in as I finalize my ideas a bit more!

Char 1 -

Char 2 -

Char 3 -

Playlist: TBF Pinterest: TBF Extra: TBF

[emotoothtiger]

Manchester Street Scene (1901) | BFI Archive

 This scene is totally obliterated now and taken is at the bottom of the Arndale Centre, looking towards where it will a) be and also b) will be rebuilt after the IRA bomb in 1992. The cross roads still exist and the tramway was just recently put back ( about 2016? ) as part of the second cross Manchester link with a new tramstop called Exchange Square.

When they were putting in the new tramrails, there were a load of original tramrails still in position in original roadway ( cobbled! ) about 2 feet to a metre below modern ground level, and another  pile of them removed by the side of the security fence. l reckon I could have slipped a worker a tenner to chop a bit off with his 9″ grinder, but nice though the thought was, I had things to do that did not involve lugging a bit of tramrail around town that day.

  The topography must have done weird things in 50 years as the buildings on one side are original and behind the cameraman so their frontage must have the same ground level as in this footage. Things to make you go H’mmmm.

[honourablejester]

Yes, but no? I mean, if you’ve read Lovecraft, the man was decidedly not minimalist. For example, from The Music of Erich Zahn:

The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighbouring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognise them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue d’Auseil was reached.

And later:

It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and could realise that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out—what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, delirious, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognised the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theatres, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer.

In Eldritch Horror, I find, often a significant amount of description goes into establishing the terror of what lies beyond the words. Something is hidden, yes, something is obscured, or something is beyond understanding or description when we finally do witness it, but in order to outline that horror, the descriptions of its surroundings and fragments of its details and, most particularly, the reactions of those around it to that horror are described in loving, loving detail.

Which isn’t too different, in a lot of way, from the mood setting of traditional gothic horror. Description sets the scene, outlines the mood, suggests the directions in which we should point our fear and terror and dread. From Dracula, Jonathan’s arrival to the Castle:

Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road—a long, agonised wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night. At the first howl the horses began to strain and rear, but the driver spoke to them soothingly, and they quieted down, but shivered and sweated as though after a runaway from sudden fright. Then, far off in the distance, from the mountains on each side of us began a louder and a sharper howling—that of wolves—which affected both the horses and myself in the same way—for I was minded to jump from the calèche and run, whilst they reared again and plunged madly, so that the driver had to use all his great strength to keep them from bolting. In a few minutes, however, my own ears got accustomed to the sound, and the horses so far became quiet that the driver was able to descend and to stand before them. He petted and soothed them, and whispered something in their ears, as I have heard of horse-tamers doing, and with extraordinary effect, for under his caresses they became quite manageable again, though they still trembled. The driver again took his seat, and shaking his reins, started off at a great pace. This time, after going to the far side of the Pass, he suddenly turned down a narrow roadway which ran sharply to the right.

[…]

When I could see again the driver was climbing into the calèche, and the wolves had disappeared. This was all so strange and uncanny that a dreadful fear came upon me, and I was afraid to speak or move. The time seemed interminable as we swept on our way, now in almost complete darkness, for the rolling clouds obscured the moon. We kept on ascending, with occasional periods of quick descent, but in the main always ascending. Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.

The point of description, in horror, is to create the mood and the atmosphere, first and foremost. While there’s a lot you can do with minimalist horror, definitely, a lot of the original examples of both Eldritch and Gothic horror leaned a lot on description, and for a lot of the same functions. Setting, mood, sketches of the horror itself. The main difference, when there is one, is that Eldritch horror often makes a verbal, textual point of showing where the effort of description breaks down, because there’s something past the ability of words that a human just could not sanely describe. That being said, a lot of the more ghostly end of Gothic Horror also often does the same thing, shying away from fully describing just what is terrorising our protagonists so, only emphasising how much it does terrorise them.

I don’t know, I just don’t think there’s as much difference there as might be thought. Maybe it’s just because Lovecraft was one of my first, and he’s far from minimalist with his descriptions? But, particularly in a textual medium, description is one of the primary tools of mood setting, and horror needs that. Mood and implication are everything in horror, and neither Gothic nor Eldritch horror shy away from that.

There’s two ends of the horror spectrum

[ginnyzero]

Completely Harmless Ch. 1

Completely Harmless An SSO SilverGlade Re-imagining Story (Or Fix it Fan Salt fic) By Ginny O.

When Lily and her friends wanted to buy horses and were directed to the Silverglade Manor and its myriad of problems, they didn’t expect to start a revolution. They were just a bunch a stable girls. Completely harmless. Right?

A/N: Things are only canon if I say they’re canon. Pre-Saving the Moorland Stables compliant for the most part. Posted in its entirety on my website. Posted in 2000 to 4000 word bits here. Rated T for Swearing Word Count 177,577

Chapter One

Thomas Moorland had been nice enough and extremely sympathetic when he’d regretfully told them that he couldn’t sell them the horses they were riding. They were the camp’s horses and if he sold every horse that one of his campers got attached to, there’d be none left. They’d pouted, but the man had held firm even though he’d had a twinkle in his eye.

The large group of girls talked among themselves a bit sadly. They did love riding and the horses at the stable.

It was Justin. Thomas’ dark haired son with the soulful eyes that half of the girls in the group had a crush on that saved the day.

Figuratively that is.

“Psst,” he hissed as he peered into the stables.

The girls looked up at him in different stages of untacking their horses.

He grinned at them and bounced in. Leaning against the wall, he crossed his arms. “Heard you ambushed dear old dad.”

“You don’t have to sound so chipper about it,” Abigail mock pouted.

“Happens every year,” Justin grinned. “A couple keep trying to buy Saga out from under me.”

“You should be complimented. He’s a good horse,” Jennifer said. She patted her horse’s nose.

“He’s my horse!” Justin made a face and stuck out his tongue.

Lily cocked her hip. “Justin Moorland, you either have a trick up your sleeve or you came to torment us.”

Justin smoothed his face. “Torment you. I would never do that.” He put his hand to his heart. “My honor.”

“Loretta does all the tormenting around here,” Melody muttered.

Justin flicked his fingers and held up a folded glossy square of paper. “Ladies, if you truly desire horses, the best in Jorvik, you need to go see old lady battle axe herself, Baroness Annabella Silverglade.”

The girls stopped untacking their horses.

Lily raised a brow. “And what must we do to get there?”

“Stop trying to buy my horse!” Justin flung the folded square at her.

Lily caught it.

The girls giggled.

Justin rubbed the back of his neck. “I heard a rumor that she really could use some help. A friend of mine, Linda, she’s been working for the Baroness, helping run the Equestrian Center. But I’m afraid she’s bit off more than she can chew. Plus, she’s so busy already. Alex isn’t helping much since she comes down here to hang out with Maya so much.”

Maya shouted. “I can hear you!”

“Judy, Tyra, and Pauline are trying to keep things under control, but you know.” Justin shrugged. “Linn is stuck at the Riding Arena, Sonja is supposed to be helping out but she’d rather be in Valedale. Sabine is a bitch.”

“Justin!” Abigail gasped.

Justin smirked at them. “Well? If you want to get there and back before dark, you better be going now.” He waved at them cheekily and trotted off.

Grace huffed. “The nerve of him.”

“Utter cheek!” Melody agreed.

Lily opened the square of paper. It was a map. And Justin had helpfully drawn a red line from Moorland Stables to Silverglade Manor. There was also a few notes written in white ink. One read ‘Grape Mountain,’ and the other, “Loose Paddock.” Grape Mountain was south of the manor and Loose Paddock was north of it. Justin had included a note with an arrow at a broken line also in white. “The Baroness’ personal territory.”

Lily nodded. Justin was right. If they wanted to go out to the manor and get back before dark, they’d better leave now. At least the route seemed mostly clear. Though one bit looked disturbingly off the roads.

The horses seemed a bit astonished that the girls were putting the saddles and bridles back on them. But they were generally good spirited animals and were more than willing to leave the stables again, as long as it was at a placid trot.

The girls weren’t willing to push them either. They chattered at each other about what type of horses the Baroness might have. Some thought Arabians, others English Thoroughbreds, and others droned on about the merits of Hanoverians.

Justin’s route took them up the cliff to Nilmer’s Highland and a sharp right to the north towards Silverglade Village, a place they hadn’t yet explored. But the map said that off to their left, under the disturbing red line, there should be a path near the castle. Well, relatively near the castle. There was a lot of lawn between them and the huge yellow limestone castle on a cliff.

Regina saw it first. “Found it!” She said loudly enough so all could hear but not so loudly it’d spook the horses. They turned off the cobbled road and followed what was little more than a dirt track between some hills.

In the distance, up on a hill, had to be the manor. But it was really far into the distance. Between them and it was lots and lots of green.

“It looks rather impressive,” Lily said.

Their talk drifted to who they should approach. Annabella Silverglade herself? Or this Linda person? Or Judy? They didn’t want to be too much of a bother especially so late in the day.

The track led them to another road, they emerged on it between two birch trees, as the map showed it would. Off to their left and thus, to the south and across the road to the west were rows and rows and rows of grape vines. They grew along the flat parts of the mountain too.

“Oh, I get it,” one of the girls said.

“That can’t be the real name.” Abigail wrinkled her nose.

They turned up the road and noticed that the grapes continued despite the terrain. The road continued skirting a hillock and they came to a bridge. Far to the east they could see the village and realized it must be tucked right up next to the old castle walls. As they crossed the bridge, a dot off to the east (their right) looked like a rather quaint farm. They thought or speculated. There was a silo at least.

The road turned and for a little bit the road was lined with birch trees and grape vines. It was a long way up. They grew nearer to the manor and details emerged. A white stone wall with an iron wrought gate overgrown with weeds. To their left was a terrace also gone to weeds. Ahead of them though, the classical Greek inspired white stoned manor with its large windows and stately columns shaded by birches was impressive. The frieze on the tryptic above the door satyrs frolicking among the grapes and playing harps and pipes.

But overall, to either side of them were large, no huge, gardens gone to seed populated by yet more birch trees.

To the north the stable, or they assumed it was the stable, mimicked the manor house. It was large and long and off center was a columned archway over the roadway with another tryptic with a triangular frieze displaying horses rearing, cantering and trotting. Through this archway they could see a stone bridge. The stable had small individual doors that the top part opened individually on the lower floor and on the upper floor with the flat roof were more open windows showing where the hay was stored.

They assumed they could get into the stable proper through that doorway.

In front of it was a large parade ground with a rather odd symbol tiled into it.

And, to the south, the other large building was a large rectangular thing with a triangular roof instead of a flat one. It reminded them of what the Parthenon was supposed to look like with the long columns down the side of it.

Despite the run down appearance, the place was remarkably busy. Now, they didn’t want to bother the Baroness at all. That wouldn’t be proper. She was no doubt a busy woman. So, instead, they looked for Linda.

However, the first person they found was a girl with black hair that reminded them a lot of the stable manager of Moorland Stables, Jenna. She introduced herself as Judy.

They explained their mission. They wanted to buy horses and Thomas refused to sell them the camp horses and Justin had sent them this way.

Judy shook her head. “Happens every year. Well, you’re in luck. We have a fresh batch of three year olds looking for forever owners. They’re broken enough to ride and all, but they’ll need a great deal of training before you’ll be able to win any championships.

That was fine with the girls.

“Now, I’m going to warn you. These horses are special. They won’t be accepted by just anyone.” Judy said.

The six girls nodded.

“All right, they’re in the stables. May Aideen smile on you,” Judy grinned at them. She waved them towards the long structure.

There was a fence around the parade ground. But no one wanted to tie their horses to it. That wasn’t done. Plus there was nothing for the horses to eat near the parade ground. The girl’s dismounted and loosely tied the camp horses up in the area overrun by the weeds.

They all gasped as they went under the rotunda. It was actually stained glass and parts of it was faceted to throw off rainbows. The stained glass was of course, grape bunches and vines. They went into the shorter section of the stables first.

Inside the stables reflected the outside of the stables. There was cool white stone under their feet and the walls of the stable had been bleached white and had a silver sheen where the pattern of the wood was. Each stable wall topped with the delicate iron work like the gates.

But inside these pretty stalls were the prettiest horses the girls had ever seen. They had delicate heads and long flowing wavy manes and tails.

No one could restrain their squeals.

They didn’t run. They didn’t want to scare the beautiful creatures. But they certainly all walked quickly to the different stalls fishing out cubes of sugar and holding out hands to try and make friends.

A dark brown girl in a bright orchid t-shirt that read Knights of Unistria and black shorts laughed. “You must be new here. These are Jorvik Warmblood Sports, Jorvik’s best kept secret. I’m Linda.” She seemed friendly enough.

Lily was the leader. “Oh, we heard you worked here. I’m Lily and these are my friends Abigail, Grace, Regina, Melody, and Jennifer.” She gestured at each of the girls. “We’re, um, campers.”

“Obviously,” Regina rolled her eyes. They all wore the camp uniform after all, red t-shirt, grey fingerless gloves, brown riding pants, black riding boots and a black helmet. It was dreadfully unstylish.

Linda smiled at them and pushed her glasses up her nose. A bay horse with a white blaze down his nose and a white mane and tail huffed into her hair. She reached up to pet his neck absentmindedly. “And this is Meteor, the constantly starving.”

Meteor had the same nose shape and body structure as the horses in the stables. Though he was bigger and his hair wasn’t nearly as long.

“He’s handsome,” Grace said. “Is he yours?”

“More like, I’m his,” Linda wrinkled her nose.

“Oh, like cats,” Melody giggled.

“We’re here to become owned too, or something,” Jennifer waved her hand around.

Linda sighed. “Did Justin send you?”

“He gave us a map and everything.”

“Is it really Grape Mountain?”

“No. That’s him being cheeky.” Linda huffed. She tugged on her pony tail. “All the horses here are for sale, it’s true. In fact, if we don’t sell them. We’ll have to cull them. We simply don’t have the resources right now to look after them all. They’re in here for their final checkups.” Her face fell. “And it’s not really fair to release them into the wild. I mean, maybe they’d be all right.” She bit her lip. “So, they’re really cheap, three hundred shillings each. The Baroness is simply at her wits end and so am I.”

The girls looked at each other and looked around the barn. It seemed clean enough, but it probably could be cleaner.

“Thanks Linda,” Lily said before anyone else could. “That’s, a lot better of a deal than we expected.”

Linda twiddled her fingers. “Look, I have to run. If you have any questions, talk to Judy or Tyra. They know everything there is to know about the stables and Jorvik Warmblood Sports.”

“Not Sabine,” Grace said shrewdly.

Linda blinked. “Sabine’s a boarder. She doesn’t work here. She likes to make everyone think she does.”

“Good to know. We’ll be on our guard.” Lily saluted.

Linda smiled again. “All right. Good luck!” She said and trotted out.

“Huddle,” Jennifer said.

The girls gathered into a circle.

“Okay, something is definitely going on here.” Lily rubbed her chin.

Abigail groaned. “I’d do anything, and I do mean, anything, to get away from Loretta.”

“But, but, camp,” Grace hissed.

“Look, if this Baroness is as important as Justin implied she is,” Regina murmured. “I don’t think Old Man Thomas is going to mind us coming to help her out.”

“He might reward us,” Abigail bounced on her toes.

Jennifer sighed. “And riding around the cavaletti in a circle is so dull.”

Grace wrinkled her nose. “And the Bobcat race is, look, okay, Tan and Loretta are full of it and the other girls don’t want to lift a finger if it involves actually doing anything that might scuff their nails. They want us to be Bobcats to do their dirty work.”

Lily held up a finger. She jogged out of the stable and flagged down Judy who had a clipboard. “Judy, I have a question. It might seem odd.”

Judy widened her eyes. “Ohkay?”

“Does this stable have a dedicated riding club?”

Judy opened and shut her mouth. “No. If we did, we probably wouldn’t be in this state.”

Lily beamed at her. “Thanks, Judy.” She turned around and jogged off leaving a very bemused and confused Judy behind her.

Lily returned to the huddle. “Good news. No riding club!”

The girls jaw dropped.

“No club? Really? This gorgeous stable is ripe for the taking.” Regina’s voice turned fervent.

“This is not Pokemon Go!” Jennifer glared at her.

Lily tossed her hair. “Girls. I have an idea.”

Abigail pounded her fist into her hand. “Let’s show up Loretta.”

Grace’s lips parted. “Form our own riding club,” she breathed.

“And claim the SEC for our own and rule!” Regina pumped her fist into the air.

Lily smirked. “Exactly. So, let’s get some horses, recruit Tyra, Pauline, and Linn. The map says the Riding Hall is behind the manor, recruit more if we need to back in Moorland, and take Loretta and her Bobcat girls down.”

“Break,” Jennifer said.

They girls moved apart and scattered across the stables to look at the different horses. There were plain horses without markings, and those with; appaloosas, dapples, paint horses. There were those with the fancy coat genes too, cremellos, buckskins, and roans.

It wasn’t like they fell in love with the horses, because they did. But it was also like the horses fell in love with them.

With their shillings in hand they tracked down Judy and handed it all over.

Judy beamed at them. “Oh, thank you, thank you so much.”

“No. Thank you,” Lily said with a smile.

A/N: If you read this, I’ll be surprised. This story is a practice project for my portfolio and my own Horse MMORPG called Mystic Riders. I wanted to prove to myself and my dev partner that I could in essence design a section of game. I’m a fashion designer and a writer who loves games. I don’t expect (or want) SSO to implement ideas into the game (mostly.) This is for my own education and entertainment.

Writing story is the way I organize my thoughts and world build. So, this story may be a little salty, and a little shady in places. I care about Star Stable, horse games, and actual MMORPGS so much that the wasted potential grinds my gears. I chose the Silverglade Manor area because so much of that potential felt untapped to me and there were so many story lines that touched the Manor. If you want to see my take on anywhere else in the game, then, I’d have to work for the game. (There is only so much free labor I’m willing to do.)

FOR THE ACCOMPANYING IMAGES PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE MY WATERMARK AND CONTACT INFORMATION. THANK YOU. I get it. Some of you might get excited and want to see this stuff in the game, especially the clothes, tack, and pets. However, the only way I want to see this in the game is if I get paid for it. If I see it in the game and I’m not paid for it, there will be hell to pay. You think I’m salty. I’d be angry. Personally, I’m not going to send this info to SSO. If you do, leave my contact information there! Don’t give them any excuses to steal.

Now, I’ll know you haven’t read this note if you leave me comments about how ‘salty’ I am about the game and if I hate it so much I should do something else. I am doing something else. It’s called Mystic Riders MMORPG Project. Mystic Riders however is a very baby phase game. You can check out our plans on the game dev blog. (Skills, Factions, Professions, Crafting, Mini-Games, 25+ horse breeds!) If you know anyone who would be interested and has money or contacts about game making, direct them to the blog.