#Unless of course this IS the real me — just amplified — and our body language is just so similar I can’t tell the difference

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

I have officially changed my vibe from “mildly intimidating” to “kicked puppy” in the span of three years… on purpose.

[deadskepticfiles]

THE DREAMING PROPHET, EP 8, THE LANGUAGE OF BODIES

[PODOMATIC LINK]

As terrifying as Speak-as-One can be, we can't beat them unless we understand them - and their creepy doom harp. A special research project episode.

Talking points: The Song, The Instrument, Audio design, Musical science, Architecture, Anatomy and Language of the Maze. Featuring cohost, Xaviul. Spoiler + Content warning begins at 1:09. Content warnings: None.

Links:

nathan moody on bandcamp: https://nathanmoody.bandcamp.com/music

interactive sound and fury: https://www.interactivesoundandfury.com

bloody disgusting interview: https://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/3580174/interview-system-shock-2-follows-helped-create-co-op-horror-blackout-club/

harry bertoia's sound sculptures: https://youtu.be/YfQ3624z36Q?t=121

using resonant frequencies to break glass: https://youtu.be/Oc27GxSD_bI

effect of sound on the human body: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-11/acoustic-weapons-book-excerpt/

harmful sound levels on healthlink bc: https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/health-topics/tf4173

orfield labs anechoic chamber: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/orfield-labs-quiet-chamber

lore masterdoc: https://tinyurl.com/tbcloreguidev2

lore comics: part 1: https://twitter.com/JustJellyJammin/status/1172704758337101827?s=20 // part 2: https://twitter.com/JustJellyJammin/status/1176862814675361794?s=20

TDP twitter: http://twitter.com/TheDreamingPC

transcript masterdoc: https://tinyurl.com/tbctranscripts

The Blackout Club Lexicon, for player/game lingo & terminology [on Google Docs]: bit.ly/TBCLexicon

Credits: - lavanya: host, transcript, video editor, asset artist, speak-as-one's #1 fan

astriferal: host, audio editor, puncher of things

be11amy: advertising - xaviul: host, moral support

special thanks: olive & coolguy

intro & outro music, "ringing bells": a weirdly handsome individual

transition audio clips, music, voice lines: the blackout club/question games

vibraphone clip: krol111 on wikimedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vibraphone_music.ogg)

the blackout club: question games (https://www.blackoutclubgame.com)

LAVANYA: Good evening, dear listeners, and welcome to the Dreaming Prophet. Tonight, we have a very special topic - that great unknown instrument whose winsome sound fills up our whole town and lifts up our spirits! 

LAVANYA: And tonight, even better, we have our very own conductor to lead us through this magnificent journey into our vast Song. So, dear listeners, I have a question for you tonight. What's the difference between a conductor and a god? 

LAVANYA: The answer, of course, is that Speak-as-One doesn't think they're a conductor. 

LAVANYA: My name's Lavanya -. 

ASTRO: And I'm Astro -. 

LAVANYA: And welcome to the Dreaming Prophet. 

ASTRO: This is a Blackout Club show for Blackout Club players with minimal speculation all law and a focus on the known facts. 

ASTRO: Our topic of the day is the instrument. 

LAVANYA: As for a spoiler warning: for today, you can consider yourself a rich kid at Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, or whatever seasonally appropriate holiday you want to cram on in there, because tonight, you are going to be spoiled~. 

LAVANYA: Our discussion tonight covers the map and various details of it. It covers, partially, the history of Speak-as-One. It covers what the Song is in itself, and how it is treated and translated.

We will be discussing the game. We will be discussing the sound effects. We'll be discussing some of the people who have worked on the sound effects behind the scenes, in so far as they are credited.

We are basically just dipping our fingers in every single pot! So if you are allergic to spoilers, just tap on out on this episode.

in terms of content warnings, there is surprisingly little. As long as you don't hate sounds, music, joy or human nature, you should be fine. 

ASTRO: So, Lavanya, you know I've been wanting to cover this for a while, but I can't do it without help. Firstly, I'd like to extend a special thank you to Olive and to Cool Guy, who have helped me process the vast amount of information and research we've done for this episode. 

LAVANYA: And when Astro says Cool Guy, what they mean is "Cool Guy", because that's his name. If you open up the dictionary and you look next to the definition of Cool (comma) Guy, you will see his picture there. We have personally gone through every dictionary in the United States and stapled a picture there, just to ensure that this is true. 

XAVIUL: Man, you guys have a lot more free time than I thought. 

LAVANYA: Who let you in?

ASTRO: And as you've discovered, Lavanya, we have a guest today. Also, welcome back to the show, Xaviul. 

XAVIUL: They let me in once, I haven't left since.  Now they have to deal with me

XAVIUL: I will leave to get more snacks, though.

LAVANYA: So, we're going to start off with the Song!

This was loosely discussed in episode 7, which hopefully, you all listened to and internalized and adored - but just in case you didn't, because you're godless heathens - I will go ahead and explain what it is for you!

The Song is both a hive mind and an audible sound. When I say hive, mind what I mean is that it contains all of the memories and individuals from the past that make up components of Speak-as-One. The Song was once easily heard and understood by humans, but now, not so much. This is probably because of the Word, which we discussed in a great deal more detail in episode 7 and episode 5.

So you should go back and listen to those!

LAVANYA: While the Voice interprets the Song, not everyone has this ability. This is a special aptitude that is found in certain individuals that can allow them to be the Voice: for everyone else who doesn't have that special Song in their ear, the Song needs to be amplified, which led to the question.. well. What do you do when you have a mystical magical brainwashing Song that half the population can't hear?

Which, of course, leads us to build a giant fucking instrument. 

ASTRO: The instrument is a giant tunnel network under the town, equipped with massive scale parts of one huge instrument. It can be played by many people at once, and requires constant maintenance. It's constantly being expanded. We see this in rooms like new growth and 920 observation. 

Dax also calls it the maze, which is information from bells in the prologue, and it's kind of both: no part of the instrument is an exact one to one with in real life instruments. 

However, many parts contain elements of instruments that we know.

LAVANYA: Thee-I-Dare says that the instrument is old:  very old. However, we don't have any exact date or age,much like we don't have an exact date for humans being in Redacre.

He specifies that the tech inside of it is fairly new. You can see this on the screens, and in the labs, and a lot of the fiddly fiddly details. And as you can see as you're roaming around the maze l, a lot of the tech inside it looks pretty fucking old: straight from 1950s in the 1980s, whatever difference there may be between those two eras, in those giant LCD screens and everything else.

Which leads to the interesting question: does the instrument pre-date Redacre, or is the Redacre just really fucking old?

XAVIUL: Kind of the chicken and the egg question.

LAVANYA: Smash the egg, embrace the freedom of revolution!

XAVIUL: I thought that was the opposite of what your whole spiel was. 

LAVANYA: I'm flexible. 

ASTRO: Some parts of the maze contribute directly to the Song and some don't. It would probably be more accurate to refer to all the music making parts as the instrument, and everything else as the maze. However, we are going to use them interchangeably here, especially since even the non music making rooms often have music making parts in them. 

XAVIUL: The instrument is played by a mass of people. No one individual can play it. It's just too darn big. So everyone must work together. There are several parts of the instrument which have control panels on them, which explicitly connect to the sound making parts and plexus. There are panels surrounding the giant airbags at the base, and under the walkway at the far side, and between String relay, Signal Relay, and Host Conditioning. They all have two terminals in them. Old Growth’s basement has one terminal. 

ASTRO: There are many other parts of the instrument that contain controls such as this, but we're not getting into all of those right now. It would be honestly too many to count!

Information encoded into the Song is shared with all parts of the Song. This is why sometimes a choice is made to stop encoding. We can see this in the Madi-Shaw logs in the journals: encoding is an intentional action, not passive. Information won't be encoded purely by accident. Information you might not want encoded might be encoded, if you're sleep talking, but that's because consent is a lie and choice is a poison according to SAO.

LAVANYA: However, encoding information is treated as the default choice. Refusing to encode information scares the Watchers! And it is treated as taboo: the Song is supposed to be the truth. 

LAVANYA: If you're excluding things, that's lying by omission!

ASTRO: the watchers sometimes take it upon themselves to make this kind of judgment. They will at times choose to withhold information from the Song themselves.

ASTRO: Encoding is done by chordists. When you are referring to a chordist who is encoding at that time, they are considered the CHORUS to perform it. So, let's say that you're a kid in the Blackout Club - crazy, I know - you're on a mission and you commit a sin.

ASTRO: So what sin do you guys commit? Xaviul, you go first. (Xaviul is an expert on the types of sins that can be committed.)

XAVIUL: Wow this is a lot of perjury and I won't hear any of it. 

ASTRO: Okay I do need a legit answer to continue with this -

LAVANYA: Assault.

XAVIUL: Assault. I put the ass in assault!

ASTRO:Thank you, complimentary Laugh-Last follower. You attack an enemy. Let's say you attack a Lucid in-game. Here's what happens. Lucid reports sin to their Dispatchers.

We aren't sure exactly how this is done, but it's likely done using phones: Lucids have their phones with them. You can see them using it as a flashlight, and you can also see them typing on their phones when they pause in their tracks. 

XAVIUL: Makes you wonder who's the real parasite: SAO, or technology. 

LAVANYA: This isn't a game about friendship. This is a game about the dangers of social media. So turn off that computer and turn off that phone, kids.

XAVIUL: right. 

XAVIUL: Don’t they need the computer to listen to us?

LAVANYA: Stop asking questions.

ASTRO: You know too much.

ASTRO: Lucids report sins to the Dispatcher through their phones. Sleepers can also report sin, but we're not sure if they use the same mechanism or a different one. 

Sleepers do have their phones on them at all times, because when you prank call them, they respond. They ask: is this the Voice or is it music?

This is conjecture, but phones often absolutely record voices and things happening around us. We've seen this recently in our own real smartphones, and it's entirely possible that CHORUS phones do the same thing, which may be why Lucids say speak out loud for the Voice.

The Dispatcher dispatches.

DISPATCHER, QUOTE: More assault. Inform the voice.

ASTRO: The Dispatcher will send out information to the other agents in the field, which include the Lucid and also the stalker. When you are playing in stalker mode, you can hear the Dispatcher's voice in your ear, telling you about the things that the kids are doing. Chordist Lucid, or what I like to call D.J. Lucid, receive information from the Dispatcher and play strings at the terminal. This is a very rare interaction, but if you are very lucky and you happen to be in the right place, at the right time, a Lucid will go over to a terminal - in any of the rooms that have terminals - and will play the organ keys there.

It creates a very specific pattern of notes that is then sent off into the ether to become part of the Song. The Song tracks the player's sins over the night: by the time that information reaches the Chordist Lucids, and becomes part of the Song, everyone in the Song knows about the assault that you committed. They know that you've attacked a Lucid. They know where and they know that you're still out there.

And when that's amount of sin passes a certain threshold - say, that you tackle a few more people, you do some prank calling, you kick in a few doors -The Shape will come out, and he will use the Song to prioritize who he needs to hunt, while hunting players who are seen by anyone in the Song. Sleepers, Lucids, stalker-shaped Kids, they will have their exact location reported to the Shape.

LAVANYA: This leads us into our next section design of the Instrument, and design of the video game itself. Now in the spoiler Content Warning, I said that we'd be speaking of the gameplay systems. This is one instance we're going to be discussing the audio system that underlies the Blackout Club, and various aspects of it which means that we're going to be stepping away from the lore for a moment, and we're just going to be digging straight into the nitty gritty.

As far as we can tell! Because, unfortunately, we don't have access to the engine code. 

ASTRO: Let's talk about the audio design of the game. It's really good. Good audio design immerses you so much that you don't notice it. If you notice it, something has gone wrong. This is why audio designers rarely get noticed for their work, unless they are extremely exceptional in very obvious ways, like making a specific sound or an iconic piece of music - or really bad.

And this is true across all disciplines. It's not restricted just to game design: you can find this in the theater arts, you can find this in the music industry, pretty much everywhere.

LAVANYA: And when Astro says that the sound design in this game is really good, they are not fucking with you. The sound design in this game is fucking amazing! Most of the game can be played with eyes closed. And as someone who, personally, first thing that I do every single time I load up a game is I disable all sounds - if you actually do that in the Blackout Club, you are basically cutting your own hamstrings. You will be playing at half speed the entire time, because it's not only really great to listen to, but it's actually pretty vital to overall gameplay. 

ASTRO: The sound design of the Blackout Club gives you critical information, as Lavanya mentioned. Surround sound, when you're using headphones, means that you can hear exactly where enemies are on a two dimensional plane. In real life, our ears hear only on a two dimensional plane. Each ear receives information independently. If information reaches the left ear before the right ear, our brain registers that that sound is on the left - and all of this happens in an instant. 

XAVIUL: Each enemy makes specific sounds on all types of terrain. Recently, this has gotten a amplified effect in the game to.. we'll call it mixed reviews. But sleepers have heavier footfalls than the Lucids do. The sleepers elites have boots, while the regular sleepwalkers have bare feet.

Makes you wonder why they don't wake up, wondering why their feet are covered in cuts and mud.

But sleepers and Lucid also have different voices, and voice lines that they will say through the night. Camera drones buzz constantly as they move, thouhg mounted cameras are silent. 

ASTRO: You also subconsciously receive information about things further away from you. The way your own footsteps and other sound reflect off the environment and back to you tells you more about where you are.

Even player voices are affected by sound reflection. If one player is inside a cave - say, an exit cave, or even some parts of the Instrument - all of the players voices will echo and resonate, as if they were inside that cave. All entry or exit caves except the one behind 922 Hoadley will do this.

You can contrast this sound with times that you enter soundproof rooms, such as Subliminal Media. Inside Subliminal Media, all sound is more muted. There is no echo at all, to the point that it's kind of unnerving. This information can tell you roughly how big the room is, how close you are to the wall, and what the texture of the wall is. It's less reliable if you're playing blind, due to many different factors, but it still gives you more information which builds your mental profile of your surroundings. And this leads us to one critical fact in most cases. You can tell where you are in the map solely by sound.

So, we are going to play a little game. I have prepared sound clips of different areas of the map, and I would like you two, my lovely co-hosts, to tell me where you think they were taken. 

XAVIUL: A competition. I can't wait to grind Lavanya into the ground.

LAVANYA: There is nothing I love more than listening to loud versions of the sounds that usually I keep at 5 percent! I believe in myself utterly. 

ASTRO: All right. I've sent you an easy clip to start us off. Go ahead and listen to this, and tell me where you think it was taking. 

LAVANYA: Now some of us may think something as foolish as, “oh, this could be the Plexus!” But I want all of you to know I recognize the sound personally from the -

XAVIUL: It’s the Airway. 

LAVANYA: God damn it, Xaviul, don’t snipe me in the middle of my monologue. 

ASTRO: All right, let's listen to another one.

XAVIUL: This is the Plexus.

ASTRO:You are absolutely correct. 

XAVIUL: Can't miss those airbags. 

ASTRO: And one more for good measure.

XAVIUL: Is this strings?

ASTRO: Close.

LAVANYA: Is this Somniliquoy?

ASTRO: Not even close.

XAVIUL: Oh, this is Nerve!

ASTOR: Exactly.

XAVIUL: Three out of three!

LAVANYA: This is why Xaviul is the one at the top of the leadership board with a thousand plus hours. or is it two?

XAVIUL: Now I'm almost at twelve hundred.

ASTRO: The theme song of the Blackout Club was made by an artist named Nathan Moody. We'll attach a link to his bandcamp in the description, so that you can hear all of the incredible music he makes. He makes all of his songs with handmade instruments. The theme song isn't something you can replicate, not perfectly with any conventional instruments we know.

Meanwhile, the general sound design of the Blackout Club was made by an artist named Patrick Balthrop. He also has a website that you can find in our description. His studio is called Interactive Sound and Fury. His position as sound designer means that he is responsible for what we hear in game: the sounds that aren't the theme and the voice lines. But he does control how we hear those sounds too. He worked on Bioshock, among many other things.

Bloody Disgusting had an opportunity to interview Null. They asked a question about sound design, and Null got an answer from Mr. Balthrop. We are going to break down that answer here.

PATRICK BALTHROP, QUOTE: Early on in making The Blackout Club, Jordan pitched me the giant instrument and I got to work. I began to think of architecture that would emit sound by existing in the world. I immediately began to think of Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures and sent a reference to the team. Bertoia’s work was an influence on how I began to approach the sound design of the instrument.

ASTRO: So, in the middle of that section, there's a link to a video of Harry Bertoia’s work. If you haven't watched the video, what you see is a large room filled with a lot of things that make  -and we'll call them instruments, but they don't look like conventional instruments.

In the Maze, we encounter these things called Danger Sticks, for lack of a better name. They are essentially steel rods that have been stuck into the ground that, when you walk through by or near them, produce a fuck ton of noise. However, even if you never interact with them, those rods are still making noise. Wind that passes through the maze will agitate them just a little bit and create a gentle musical sound. Harry Bertoia’s room makes music, and humans can act on it to make different sounds, but simply by existing, IT MAKES SOUND. 

PATRICK BALTHROP, QUOTE: Once I established the palette, I set about solving how these sounds would work together musically in the game. 

ASTRO: So this is like a color palette, but for sound instead of visual art. What kind of qualities, what kind of sounds does he want in this design?

PATRICK BALTHROP, QUOTE: All the sounds of the giant instrument are emitting musical notes in a pentatonic scale procedurally. I designed them this way so I could have them overlap one another, procedurally creating harmonies with each part of the instrument contributing to a larger piece of music. When the player is underground in The Blackout Club, they are playing through a procedural musical piece that is evolving harmonically and texturally. 

ASTRO: So, I mentioned sound quality. Sound quality is any attribute of music or sound, and you can use this in different contexts. I can say a sound quality is clear - clear sound quality- or I can say organic sound quality. Different materials make different sounds. This has to do with the makeup of the material on a molecular level. What is it made of, how dense is it, how light, how smooth, and how rough. 

LAVANYA: So, on a fun tangent! Yesterday, we were on the Airways, sipping our mild coffee shop lattes - available now from [BLAH] - remember, shop local!

XAVIUL: Do we get a choice?

LAVANYA: No, you don't have a choice. Choice is a lie, and one day, you will get used to that.

LAVANYA: Anyway, when I told Astro, “hey, listen to those trumpets go!”

- and then Astro knocked me into the ground, sat on me, and forced me to listen to them reading the definitions of woodwinds over and over and over again. So this means now I am properly prepared to explain what that means to you, my favorite listeners! So the sound thatyou get from metal is significantly different from wood, stone, etc.. So you can hear the difference when you're listening to them, in the way that the materials interact. Also create different sound qualities!

ASTRO: So, because I'm a percussionist by trade, I'm going to use my favorite instrument section to introduce this topic. Have you guys listen to an instrument called a vibraphone?

[VIBRAPHONE NOISES.]

XAVIUL: Sounds metally all right.

ASTRO: Now contrast this with this sound clip of a marimba. 

XAVIUL: It got awfully Toy Story here, because this sounds Woody.

LAVANYA: Oh, fuck.

ASTRO: So, as Xaviul alluded to, these instruments are made of different materials. The vibraphone is made of metal, where the marimba has almost the exact same setup, but its keys are made of wood. Critically, the marimba is not made entirely of wood. It also has metal tubes under it.

But what you're hearing is a difference in the material of the keys. Even if you aren't familiar enough with these instruments to recognize them as soon as you hear them, you can tell that there is a difference when you listen to them side by side. And so this concept has been used to create new instruments out of things that already exist. For instance, Adolph Sax created the saxophone, and his goal was to combine the power of the brass section, such as trumpets and tubas and trombones, with the versatility of the woodwinds, who can play very gentle and very quick cadences.

So, there's another word that we need to define, which is pentatonic. Literally, this means of five tones. This means five notes per octave. Now, octave as a word is kind of misleading -because it means 8 Oct, of course, but there are actually only seven true notes in an octave, because the eighth note is the same as the first note, but one octave higher.

Similarly, pentatonic has five notes, and then the sixth note is the same as the first, but one octave higher. Pentatonic scales were developed independently in music around the world. 

LAVANYA: I'm sorry, I tuned out for a second. Are we talking about Pentatonix? Because I love that band. 

ASTRO: [laughter]

ASTRO: So, pentatonic scales were developed in Celtic music, in German music, and Nordic music, Turkish music Afro Caribbean music and many others beyond that. Bottom line is a lot of music uses these scales and you have definitely heard pentatonic scales before because they sound good. For instance, the song ‘Amazing Grace’ uses pentatonic scales. You've also heard them, because you play the Blackout Club.

The point of the decision to use pentatonic scales was to make a pool of - a palette, so to speak - where you could pull any two notes out and they would sound good together. And this was a really smart decision. The last thing we want to convey here is that this was lazy.! It isn't lazy, so don't use this new knowledge to insult the games team. 

PATRICK BALTHROP, QUOTE: When the player is underground in the Blackout Club, they are playing through a procedural musical piece that is evolving harmonically and texturally.

LAVANYA: Now that we're wrapping up that quote, what that means is that the game is writing its own music as we play: the music generated by the game in the background is related to the action of the player. So like I told Astro, the first time they explained this all to me, it's like you're getting your own personal composition every single time. So that's pretty fucking nifty!

We have one more supplemental quote from Null, which is about the design of the maze. 

JORDAN THOMAS (NULL), QUOTE: So we wanted it to feel timeless, like the vision of a mine that is far from human. The hope is that it feels like it transcends technology from our particular time or relies more on the blood and the sweat of the humans who occupy it. 

LAVANYA: So, keep in mind, what this means is that the humans of Redacre are the powerhouse of the Instrument.

XAVIUL: Wasn’t this episode nerdy enough without making nerd jokes?

ASTRO: These two quotes have profound significance when you consider the Instrument and the Song that it creates. Instrument technology has not changed much in many years: as far back as we can find through history and archaeology, our drums are still material of whatever kind stretch over a hollow frame. Our stringed instruments still use tension and string length to create different sounds. And for literally thousands of years, we have made music in much the same ways, even though we've called those instruments different things and made different kinds of music with them.

And now, we need to talk about the language of bodies, after a word from our sponsors.

LAVANYA: So now that we're back from that stunning commercial break: the structure is what we are going to be covering next, because the thing to keep in mind is that the Instrument is not just an Instrument. 

The Instrument is not just a tool for playing the Song and allowing people to hear. The Instrument is a location. All of the rules of the Maze were hand built and planned by the developers, so huge shout out to the team. All of the little details, everything that you see - these are not generic cave designs or maze or anything else! Everything in these rooms has a purpose and is there for a specific reason. 

XAVIUL: They're meant to look and feel realistic, just a few degrees of separation from our reality. Like something you could really stumble into and lose all sense of individuality in! TBC is “low fantasy realistic”, as in air quotes, but deal with it. 

LAVANYA: Fantasy? I don't know about that. Because can we say that eldritch gods really don't exist in our world?

Probably. But have you seen a squid lately? Have you seen them dance, even after they have embraced death?

XAVIUL: I live in Virginia. I haven't seen the ocean in years. 

But part of the horror element is making you question that part of your known reality the Blackout Club straddles the line between real and imagined blurs it wherever they can out wherever it's more interesting. 

ASTRO: So, because of this there are real design principles that came into play when sculpting the Maze. So, let's start with something we know - one of the things we've been told about the Song infection is that it doesn't just need to be heard have an impact, in an older Thee-I-Dare talk. A player suggested: why not use headphones to stop the Song?

And Thee-I-Dare said, unfortunately, it resonates in the whole body.

So let's talk about resonance. This is vibration. The continuation of sound resonating sounds similar to echoing, but there's one key difference: echoing bounces. 

Resonating vibrates.

LAVANYA: Resonance is especially interesting, because eardrums are not the only way that we can hear. We can also hear through our bones, which sounds incredibly fake, but trust me, it turns out your bones can do a lot. To be super technical, even the way that we hear through our ear drums is really very tiny bones. They vibrate the sound vibrates through the rest of us and then we hear it. 

ASTRO: No, that's - not how that works. 

XAVIUL: Two hundred sixty five bones in the human body, and Lavanya is still tone deaf. 

LAVANYA: Hey!

ASTRO: Our ears have three very small bones in them that interconnect to each other. And when the eardrum vibrates, it vibrates those bones. So, technically, all hearing happens through our bones. You can notice bone resonance in your own life, when you're at the dentist's office, or grinding your teeth, or clicking them together.

XAVIUL: Oh, that's horrible for your teeth.

ASTRO: Tuning forks also work this way. They're not great at vibrating air, but they can vibrate other materials, like your jawbone. The sound that you hear from that is that sound traveling through your jaw, to a place where your brain can receive it. Sound travels best through solids, because the atoms are closer together.

All materials have what's called “resonant frequencies”. This is the frequency of sound that makes it wiggle or oscillate, if it's not being affected by any other external force. This is why Glass breaks if you sing at it, which is a real thing that happens - which you may be inclined to chalk it up to cartoon logic, but it is something that you can feasibly do.

XAVIUL: They did a myth busters episode on it!

ASTRO: Glass isn't flexible. So, instead of bending or wiggling, it just breaks. But other materials can bend, like metal, and wood, and parts of the human body, have a couple of fun links in this section - which I'll attach in the description.

But there's an article on Pop Sci, which is an excerpt from a book called ACOUSTIC WEAPONS. Here's a quote from it.

Vic Tandy wrote a paper for the Journal of the Society for Physical Research, not my usual farem called Ghosts In The Machine, in which they describe how they got to the root of stories of a haunted laboratory.

People in the lab had described seeing ghostly gray shapes that disappeared when they turned to face them. Upon examining the area, it turned out that a fan was resonating the room at eighteen point ninety eight hertz: almost exactly the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. When the fan was turned off, so did all the stories of ghostly apparitions.

So humans can hear between 20 and 20000 hertz. On average, age can be a factor in this, and so can many other things. For a frame of reference, the sound of my voice averages at about one hundred seventy eight to one eighty Hertz. At lowest, I can hit about one hundred seventy Hertz.

XAVIUL: Brag about it.

ASTRO: Frequency isn't the only factor. Volume is also key. Volume is measured in decibels or DB. According to Health Link B.C.. normal conversation is about 60 decibels. A lawnmower is about 90 decibels. And a loud rock concert is about 120 decibels.

So, the reason I'm giving you all this information is so that you understand three things. First, your body will not shatter like glass if you listen to the wrong music. You're pretty safe.

Which leads into the second point. The magnitude of what we're talking about is absurd. The volume and the frequency you would have to reach to harm a human with sound is wild. But that doesn't mean that things couldn't vibrate because of sound

Three, we wanted to provide real examples of similar things happening, to give you a better picture of what we're dealing with.

Here's the bottom line. If a sound like the Song is big enough and strong enough, theoretically, it really could vibrate the ground and vibrate bodies to be heard. A better word might be sensed.

ASTRO: So, I know you're all dying to hear more about resonance, so let's keep going. 

XAVIUL: Yay.

LAVANYA: [laughter]

ASTRO: Most of an instrument body is typically made up of what we refer to as a resonance chamber. For example, the wooden body of a string instrument like a violin or a cello residents chambers can come in other shapes and sizes. 

For instance the Mirra, the Shona thumb piano, is often placed inside of a gourd. This acts as a separated resonance chamber for the instrument, which doesn't make much sound on its own. Resonance chambers work by bouncing the sound around inside. As mentioned before, sound travels best through solids. So we need to give it a little bit of a boost to travel effectively through air.

Sound reflects just like light, and it will bounce off any smooth surface. When it bounces, it doubles back on itself, reinforcing the sound and making it stronger or louder. So, this vibrating air that bounces around inside the resonance chamber needs some way to escape and get to your ears to be heard. If it stays inside a sealed rock chamber like the Throat, no one will ever hear it. This is why if you look up, you can actually see a large opening that seems let in a little bit of moonlight to the caverns below. 

A real world analogy to this is the hole in the middle of the guitar, or the S shapes on top of stringed instruments. If these holes didn't exist, you wouldn't hear as well if at all, or the sounds that you make with your instruments.

XAVIUL: And on an added note, if you didn't have ear holesm we wouldn't be able to hear very well either. 

ASTRO: The Throat has connection points to a lot of parts of the Instrument. There are holes to String Relay and arguably to Ingestion, som because of those connection pointsm the sound from those parts of the maze can reach into the Throat, bounce around and then eventually make their way to the surface.

On the flip side, the sound can be caught in between ridges and rough surfaces. Most of the Maze is probably smooth for acoustics, especially parts that contribute to the creation of the Song. You can see crossing from Instrument Supply to Ingestion or Crypto Library. There's immediately a difference.

In the terrain rooms, like 920 Observation and New Growth, they have a lot of rough edges and uneven surfaces. This isn't ideal for acoustics, but they're also new. The sound is getting bounced around in those rooms in ways that don't amplify it as well and it's getting a little bit scattered, but the same concept comes into play much much more with rooms like Somniliquoy and Subliminal Media. Soundproofing is full of rough edges, because sound will literally get caught in the crevices and fizzle up.

So, now we get to talk about something truly terrifying: the echo chamber in Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota. The background noise in this room measures in the negative decibels negative nine point four decibels. Regular soundproofing isn't this extreme, but they really wanted to make the quietest room they could. And if you look at this room, you will see that they have spared no expense. 

XAVIUL: Oh, I hate this room. This is an especially cursed room.

ASTRO: It's a very cursed room. 

Every inch of the walls and even the floor has been layered with sharp spiky bits of wall, and in-between these panels, sound gets caught and tries its best to bounce back and forth, but ultimately can't. The floor has been covered with netting so that they can put even more soundproofing under it. 

XAVIUL: Is this the room where you can hear your own heartbeat?

ASTRO: Yes. You can. This room is so quiet that it's been theorized to make people go crazy. 

LAVANYA: Oh, I love it.

XAVIUL: I just added some damp cave gas in your set. 

ASTRO: So, whatever the cult is trying to hear in Somniluquoy, we either can't be allowed out into the rest of the instrument, or they don't want the sounds of the Song to be let in to allow them to hear more clearly. 

LAVANYA: And what little bit we do know about what they're testing is  mostly about that special special cave gas. Speak-as-One uses the gas as a means for listening to the first voice or whatever voice that they initially came from: essentially, the origin of the species of Daimons. 

They do this by dunking sleepers within the gas, where they enter the deepest form of sleep, and then they go beyond this same form of sleep - which is what allows them to try and decode the names of the other Daimons. Speak-as-One states that truth can be found in the deepest sleep, which comes with the gas.

XAVIUL: The-Measure-Cuts has said that Speak-as-One is listening for something, but they're keeping quiet about it - so maybe the soundproofing is for both directions. 

Who knows? It's a mystery.

ASTRO: So we've talked about volume. Now let's talk about pitch. In a stringed instrument, the length of strings changes their pitch. In the Maze, this happens in a room called String Relay.

In this room, strings move back and forth along tracks. The bottom track is completely horizontal. It's flat, but the top track is at a diagonal. This means that these sets of strings when they move are being not just moved, but stretched and relaxed. If you watch, you can see them thickening when they relax and thinning when they're stretched. 

You can try this on your own. If you have a rubber band stretched between your fingers, the more you stretch it, the higher that sound goes. So these shorter relaxed strings make longer wavelengths and deeper sound, and when they're looser, they vibrate less. Tighter strings, longer strings make shorter wavelengths and a higher sound. They're stretched tighter. They vibrate more in the space of any given time.

In the real world, if you are familiar with any kind of instruments, when you tune guitar strings, turning the little keys stretches and relaxes the string. Similarly, the size of metal tubing impacts pitch. We can see this in the Plexus. Large organ pipes have a much deeper sound than the smaller ones. If you go over to the far sides of the Plexus, when you first enter from the Nerve Center, those gigantic tubes have a deep deep sound. 

But if you stay closer to the center, where the smaller pipes are, you can hear the difference. Think about blowing across the lip of a bottle. If the bottle has more liquid and thus less air, the sound of the air inside it has a higher pitch. If you empty out some of that liquid the bottle will create a lower pitch.

LAVANYA: All right. So now we’re going to move down to architecture, as you were warned about in that ever distant spoiler warning. The Arches create a wind tunnel down from Dream Therapy. Basically, the way that it's setup, you can see from Dream Therapy to Subliminal Message, how the air and what that the sound waves would be push.

Traditionally and in a lot of houses, if you want a natural air conditioning, they'll have two large rooms with a window and each connected by a single hallway. This makes it where, if you open up one window and you open up a window on the other side, the cold air from one side will be pushed and drawn all the way through to the other one: cooling the entire house in the process. It carries the sound in the same way that, say, Georgian architecture carries air from one window to another. 

It carries the sound down to it when you enter the Arches. You can hear a wind sound activate when you enter. This happens once per game. It happens every single time. Keep an ear out, you will notice that.

ASTRO: And now finally we can explain the weird ass title of this episode. 

XAVIUL: Rooms in the bays are based on body parts. It might not be all rooms, but a lot of them are.

LAVANYA: SAO actually spoke to Astro and I about this to get clarification. They stated that the language of bodies is symbolic. The maze is structured like a body, not because it's a one on one match to everything in the Maze, but more because it comforts humans. It comforts them to know that, when they're stomping around downstairs, they're actually deep nestled comfortably into the organs of a strange, eldritch thing, because that's how we are, I guess.

XAVIUL: We aren't ready for the full truth, which is nothing but Lavanya just said, so. The language of bodies communicates to us on a more accessible level, according to SAO. 

LAVANYA: One of the many themes of the game is communication, which Xaviul is not very good at, but we all have to learn. Another theme of the game is the many ways that information passes, travels, morphs and translates through out the process. 

ASTRO: So what is language? Dictionary definitions follow language: they don't predicate it so we're not using those as a source in this discussion, but it is a very wide and far reaching discussion among scholars. You'll find people defining it different ways, but for our purposes, we can think about language as patterns that communicate ideas. 

There are different kinds of these patterns: audible patterns like speech, and singing, and music, but there's also other things like physical patterns, like sign language, quipu, writing, dance, and Old Tongue, and structures and architecture. 

And given this, we need to ask ourselves if the language of bodies is indeed a language - if the structure of the instrument, if that is a language -

What is it communicating?

ASTRO: There was a huge amount of content that we didn't get to talk about, because this episode was already very dense, so we're going to be releasing an episode eight point five. It will be mostly theory, but useful theory. The purpose of the Dreaming Prophet is to arm club members with the facts. Some of this information is really hard to find, and we've spent hours trying to pull it together. Therefore, we'll present what we have. You judge and you decide, but at least you'll have a place to start. 

Cal, Archers Volley and Skegulium, has made a lore master doc. If you're new to the game, or if you know someone who is, please check it out. They're trying to source as much info as possible with transcripts and videos, compiling the disparate info of the community into something comprehensible.

Cass has made a law primer comic. This is a compilation of some of the latest in the lore field, broken down from an in character perspective, so check it out. 

LAVANYA: And also, on the Dreaming Prophet Twitter, we have a new feature called Breaking News. It is a weekly compiled version of the latest news in the Blackout Club, in terms of what has happened this past week -

ASTRO: and it looks sick as hell.

LAVANYA: Feel free to retweet it. Feel free to look at it, if you can't keep up with the rapid fire nature of SAS, and get yourself updated on some of the basics.

ASTRO: You can follow the account at THEDREAMINGPC on Twitter.

Spoder-Man has made a transcript master doc. If you have transcripts or video links, please send them to him. Further information is on the doc itself, which is at TINYURL.COM/TBCTRANSCRIPTS. All of these links are in our description, so visit them as you please.

And finally, if you enjoy the Blackout Club, please leave a review of the game. If you already have, wonderful! If you haven't, time to get on that.

We'll be linking this store page in the description. After you've left your review, use the hashtag the Dreaming Prophet and hashtag the Blackout Club on Twitter to share your favorite Blackout Club memories. 

The Blackout Club is made by question games

Our advertising director is Bellamy.

Our transcript and video is by Lavanya.

Audio editing is by me, Astro. 

Spider-Man is our publicity guy.

Xaviul smells like blue paint. 

[artemis-entreri]

All the numbers. ALL OF THE MEME NUMBERS.

[[ Finally answering an ancient Ask from an ancient meme I posted in an ancient time. XD Cut for the humongous length, which resulted from what are probably pointless exercises in analyzing fantasy accents and just overall spending too much time and thought on a fictional character. >_> 

Warning: contains spoilers through to the end of the series. ]]

1. What position does your character sleep in? ( i.e; stomach, side, back, etc. ) Describe why they do this — optional.

I see Entreri as the type to sleep on his back, with his head oriented towards the door. If the furniture is arranged in such a way that this isn’t possible for him to do, I don’t think it out of the realm of possibility that he would rearrange things so that he could sleep in the configuration described above. I don’t think he’d be particularly comfortable sleeping fully on his side, with psychological rather than physical reasons, unless he had the wall to his back, otherwise he’d be too vulnerable to the unknown, which in someone as meticulously careful as he is, would be equated to unnecessary exposure to danger. Unless, of course, he’s sharing a room with Jarlaxle, in which case he’d probably be sleeping with his back turned towards his roommate most of the time. XD 

Since the human body dictates that we can’t sleep comfortably in the same position all night, I’d imagine that, to appease his body’s demands, sometimes he would lay slightly facing the side away from wherever the door is. After so many years, Entreri would no longer do this consciously, but it’d be a force of habit that would’ve been self-conditioned.I don’t think that he’d ever sleep on his stomach, since this position puts him in the most vulnerable arrangement. Being face up allows him to have the greatest degree of awareness with all of his senses for what’s going on around him, and I think that a small part of him is in tune with all of those senses even while he slumbers. I don’t imagine that he’d find sleeping on his stomach very comfortable, again due to psychological reasons rather than physical, which are amplified by the traumas of his childhood that would probably add to those feelings of vulnerability and exposure. In the case of sharing a bed with someone, I see him as preferring to sleep on the outside if the bed is against a wall, or, barring that, on whichever side provides the best path to the most efficient means of egress, be that the door or a window.

2. Does your character have any noteworthy features? Freckles? Dimples? A scar somewhere unusual? etc.

Entreri would have no physical scars from early in his career. Any scar would indicate weakness or failing, and since so much of his absolute perfectionism centered around eliminating all traces of weakness, he’d see to that all of his wounds were healed perfectly. It would even make sense for him to have gotten older scars like ones from his childhood fixed, if for no other reason than to not provide any visual cues to others as to where he might be weakened. I think perhaps that during the pre-Sellswords era, Entreri would’ve found the sight of his scars intolerable, as they’d remind him of the times in which he wasn’t perfect, and while he’s extremely disciplined, he wasn’t self-punishing in the sense that he’d keep those scars to remind himself of his failings. He was more the type in which each lesson learned is burned into his memory, such that he doesn’t need or want reminders of them. Although we’re supposed to believe in the degree of impeccability of Entreri’s skill, it’s unrealistic that he’d never gotten scarred in his early life. He grew up in abject poverty, fought (probably literally at times) tooth and nail to survive, and spent more time fighting than resting. Magical healing of any sort, including potions, were not available to him during that period of his life, but since we know from the books that retroactively fixing scars is possible, it would fit his pre-Sellswords character to go out of his way to ensure that all of those physical reminders were wiped away.

Over time, I see Entreri’s dedication to this sort of superficiality wane, or at least become more selective. For starters, he’d also suffer far fewer scars, as his ability is honed, although that is offset somewhat by his tendency to get into more dangerous situations due to those sharper skills allowing him to do so. Nonetheless, his increasing jadedness and tiredness with living probably would make a few scars feel trivial by perspective. I think that he’d still seek erasure of the marks left behind by events such as Lolthite priestesses’ whips from his time in Menzoberranzan, as those would serve as reminders of a time that his free will was suppressed and his existence objectified. Along the same vein, during his four decades of enslavement by the Netherese, I could see Entreri falling back to old habits and avoiding getting scarred as often as possible during his missions, as that would be one of the few ways in which he could defy and resist the circumstances he found himself suffering. I don’t think Alegni paid enough attention to Entreri to pick up on something like this, and Entreri would’ve taken extra precautions that Alegni didn’t notice, because it wouldn’t have been beneath the tiefling warlord to further shame Entreri by making him bear the marks of his enslavement. 

I do see Entreri keeping the scar that Jarlaxle inflicted upon him inside Crenshinibon via throwing dagger. Unlike most other instances, that injury was due to a conscious choice on his part, a gamble that was initially based on pragmatism but later led to the development of, at the very least, camaraderie if not trust and friendship. That choice took Entreri down a road that made Jarlaxle’s seeming abandonment and betrayal that much more hurtful, and Entreri’s bitterness was of the sort in which he blamed both Jarlaxle and himself. He can be pretty self-deprecating and that coupled with his cynicism leads me to believe that he’d keep the reminder to fuel his rage as well as not repeat the same mistake. It would certainly serve as a poignant reminder, given that the wound was unattended for a long time, agitated through fighting, horseback riding, and toiling under the hot desert sun. Perhaps some part of him couldn’t bring himself to fix that scar, for during the period spanning the end of Road of the Patriarch and his capture by the Netherese it would be a sharp reminder of why he cut ties with Jarlaxle, and after that, a focus for his anger, without which he would probably go mad from the impotent rage. While the events in Hero suggest that everything is hunky dory and Entreri magically overcomes FOUR DECADES of the most intolerable form of abuse to him in addition to all of his earlier traumas, I think it’s a lot more likely that he has a long way to go before considering erasing the scars he chooses to keep. 

For something more frivolous, I headcanon that Entreri has Venusian dimples (those dimples on the lower back right above the pelvis). While Venusian dimples tend to be visible in men who are athletic, they are features that don’t necessarily occur in all of the physically fit. In our society at least (can’t say how prominent Venusian dimples are as a feature in FR folks), they’re rare and, for reasons unbeknownst to me, signifying that those who have them are blessed with good luck. It’s a twisted sort of irony that has me ascribing this feature to Entreri, because his life has been anything but blessed and lucky. Plus, they’re sexy as hell, so why not. XD 

3. Does your character have an accent? What does it sound like?

I don’t believe that Entreri would normally have an accent, and even if he did early in life, he would have summarily trained himself out of it. This is again having to do with his need to remain inconspicuous. However, he should be able to speak with whichever accent he wants to speak with. Being a master of disguise, he should be able to imitate most if not all accents of Common, and even various ones of the drow language (i.e. High Drow and Deep Drow).I’ve also contemplated what exactly a Calishite accent would sound like, and I guess it’s fundamentally impossible given that there’s no reason for there to be a real world parallel for every accent in a fictional setting, or for Common to sound exactly like English for that matter. However, different products set within the Realms have had their different takes on it. The video game “Baldur’s Gate” has Calishite characters speaking with a Turkish accent, albeit inconsistently, namely that there are three characters in the game all of whom are Calishite, yet all speak with very different accents. Furthermore, as someone pointed out in the Beamdog forums, there’s no reason for the Calishite accent to be Turkish just because Calimshan is inspired partly by the Ottoman Empire, which no longer exists, not to mention that Calimshan is also inspired by Arabic cultures, so if we were to take a true inspiration from real life in that regard, the Calishite accent would be an amalgam of the Turkish and Middle Eastern accent, and what that would sound like, I couldn’t begin to imagine. A more recent spin on the Calishite accent is seen, or rather heard, in Sword Coast Legend’s Calishite paladin, Javen Tarmikos. His voice actor speaks with an affected British accent (listen to it here, starting at 0:24). I consulted with a friend living in Great Britain about the specific regional influence of Javen’s accent, and his feedback was that the voice actor was mimicking a foreign accent while attempting to speak British English. The friend’s opinion is that the accent that the voice actor was going for is Arabic, but he wasn’t sure if the voice actor was truly Arabic-British. Javen is voiced by John Hopkins, who is a native British English voice actor, so I think it’s safe to say that the Arabic British accent is faked. I don’t have a good impression of what the accents of the Calishite “Baldur’s Gate” characters are like, but I seem to recall that they are accents based on American English. Given that the “standard” accent for Common is Received Pronunciation. I feel that Javen’s accent is probably closer to what the Calishite accent for Common would be like, because of Calimshan’s relative position in Faerûn compared to both Turkey’s and the Middle East’s positions relative to Great Britain in our world (to say nothing about the American English spin on things). Detailed analysis would require more linguistics knowledge than I have, but I think it’s fair to simplify it to the fact that the amount that language articulation drifts tends to be directly proportional to distance from the “mother source”. Hence, an off-British accent for Calimshite Common makes more sense to me than a Turkish or Middle Eastern accent on American English.

4. Do they have any verbal tics? Do they have trouble pronouncing certain words or getting their thoughts across clearly?

Entreri wouldn’t have any verbal tics, nor would he have trouble pronouncing any words. To have either would qualify as a weakness for him, and he would therefore have conditioned himself to avoid mispronunciations and verbal failings. While I’m certainly not saying that correcting verbal tics is easy, far from it in fact, it is still the case that Entreri made himself into a superhuman specimen fairly early on in life, achieving a state of being that arguably no real world human can, so changing the way he speaks would be a comparatively simple matter and one that he would have to go through to make himself seem unassailable. It can be argued that Entreri would have trouble conveying his thoughts simply from the perspective of his not being well-versed in certain emotions, even after the “growth” and “development” he undergoes in the events leading up to and through Hero. However, he deals with all of that that by shutting out those emotions when they manifest, and, barring that, refusing to address or discuss them. While it’s totally reasonable that he has learned to love, that statement would be incomplete without the word “again” modifying it, as Entreri even states that he loved his mother before. Therefore, the “revelation” of him learning how to love isn’t as dramatic as the reader is led to believe. At one point, Entreri simply forbade himself from being accessible to love, or at the very least, from acknowledging the emotion. I don’t see him as suddenly becoming a touchy-feely font of emotional sharing. He’s still closer to being emotionally unavailable, given that severe trauma from his childhood, coupled by four decades of slavery, not to mention the shit that happens in between, would be combining with a more than merely unnaturally long life spent, by the way, more in unpleasant circumstances than otherwise to produce a master of cynicism and sarcastically stoic acceptance of the evils of person-kind. This doesn’t exactly describe a person who is an example of altruism and positive feelings. To force a character who has underwent all of those traumatic events to completely “transform” simply rings really untrue and unrealistic.

5. What are their chief tension areas?

It’d be rare for Entreri to have tension issues as he keeps his body in very good shape and is careful to perform proper maintenance exercises everyday. We see him feeling some cramps and sores from sleeping on the cold hard ground, but those seem to be more of passing inconveniences than anything lasting. However, a very physically fit person can’t do anything with the physiological pains caused by mental illness, and Entreri’s certainly got enough of those that he would be suffering at least the occasional pain in his chest and the corresponding spot in his upper-mid back.  

6. If you were to pick one song — and only one song — to describe your character, what would it be and why?

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Green Day. I might be able to come up with something better if I was more savvy about music, however with my limited knowledge, this song is the best one that I can think of that fits Entreri’s solitary character. There is also a hint of self-destructiveness/hopelessness in the song, despite what it says about hoping to find someone who would understand. The concept of broken dreams rings true to me about Entreri’s jaded perception of the world. While we’re supposed to believe that he’s completely found himself as well as peace by the end of Hero, that just doesn’t strike me as realistic at all. It feels like something written by someone with little to no knowledge about how people who struggle with mental illness actually work. Sure, Entreri might find good feelings from helping people, but it’s unlikely that he’d be doing it solely for the sake of positive feelings anytime soon, if ever. He’s got a lot of pent up and accrued anger against the world, for very justifiable reasons. Furthermore, although the message that Bob seems to push onto us regarding Entreri’s difficulty in looking into the mirror is due to some part of him being uneasy with killing all the people that he had, realistically speaking, Entreri’s self-loathing more likely comes from shitty circumstances that left him without much of a choice, of being a slave his whole life, both literally and figuratively. I don’t buy that Entreri has been accumulating guilt this whole time over every person he slays and every “wrong” deed he commits. In his world, the distinction between right and wrong was a luxury that he couldn’t afford, not with survival ruling supreme in his mind. Someone like that doesn’t need redemption, because they don’t view themselves as having ever fallen. What he needs is to recover from his severe traumas and PTSD, and that isn’t accomplished by singing a song about letting it go and helping random people that one encounters on the road, which is what Bob would lead us to believe with the way that things fell down the trope hole.

Realistically speaking, while not as embittered and stoic as he once was, Entreri’s still got a long way to go to recover, and his road is more akin to one walked by real people with real mental illnesses, whom question if their entire life is enough time for them to recover fully from that which was inflicted upon them and has afflicted them for so long. That road is one that is, ultimately, walked in solitude, because the people who can actually help and be able to relate are few and far in between (case in point: the author of this mess and the rabid legions that embrace the stereotype as perfect and logical). Furthermore, one needs to be willing to confront their condition in order to be able to improve upon it, and that is a decision that one can only make for oneself, regardless of the influences, both positive and negative, that weigh in upon that decision.  

7. How does your character perceive themselves? Positive? Negative? Neutral?

While Entreri knows the extent of his martial prowess, overall he has a very negative perception of himself. He frequently berates himself for even the smallest mistakes, and reflects on his existence with a great amount of negativity. He’s canonically self-loathing and is often self-deprecating, so a negative perception of himself isn’t even just headcanon. At one point, his attitude shifts more towards neutral, but in the end it just plunges back down into self-loathing.

In Hero, in Drizzt’s final journal entry, he writes:

Which is a pretty big slap in the face, because of just how uncomfortably bad the characterization is of Entreri. In addition to the whole mental illness not working that way, which I’ve already expounded upon in the previous question, this is just yet another example of Drizzt making assertions about Entreri. One of the reasons that I dislike Drizzt as strongly as I do is how presumptuous he is, about Artemis, and about everyone else, asserting their worth in his melodramatic and sanctimonious journal entries relative to his own values, without so much a thought as to understanding the other individuals thoroughly, to try to put himself in their shoes and see from their perspective. Drizzt’s treatment of Entreri has always been reminiscent of that of an abusive member in any kind of relationship, namely, in that he asserts Entreri to be this or that, with little care as to why. This final journal entry made me really mad, because we’re supposed to take Drizzt as a reliable narrator, and many people do, but this is far from the case. I have, and still do, struggle with how things were left off in Hero, but I think that what I need to do is take the words quoted above as yet another example of Drizzt being an unreliable and biased narrator, and that he’s yet again ascribing his own beliefs to someone who’s very different from himself. 

So, Artemis Entreri might be able to smile and look into a mirror, but not for the reasons that Drizzt, or Bob, thinks. I can’t see any other realistic way to assimilate it.

8. Are they a quick thinker or do they need time to sort through their thoughts? 

He’s a bit of both. Entreri is an extremely quick thinker, and a large part of what makes him so deadly is his superb ability to improvise. He has shown on numerous occasions that he’s better at thinking on his feet than is Drizzt. He has on occasion even out-witted Jarlaxle. His dry sense of humor is also razor-sharp, allowing him to win verbal battles even while he is in physically disadvantageous positions. The thing with Entreri is that the closer to himself the topic becomes, the harder it is with which for him to cope. He survives because of his combat thinking acuity, but he doesn’t truly live because he can’t figure out matters of the heart. He gets better at this with time, but it’s a long journey for anyone to take, especially so for someone like him who’s more accustomed to dismissing his inner workings than listening to them. It certainly doesn’t help that the vast bulk of his relationships, the romantic ones especially, have little care for who he is but rather is built upon the women’s fascination with what he is.

9. Does your character dream or are their nights filled with an empty blackness? Describe a dream they’ve had or a night they couldn’t sleep and what they did to preoccupy their time.

I’d think that Entreri either does not dream or has foggy nightmares about his childhood and/or other unpleasant events that he’s had to endure. Although he would’ve found a certain degree of closure from killing his childhood molester and the power-abusing man who was most likely his biological father, acts of revenge do not erase past traumas, so Entreri’s boyhood vulnerability and shame would likely often visit his slumbering adult mind. No small part of the reason that Entreri worked to build himself up as much as he did is to make it so that he’s never anyone’s victim like that ever again, but that doesn’t stop what he’s striven to prevent from manifesting realistically in his nightmares. Prior to the Spellplague, in post-Sellswords era, I think that nightmares of the invalidating experience he underwent in Menzoberranzan would still haunt him to no small degree, despite his declaration of, “Artemis Entreri is dead” in his determination to divorce himself from his past. 

While I believe that Jarlaxle’s ploy at the end of The Silent Blade rid Entreri of the sense of invalidation that Drizzt represented for him, as well as the torment brought by the lack of resolution from their perpetual stalemates, it would make sense for his experience in Menzoberranzan to have remained a cloud on his mind, as we can see from his severe rejection of the idea of escaping into the Underdark with Jarlaxle when Gareth’s army laid siege to Castle D'aerthe. I don’t think that he ever recovered from the Menzoberranzan experience, and it was only overshadowed by the more recent and longer lasting trauma in the form of over four decades of enslavement under Herzgo Alegni. Nonetheless, with unresolved circumstances, like the Menzoberranzan instance, they’ll come back to haunt the sufferer’s dreams, and compounding with later stresses would make for darker and more warped nightmares that would pull from all prior and subsequent traumas. His mind would subconsciously try to cope with this, and as a self-defense mechanism, make the nightmares vague, so he’d probably never quite be able to tell what’s going on in the nightmares. He’d likely wake up from them shaken, perturbed and reeling from the emotions and too-real sensations that they inflict within him. These sorts of nightmares would be more sensory than visual, for instance taking the forms of hazy flashes of defining elements like his rapist’s rotting yellow teeth and the overwhelmingly rancid breath saturated with the vapors of cheap alcohol. Perhaps these elements would be combined with his helpless body hovering high over a gaping rift of infinite darkness, reminiscent of the Clawrift that the Priestesses of Lolth suspended him over while having their way with him as an iblith sex toy. Then, add in the agony reverberating through every fiber of his musculature with the strike of Alegni’s tuning fork against Charon’s Claw. 

Perhaps the most torturous of all might be found in his inability to resist and his impotent rage, that despite his fighting tooth and claw to see that such losses of dignity would never be visited upon him again. This would be confronting him with the fact that all of his efforts have been for naught, and that even despite them, there’s nothing he can do to protect himself. A sleep with empty blackness would be a blessing for him. 

With his superhuman willpower and discipline, Entreri should be, for the most part, successful in suppressing these nightmares. However, even he would be prone to times of weakness, and these sorts of bad dreams will keep coming back, even as his life moves towards a better place. I don’t see him giving in to the effects of the worst of the nightmares. If he wakes up severely shaken, perhaps even scared, he’s too stubborn and prideful in his own way to acknowledge that something as intangible and pointless as a bad dream would have any effect on him. He’d force himself to go back to sleep, because not doing so would be surrendering to it and validating it, and even though dreams born of trauma would affect him, he would pretend that they do not.

Sleepless nights would be a different matter altogether for Entreri. How he would spend one such night would depend entirely on its specific circumstances, but he’d most likely be making good use of the time, be it honing one of his many skills or gathering information. I don’t see him engaging in any sort of pointless activity, he’s way too pragmatic to just be burning time for the sake of burning time, like getting senselessly drunk or sitting about drumming his fingers against the table. Perhaps he’d crouch on a rooftop overlooking a good chunk of his surroundings, achieving an almost elven reverie-like state as he allows the subtle currents of information to flow within him. 

10. If they had a choice, would they prefer a subway or a bus for public transportation?

He’d prefer the subway, for it offers more shadows, less exposure and a greater sense of privacy even in the most crowded situations. It certainly doesn’t hurt that subways tend to be more efficient and predictable.

11. What do they think of creation? Do they believe in evolution or do they believe in God? What is their religion like?

Entreri doesn’t think much about creation or existential matters. He would not believe in the existence of any gods at all if the gods have not shown themselves to exist in his world. Although he is distasteful of the deities, Entreri isn’t self-delusional. He doesn’t deny the existence of the deities, however he doesn’t worship or follow any of them either. In fact, he scorns priests and other religiously devoted people.

The interesting thing is, in the Forgotten Realms, one doesn’t necessarily have to actively follow a deity to be championing them, and subsequently after death, have their souls collected by that patron deity. In his early career, Entreri’s deeds would have earned him the patronship of Bhaal, however his more recent actions fall more within the portfolio of Mask. Entreri wouldn’t take at all well to anyone telling him any of that, however, as his unwittingly acting as a particular god’s agenda would feel like to him a flagrant violation of his free will, plus he would be disgusted at how what he has done is not too far from what priests do. On the other hand, completely spurning all of the gods is also a very unwise approach to take, because an unclaimed soul ends up on the Wall of the Faithless, which is a really unpleasant (and eternal) fate. However, it’s likely that Entreri doesn’t even know about the existence of the Wall, but if he did, it probably wouldn’t affect how he feels about the gods. When he sees that his death is inevitable, I really see him destroying his own soul with his dagger so that, in his eyes, no one, be it overly and inappropriately ambitious mortals or fickle immortals and their machinations will ever have control over him after he has given up control of himself. 

12. Describe 5 unusual characteristics your muse has.

Other than the five already discussed here, 

1) Entreri would definitely have calluses on his palms from being an expert swordsman. Even though he wears leather gauntlets, he’d still have calluses between his thumbs and index finger from the hilts of the blades as well as over all the raised regions of his palms. 

2) As per Night of the Hunter, Entreri keeps the nail on his left thumb long for the apparent purpose of using it as an impromptu substitute for when he does not have ready access to his thieves’ tools. Realistically speaking, it can’t be too long, or else it would hinder his swordplay. The task described in Night of the Hunter that takes advantage of his long thumbnail is not actually possible and demonstrates a poor understanding of lock mechanisms, so it doesn’t actually matter how long his nail is  since what he does is inherently impossible. But, suspending disbelief, I just assume that it’s no more than extending a half inch beyond his thumb tip. 

3) Unlike many rogues, thieves, assassins and other characters with evil dispositions, Entreri doesn’t enjoy killing. He also kills efficiently, granting his victims a swift and painless death. He doesn’t believe much in torture either, engaging in acts similar to torture only to send a message (i.e. chopping off Regis’ fingers to send to Drizzt) but not out of any desire for cruelty.

4) At the end of Hero, Entreri is around 159 years old, and this is a rough figure because his precise date of birth is unknown. He decided that he was fourteen in “The Third Level”, which takes place during 1341 DR, and the events of Hero transpire during 1486 DR. Needless to say, this is very very old for a human! However, Entreri isn’t a normal human due to his absorption of a Shade, but it’s unclear what exactly is responsible for his unnaturally long lifespan. Some believe that Charon’s Claw is the cause of it, while others believe that it’s the Shade properties. In terms of D&D game stats for Charon’s Claw, there isn’t anything about the item that would suggest prolongation of life, but then again, there isn’t anything in its stats either about how Alegni used it to raise Entreri back from the dead multiple times so that he could keep being his unwilling slave. The information given in Hero isn’t very helpful in this regard either, as the only thing that’s established is that with the advent of The Sundering, that the hold that Charon’s Claw has on Entreri is not what it used to be, however it’s even explicitly stated that it may never even have had an effect on his lifespan. On the other hand, Shades live hundreds to over a thousand years old, which could mean that some of this property transferred over to Entreri, but it’s really hard to say. That’s one of those things that makes him bendable to the author’s whim I suppose, but that’s irrelevant for the purpose of this question.

5) I guess this last thing isn’t that unusual, but Entreri’s pretty short for a human male by our standards. However, his height of 5'5" is only 2" shorter than the average height for a human male in the Forgotten Realms, which isn’t that weird in his world. 5'7" does seem to be on the short side for human males by our reckoning, however it’s a pretty accurate average height for the average medieval European man.13. Have they ever been so overwhelmed they had to stop and take a break from something?

Entreri’s method for dealing with stressful or overwhelming situations is to just push through them. Severe injuries and tangled webs of intrigue are best dealt with by being done with them. He doesn’t start things that he doesn’t finish, regardless of his mental condition. His physical condition may force him to step away from something, however he will invariably return to finish it sooner or later. 

14. Are they a team player or do they prefer to be solo?

Entreri always prefers to work alone, but he does recognize the merits to having a team. Despite this, he would rather rely on his own exceptional abilities to make up for a disadvantage in numbers.

15. Can they multi-task or must they focus on one subject at a time?

Entreri is an expert multi-tasker.

16. What are their best school subjects? What are their worst? List five of each.

School is really a luxury in the Forgotten Realms setting. It’s established in canon that organized education, such as magic schools, are very expensive, and otherwise general education is imparted within the household or self-taught. Trade skills are gained by apprenticeships, and acolytes of various orders learn through their time in their respective orders. I think it’s safe to say that Entreri taught himself everything that he knows, by necessity, but if schooling had been available to him or some sort of apprenticeship opportunity, I see him as not being into either, due to his independence, distrust of others and a general preference for being alone. 

If Entreri had gone to school, and assuming a subject list similar to that of our world but in the context of the realms, his best five would be bartering, tracking, appraising, riding and of course swordsmanship. His worst five would be languages, history and lore, astrology, religion and anything concerning the tedious details of etiquette. I can actually see him being good at home economics-type classes due to his attention to detail and perfectionism. He’d also likely make reasonably tasty food for himself since he wouldn’t suffer himself to eat his own bad cooking. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’d put in the effort for others. ;P

17. Is your character an introvert or an extrovert? How do they handle big crowds of people?

Entreri prefers to keep to himself as an introvert does, however he isn’t shy about talking to people or engaging in extended conversations with another (even if he would prefer not do so). He doesn’t like people in general, but he doesn’t go out of his way to avoid them if he doesn’t have to either. Rather than having to seek out solitude, his very presence ensures that he has a respectable amount of space to himself even in the most crowded establishments. He doesn’t have to worry about big crowds, it’s the big crowd of people that have to worry about him. I think that Entreri possesses the charisma and the lack of social anxiety that could make him an extrovert, but his misanthropy makes him behave like an introvert.

18. Are they a leader, do they prefer to follow, or would they rather just stay on the sidelines altogether?

I see it as being situational. Entreri prefers to do things his own way, oftentimes intentionally defying the details of specific instructions simply because he strongly dislikes being ordered about. He doesn’t particularly enjoy following another’s suggestions, however, as long as his independence is respected, he’ll tolerate being dragged around on various quests and/or adventures. I think that his leadership abilities would be respectable, as he has a tactical mind and a commanding presence, but he would shun the responsibilities and hassle that come from being in a leadership role.

19. If your character was suddenly challenged, would they rather run away or stay and fight?

It would depend on the circumstance. He’s more inclined to fight than to run away, however, he’s cautious and will not charge blindly into anything. Challenging him is not a good idea unless you’re prepared to die or are completely certain that you can kill him (which, well, no one really can, due to his own resourcefulness and the fact that Jarlaxle wishes for him to stay alive).

20. If your character was allowed to murder one person without any consequences, who would that person be and why?

I think that would most likely be Kimmuriel Oblodra. Honestly, I don’t see Entreri having any qualms about murdering any Menzoberranzanyr drow, Gromph included even though he’s no longer located in Menzoberranzan. If Entreri knew about Quenthel ordering Jarlaxle to not rescue him from enslavement under Alegni, it would be a difficult toss-up between Kimmuriel and Quenthel. Quenthel is tempting because as the Matron Mother of Menzoberranzan, it would be difficult to assassinate her without a great deal of complications, and Entreri might just be tempted into choosing her if he was offered the chance to kill her without consequence. On the other hand, his hatred of Kimmuriel runs deep, psionics are more of a threat against him than arcane magic, and if he knew about Kimmuriel’s involvement in altering Jarlaxle’s memory (which resulted in his continued enslavement), it wouldn’t matter to Entreri that Quenthel had ordered it, he would still want Kimmuriel dead. Furthermore, even though Kimmuriel “helped” Dahlia, it was at Jarlaxle’s request. As such, Entreri wouldn’t feel like he owed either Kimmuriel or Jarlaxle anything for the service, especially as he views it as part of Jarlaxle’s reparations to him for having ditched him with Alegni. There is little love lost between Kimmuriel and Entreri, and given the chance, Kimmuriel would off Entreri, and Entreri knows that. 

If Tiago weren’t already dead, he’d be high up on the list too, especially if Entreri found out about how Tiago had raped Dahlia on numerous occasions while she was mentally impaired.

21. Your character has been granted 3 wishes; what would they wish for and why?

When I first did this meme, the canon point was Night of the Hunter, so the two of the three that I listed without explanation no longer apply. I was going to explain the “why” parts originally when I revisited this question, but since they’re, for the most part, outdated, I’m no longer going to do that. XD Instead, here are three new wishes and their reasoning:

1) “I wish to always have my own free will, that no other being shall have the means to dictate, control or otherwise affect without my consent what I do or not do with myself and my life.” – This is something Entreri has striven for throughout his entire life, and in no small amount due to how much it has eluded him. For most of the time, he isn’t even actively aware enough of it to be able to word such a wish, but after four decades of slavery, facing the possibility of Drizzt using Charon’s Claw to control him like Alegni had, and Charon’s Claw coming back after he thought it destroyed, I’d think that Entreri would have a much better sense of what he wants to avoid at all costs. 

2) “I wish to be immune to the negative effects of all magics, be they divine, arcane, psionic, or otherwise.” – Go big or go home, right? :P I can’t see him wishing for total invulnerability however, I think that he derives a fair amount of pride from ability to take care of himself with his own skills, and should those skills fail him especially with the lack of interference from magical sources, he’d be ready to throw in the towel. That, and total invulnerability would be akin to a luxury, the kind that makes people grow complacent and thus degenerate. I doubt Entreri would believe in total invulnerability either, he’d see it as a temporary thing that’d lull him into a false sense of security until someone else found a way to get past it and get to him while he’s vulnerable.

3) This should really be #1, because the first thing he’d try is wishing for more wishes, but since the rule of these kinds of things is that there’s no wishing for more wishes, it is #3. :P But you know, I’m pretty stumped so far as coming up with a third is concerned. As of the end of Hero, he might consider wishing good fortune for his “friends” and former allies, but I can’t see him actually following through with that because it’s pretty lame, plus his lifelong thing has been to always be prepared and self-preservation. It just isn’t realistic that he would be so self-sacrificing as to give up something as powerful as a (mostly) limitless wish to aid others that aren’t even in immediate peril. I see him saving one last wish as a true last resort. 

22. Does your character trust people right off the bat or does it take them some time to warm up to someone?

It’s nigh impossible to gain Entreri’s trust fully. Despite having been physically and emotionally intimate with Calihye and Dahlia, he did not trust either of them completely. I don’t believe that Calihye would’ve left him, as described in Hero, had he fully trusted her. While we’re supposed to believe that he and Dahlia share some sort of all-too-perfect profound bond, realistically speaking, I don’t think they would, and I don’t think Entreri’s dumb/naive enough to fully trust Dahlia either. He’s fully aware of her black widow tendencies, and it wasn’t all that long ago that he was worried about Dahlia forsaking him for her still-lingering feelings for Drizzt (and it was even more recently that Dahlia acted upon remaining feelings for Drizzt in having sex with Kimmuriel when he invoked a memory of Drizzt within her mind). It wouldn’t be at all unlikely for Dahlia to choose Effron over Entreri if it came down to making a choice between her son or her lover, plus it’s also in line with her nature to be fascinated by a newer/younger/more powerful/more “interesting” beau and ditch Entreri for that person (although finding such a paragon is difficult for me to imagine, Dahlia is still a flake). 

All of this is not to say that Entreri isn’t capable of giving some measure of trust to others, as he has demonstrated that he mostly trusted Drizzt, Dwahvel and Jarlaxle while he traveled and worked with each of them. I question whether he fully trusted Drizzt or anyone, because realistically speaking, someone who has been betrayed as much as and to as large a degree as Entreri has won’t have the ability to trust fully, plus Drizzt was his arch-nemesis for a significant portion of his life. The shining paragon of Drizzt’s Gary Stu-ness means that we’re supposed to believe that he can convert anyone into his inner circle if he wants to do that (as can be seen with Yvonnel 2.0, the most powerful drow born into Menzoberranzan, and even Lolth herself to a degree), but I really roll my eyes at that and unless Salvatore does a massively better job of writing it, I just don’t find it believable. Trust is something that comes back with time, but despite Entreri’s unnaturally long life, he’s spent more time experiencing things that challenge trust than not, so I can’t see him recovering that ability anytime soon, maybe not ever if he’s never subject to the right kinds of circumstances.

23. Do they prefer romance or affection? What is the quickest way to your character’s heart?

Entreri tends to avoid both, but romance is probably the quickest way to his heart, simply because of his limited experiences with positive connections. While both affection and romance are complex, in some ways, romance can be more clear-cut and obvious. We see from the books that Entreri has a better understanding of the nature of his relationship with Calihye and Dahlia than the one he had with Dwahvel, for instance. This isn’t all too surprising, as someone who’s never had any friends has a hard time grasping friendship, but a romantic relationship, especially when it entails sexual activities, is easier to identify for someone who isn’t well-versed in either. However, more than anything, the quickest way to his heart is to genuinely love him, not as a master thief, assassin and fighter but as a man whose identity and worth even he himself isn’t entirely certain of, without designs to manipulate or to change him. On a related note, I question the longevity of his relationship with Dahlia because their bond was formed under duress, arguably impossible without the significant intervention of the aboleth that peeled open their minds and left their pasts naked for each other to see. This sort of dramatic intervention isn’t much different from the influence of Idalia’s Flute that made Entreri all wonkers and made feasible his relationship with Calihye, which was based on little more than her initial seduction of him. Without knowing Dahlia’s past, and with no way of knowing it had the aboleth not revealed it, other than physically attractive, he found her irritating and dishonorable. Furthermore, Dahlia’s reasons for “loving” Entreri aren’t really based in anything substantial. There’s the shared similarities in trauma that, again, was brought to light by a forceful and magical external influence, but other than that, it seemed more like an infatuation with his skills rather than who he is. We don’t see Dahlia responding to Entreri’s dry sense of humor, there is no chemistry and rapport between them personality-wise, plus Dahlia’s son and Entreri are going to butt heads so much that you sure as heck can bet that that’ll be a chief sort of tension between the forcibly happy couple. Where canon leaves us at the end of Hero is yet another one of the inconsistencies that mark Bob’s books, namely, what we are supposed to accept as the ideal relationship for Entreri is anything but that based on the preceding characterizations of him.

24. Does your character have any enemies? If so, who and why?

Entreri has few enemies, because most of them are already dead by his hand. He thinks that Herzgo Alegni is dead, however if he finds out that his former slaver is still alive, that would be one target he’d hit first. After that, those responsible for wrongs done unto him would be high on the list, but, as mentioned, most of them are dead or his issues with them are resolved by the end of Hero. While Tiago Baenre is dead, members of his troupe are still around, and Entreri wouldn’t mind seeing those killed off in repayment for their involvement in his and Dahlia’s suffering in Q'Xorlarrin. However, Entreri’s probably not on the minds of those drow, nor is it all that likely that Entreri would be thinking of them anytime soon following the events in Hero. Plus hunting them down would be difficult, as that would involve going to Menzoberranzan, which he will not do without very compelling reasons to do so.

I would count Kimmuriel as an enemy of Entreri. As mentioned earlier, the two share bad blood that runs back for more than a century, and if Entreri ever finds out that Kimmuriel’s adjustment of Jarlaxle’s memories is what caused Jarlaxle to believe that Entreri had betrayed him instead of the other way around, thus dooming Entreri to four decades of slavery, I’d hate to see what would go down between the two of them. Actually, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t mind seeing it. I’ve never liked Kimmuriel and it would be very satisfying to see Entreri kill him dead, both for the sake of Entreri and for myself. >_>

25. Do they have any weird bedroom habits? Any unusual kinks?

I see Entreri as being pretty straightedge when it comes to sex. He would prefer being the dominant party, however, I don’t see him as so insecure such that his physical position relative to his partner does not define dominance or submission to him. He seems to enjoy letting his partner lead, however he gets the final call on things that he will not tolerate. He does read as very heterosexual to me, but while I understand him to be very selectively so, I wouldn’t really call him ace or demi either because he does demonstrate sexual attraction independent of other kinds of attraction on a number of occasions. 

On this subject, I do try very hard to adhere to canon, and my dedication to doing so has caused me no small amount of torment over the years (and especially now following Hero x_x), so my OTP being what it is could seem rather odd. I make allowances for this not frivolously because Jarlaxle is a special case, as in addition to being pansexual, we’re supposed to accept and believe that he’s so charismatic that he’s potentially attractive to everyone. 

In any case, I could see Entreri being open to trying certain kinds of kinks and staying far away from others. I don’t want to get too graphic, but the types of kinks that he’d likely stay away from would be anything having to do with filth, as he’s lived in and around impoverished conditions enough that I just can’t see him ever being able to get enjoyment out of anything that reminds him of that aspect of his past. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if Entreri possessed just a hint of sadism, enough to allow him to enjoy putting his precise control of sharp objects to use in intimate settings, especially since doing so puts him in a comfort zone built around something he’s very confident in. However, I don’t see him as being into that beyond the control and finesse elements of the tool being used. Due to his insecurities, Entreri would likely much more prefer to give than to receive, to the point of possibly being triggered when on the receiving end of certain kinky activities. For instance, although he could quite possibly enjoy bondage, especially if it means tying Jarlaxle up and (mostly not literally) kicking him around a bit, he would be thoroughly unamused and not turned on by being tied up. He might try it out of affection for his partner, but I see him as being very much not into being constrained even in a sexual sense. There’s a rough generalization for Dom/sub personalities that states that someone who is confident prefers to be in the submissive role because in consensual Dom/sub play, the sub has all the power. Like most generalizations however this one is flawed in the sense that it neglects to adapt to specific personalities. While Entreri is indeed confident and sure in many ways, he is more vulnerable than he is self-assured. Because of the insecurities and doubts that do plague Entreri, a role that one such as Jarlaxle, whom I use here because he’s a great example of a character who is cocksure through and through (no pun intended ;P), would find freedom and enjoyment in would instead fill Entreri with discomfort. That’s my take on the matter, in any case. 

26. How does your character prepare for bed? Do they sleep at all or can they stay awake for days on end without trouble?

Under normal circumstances, Entreri meticulously ensures that his weapons and gear are in good condition before he rests. His weapons belt will always be within easy reach. He’d sleep either wearing trousers or in the nude depending on what he foresees as likely to disturb his rest. Theoretically speaking, I suppose he could sleep only in smallclothes, but for whatever reason, smallclothes aren’t mentioned in any of the Drizzt books, and the characters either sleep in trousers or in the nude. I suppose that Faerûnian smallclothes aren’t designed to be comfortably worn underneath skin-tight leather armor, hence why the sleeping in the nude after peeling off that external casing. However, everyday clothes probably allow for it, and fine enough clothes would be comfortable to sleep in. We see during “The Sellswords” that Entreri sleeps shirtless and presumably goes outside in the same pants that he slept in after throwing on a shirt (at least, we don’t see him change on screen after putting on the shirt that Jarlaxle tosses him). 

Even when there are no outstanding threats, Entreri would most likely always go to bed prepared for any anticipated interruption that may find him. He can stay awake for days on end as long as it is necessary, however, as he is only (mostly) human, he can’t go on forever without sleep.  

27. If your character had one thing to say to their parents before they died, what would it be?

To his mother, he would probably say something along the lines of, “I don’t blame you.” Given that it’s likely that he killed his father, well, the blade through the chest conveys his parting thoughts rather perfectly. 

28. Are they afraid of death? Do they have any regrets?

Entreri doesn’t fear death, however he seems ambivalent about how he feels regarding it. There are many times in his life in which he wishes for it to find him, even actively seeking it in some instances. However, his sense of self-preservation is so ingrained that he instinctively fights when his life is threatened. He has no regrets of which he is aware. 

29. Does your character get restless when things are too quiet or do they favour solitude and silence? Why?

Entreri enjoys his solitude and prefers silence to noisiness, however he does get restless living a peaceful and uneventful life. He has demonstrated a distaste for characters that talk too much, and especially if those characters spend a good portion of their garrulousness rhyming. ;P While in many circumstances Entreri doesn’t have much of a choice but to follow where adventure leads, in other situations, he could’ve elected to ditch the more dangerous road and lay low. For instance, pragmatically speaking, there wasn’t much point for him to stay with Jarlaxle after the events in Servant of the Shard. Furthermore, he didn’t have to go back to Calimport or any major city at the end of Road of the Patriarch, as he’d surely know that his chosen action would land him in the midst of all sorts of going-ons, and if he truly wished to be away from all of that, he could’ve just as easily settled in some small rural town. I also can’t see him settling down with Dahlia like Drizzt does with Catti-brie because, realistically speaking, he still has many unresolved issues and soul-searching to do, not to mention that Dahlia has her own baggage to deal with and is unlikely to be happy with a sedentary life.

From a very young age, Entreri has not lived a single day without being tested to his limits, and his obsession with being at the top of his craft is meaningless if he doesn’t have something to measure it up against. He is used to activity, so inaction makes him irritable. He may be less this way at the end of Hero, but pigeonholing him into a quiet happily ever after just isn’t a very likely conclusion. Perhaps he will reach the state that he’s supposed in at the current canonical point, but I see that as a temporary high at best, unless we accept that he’s just an oversimplified and inaccurately representative caricature of a real person instead of a believable character. Which, I suppose, according to canon, he sort of is. :\ 

30. Finally; if your character was forced to eat one thing for the rest of their life, what would they choose and why?

It doesn’t really matter to him, as he is so practical-minded that as long as it is something that can sustain his body in good condition, he’d eat whatever it is. Would he make a ton of snarky comments about it? You betcha! XD I suppose he wouldn’t want to subsist exclusively on some sort of foodstuff that originates from the Underdark, as he’d feel that it would sooner or later lead him to have more encounters with drow than is necessary, and to him, zero would be the amount of necessary encounters with them. XD