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fr-owlistuff · 7 years ago

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ICCC Character

FR INSPIROBOT CHARACTER CHALLENGE with @talross-fr and @shadowdrac-rising :D :D :D This was so much fun!

PERSONALITY

cunning, opportunistic, chaotic neutral/evil, alluring, psychotic, clever, quiet, one-track-mind for some things, observant

‘They were scavengers of forgotten places, burrowing into the dilapidated remnants of civilizations long gone. Their dirt-encrusted hands greedily grasped the dusty doors and pawned at the rotten wood. They left seeds in their wake so that none could follow after them, their figures ghostly and fleeing.’

Belongs to a clan of wandering scavengers who pillage ruins. Those of the clan are half-mortal, half-wraith; descendants of some sort of nature spirit that left the earth long ago (or so they believe). They take whatever riches the ruins might offer them and sing to the plants and to the earth so that they know where to grow and shift; after they depart, the ruins they visit vanish from the face of the earth.

Some ruins are so grandiose that it takes the clan years to strip them of objects and valuables; others are small and only keep them for a day. They sell the objects to wandering merchants or gift them to outsiders who have earned their favor.

EARLY LIFE

His first memory is of the taste of ashes in his mouth. The clan told him he’d come to them covered in cinders, his cries sharp and echoing in the silent aftermath of the forest fire. He later learned that some of the clan were born and that others were made - how, they were not entirely sure.

He was just a mewling baby when he came to them, and so was placed into the care of a slightly older clan member. For most of his life he would know her as Am‘ryn (sister, soul-friend, blood of his blood), but others called her Lyrrae.

He was not unlike a clumsy puppy at the time as he followed his Am’ryn through the thick foliage and between the ancient slabs of stone, his small legs struggling to keep pace. She’d look back at him and would struggle to keep from laughing as Vaschel carefully patted the vines away from his path so as to not damage them.

Lyrrae taught him the songs of their clan and watched as he struggled to pronounce each word and follow each cadence. She gently corrected him when he stumbled and stuttered, but at the end of the day they joined the clan in their singing amidst the firefly-infested clearing, hands clasped together and love intertwined into the movements of their joyful, chaotic dance.

Years later Vaschel started following his Am’ryn into the depths of the ruins, so deep into the earth that light became a distant memory. For a little while he lived in the darkness, guided only by the voice of his Am’ryn as they burrowed into the depths. Sometimes they found age-old mummies, sometimes they found fresher bodies, usually of bandits and grave robbers that had been slain by Vaschel and Lyrrae’s clan. They spent months in the darkness, stripping the ancient buildings down to the very bones and relying on each other to survive.

It was on one of those long journeys into the underground that Vaschel first glimpsed the lie woven into his life. His Am’ryn had been tense all day, mouth pulled tightly shut and eyes dark. Vaschel noticed with a pang of dread that she’d barely even glanced at him as they began their descent. It was three days into their journey when his Am’ryn finally sat him down, looking so weary that her shoulders dropped down. She told him a story then, her story.

‘I was a hunter before. While others ransacked and retrieved, I stood watch over our camp and fought off or killed intruders. I was also tasked with hunting down creatures we called Arvors. They were spirits made flesh, creatures born out of earth in places where either great tragedy or great happiness had occurred. You see, the trees and the earth, they remember, and while we are their children, we are also other, mortal. These creatures… They were wilder, unpredictable, filled with and controlled by whatever memories and emotions had brought them to life. So we killed them before they had a chance to grow as we believed was our right. That is, until our numbers began to dwindle, so much that we were quickly heading towards extinction. The elders decided that we’d adopt these creatures into our midst instead of killing them, at least until they gave us a reason to destroy them. They gave each of the adopted Arvors a Warden who would monitor them, raise them and report back to the elders… Which is how I got to be your Am’ryn, sapling. And I… I have grown to love you so much. Which is why you must run now.’

He hadn’t understood at first, but when the steely blade barely grazed his neck he was quick to put some distance between himself and his Am’ryn. He doesn’t remember crying, but he must have. He sprinted his way through the darkness, ducking and jumping over obstacles, his breathing too loud in his ears for him to be aware of Lyrrae scarce feet behind him, sword carefully tucked into its scabbard. She caught up to him not long after that, ramming into him from behind and making him fall. He quickly turned around, but his Am’ryn was quicker and Vaschel screamed in agony when she pinned his leg to the ground with her dagger. He couldn’t see the way she flinched or how she took a step back from him as if he had hit her. He could only feel the agony racing up his leg and somewhere between a heartbeat and the next something in him cracked.

The following memories are enshrouded in a fog he can’t pierce. He vaguely remembers a struggle and an unfiltered, frothing rage within him accompanied by a feeling of betrayal. When he comes to he’s looking down at his Am’ryn’s eyes and she’s smiling up at him and there’s so much love in them he recalls being left breathless as another kind of pain bloomed in his chest. He remembers the thin trail of blood running from her mouth and she was so tired, but so happy.

And then her eyes dimmed and she died, and a part of Vaschel died with her.

‘I loved you, sister, but it was not enough.’

AFTER THE ESCAPE

He never returns to the clan after that. Maybe because of the lack of mortal connections, Vaschel becomes more like the wraith the elders accused him of being. He phases in and out of existence, sometimes a shadow, sometimes an older boy lost in the woods. He wanders away from the forest in an attempt to escape his former clan’s hunters, and stumbles into the mortal settlements. They are foreign to him at first, but he sticks to the shadows and quickly adapts to his new surroundings. He observes and learns from mortals’ behaviors, finding a twisted sort of delight in the way they create their own misery.

He never expected to fall in love.

The boy is a study in sunlight and kindness. Vaschel literally stumbled into him as he was walking down the streets, pockets full of gold coins from selling his latest relic. The boy almost fell over, but Vaschel reached out to steady him. There was a quiet ‘thank you’ and Vaschel caught the edge of a gentle smile and simmering amber eyes before the boy was gone around the corner. Hours later Vaschel genuinely laughed when he found his pockets a few coins lighter.

He found the boy again days later, and curiosity got the better of him as he watched the amber-eyed boy go door to door. He was delivering bread, he’d found out later, and it had probably been bought with his own stolen gold coins. Before he could help himself he’d approached the boy, and an amused grin stretched his lips when the boy paled at the sight of him.

‘I mean you no harm,’ he’d told the boy, and wove compulsion into his voice, feeling satisfied when the boy relaxed.

He wanted only to assuage his curiosity, but the more he learned, the more he wanted to know. He kept his distance from the boy, whose name was Sorin he later learned, but made sure they crossed paths once in awhile. He kept an eye out for him, and once hunted down a group of petty thugs who thought the small boy had encroached in on their own territory and wanted to teach him a lesson.

Unfortunately for the amber-eyed boy, this gave Vaschel an idea.

He waited for the cloak of darkness before venturing out into the streets. He knew the way to the boy’s house by heart now, and arrived just in time to see the flames devour the building. Already a crowd had gathered a safe distance from the burning building, but Vaschel moved between them unnoticed. He took a step, two, and vanished into thin air.

Vaschel found the boy unconscious by the door, flames eating at his pants and sleeves. Unfazed by the fire around him, Vaschel crouched down and blew out the flames eating at Sorin’s skin. The boy was feather-light in his arms as he picked him up, and vanished them both from the inferno eating up part of the city. Vaschel never gave a second thought to the other lives lost that day.

When Sorin came to Vaschel was sitting across from him and the boy’s lovely amber eyes found his own immediately. Something akin to alarm flashed in their depths. Sorin sat up, wincing at the burns in his arms and legs. ‘What do you want?’

Vaschel had to smother a grin - the boy was not as unaware as he had first appeared. He’d noticed the strangeness of the interactions between Vaschel and himself, and had drawn his own conclusions. The trickle of fear apparent in his posture only made Vaschel’s amusement grow tenfold.

‘Now that you owe me your life, I propose a deal.’

NOW

Vaschel haunts the border between forest and mortal settlements, venturing into one or the other when it befits him. Sometimes he wanders farther away into deserts or coastlines in search of ruins or ancient battlefields to plunder, ones he knows are too far away from any kind of woodland for his former clan to find interesting. He does business with many merchants and nobles, but his most reliable business ‘partner’ is Oleksander, a wandering merchant that knows far more than he leads to believe; he has the common sense to never ask a favor of Vaschel, and Vaschel respects him for that. Although he wouldn’t mind keeping Oleksander for a time…

A tiny round vial hangs from his neck and he touches it lovingly when distracted. Inside is his most precious acquisition: an amber-eyed thief with too much kindness and too little common sense.

NOTES:

The forest fire in which Vaschel was born was the one that destroyed the Blacktalon Witches, hence his birth.

The scavengers clan can collectively phase out of existence and teleport long distances, hence why they never have to leave the ‘forest’ to search for ruins. They teleport from one forest to the next.

#owli speaks #clan lore

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fionadorothywinterflood-blog · 7 years ago

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Semiotics - The hidden meaning of Stuff and Things

NEW BRIEF....

I chose brief 3; “Hidden meanings and verbal camouflage”, eventually developing into my booklet “The hidden meanings of Stuff and Things”.

For this project I darted around a few ideas to start off with but after a coule of crits and tutorials, I got fed up, lost confidence and changed my mind. From looking into hidden manings within family memes and childhood made up characters, to getting interested and a little creeped out by the use of inspirational quotes, online and in real life (see inspirobot).

Both of these paths of investigation seemed to have elements that fascinated me but even though I researched them quite extensively, I coud not invisage a way to comunicate them sucessfully.

Whilst looking at the reading list within the brief, I was very interested (by the title alone) of “The Language of Things” by Deyan Sudjic.

In this book Sudjic talks about human realstionship to possesions and objects, as well as design in general. He looks at our obsession with “stuff” and how we are addicted to consuming and posessing more and more “things”. As William Morris was quoted "I have never been in any rich man's house which would not have looked the better for having a bonfire made outside of it of nine-10ths of all that it held” and in Sujan’s book he seems to refer to this theory as well as highlighting the human realtionship and interaction with things.

I then went onto look at other artists that have been interested in “stuff” and our relationship to it but also the stuffs relationship to humans. Whilst looking at works by artists such as Laure Prouvost (how she looks at the gallery space, interpretations of space and areas and recreating digital areas in real life), Mark Leckey (who I was lucky enough to see at Cubit Gallery recently https://cubittartists.org.uk/2017/06/15/mark-leckey-affect-bridge-age-regression/ , Dan Fox, and Mark Beasley. The last two, of whom, as well as being successful artists and writers are left leg and right leg of the band “Big Legs” with a great song just called “Stuff” (see archive) looking at the everyday and the normal areas of stuff, how normal things and stuff around us effects us, how we effect it and how its all just a load of irrelevant, unimportant but effective and affected STUFF!!

Whilst researching these artists works and theories, I came across two interesting theories relating to “stuff” and “things”. That of the anthropocentric attitude to things and the juxtaposing theory of “The Three O’s” (Object Orientated Ontology); taking all human element away from things, e.g a bath would not be called a bath as the human element is to bathe would be taken away, therefore it should just be called “a porcelain convex vessel that can be filled with water”.

..but mainly this idea all came about from two friends of mine stumbling across a girl, in a field somewhere in wiltshire (I think it was The Secret Garden Party) about ten years ago, “Stuff on Stuff Sonja”. Sonja, who, lets say was “exploring other, maybe chemically induced realms of exixtance” was sitting crossed legged on the grass, hysterically laughing at a small pile of rubbish (a can, a used paper plate, a collection of NOS cylinders and one broken flipflop). As each item fell off of the strategically assembled totum of trash, Stuff on Stuff Sonja lost her shit and fell about, “life is just stuff on stuff” Sonja said in the clearest and most ernest voice thrugh tears of hysterical elation. Life is just stuff on, in and at other stuff. Thank you Sonja. I hope you are still laughing at rubbish.

In this project I want to look at these theories and how as humans our actions, thought processes and behaviour can be represented by concious and subconsious areas of stuff and things (see; “Jonothan had a nosebleed”), how we have packed a lunch box can represent a character trait or how we use things to express how, why and who we are.

#ag1003 #semiotics #stuff and things

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