#like there IS a way to raise a child secularly to respect and be in awe of nature

[rebellum]

Actually, religion and spirituality are beautiful

[ceescedasticity]

Ficlet: 5 Children of Jin Guangshan Who Never Came To Carp Tower (+1 Who Will Probably Be Talked Into It Eventually)

This is missing all its italics, thanks loads tumblr, and will go up on AO3 after I give it a while longer to decide if I hate it.

(1)

Her mother was a rogue cultivator who met the Jin heir at a crowd hunt and accepted an invitation to have a few drinks with his party. She hadn't intended to do any more than that, but, well, probably the wine, right? No point dwelling on it. She left town quickly and avoided Jin sect in the future.

She realized she was pregnant in plenty of time to do something about it, but thought it over and decided against it in the end. Instead she saved up her money carefully, and sought out a sworn sister she'd wanted to see again anyway. She didn't say who the baby's father was, only that he wasn't going to be a factor. When they settle down in a river town (one with a negligent local sect and enough water ghouls to be grateful for resident cultivators), they claim she was widowed. There's gossip, but no one ever presses the issue.

Her daughter grows up with two mothers who love her, learning cultivation from both of them, never quite accepted as one of their own by the neighbors but nevertheless treated with respect as one of the only people who can do anything about the damn water ghouls. She wants to leave town when she grows up anyway, tired of being strange. Her mothers convince her to wait a little longer — until they've gotten her a proper sword of her own — then until she's eighteen — then until there's not a war going on—

But finally they send her off with the best of wishes, and advice not to drink in public and if possible avoid Lanling.

She lives as a rogue cultivator for a few years, but eventually joins the (still-underpopulated) Jiang sect as an outer disciple, and does very well there. She visits her mothers once or twice a year, and hunts water ghouls for old time's sake. The town which considered her strange is now proud that she's a disciple of a Great Sect, which could be annoying but usually she manages to laugh about it.

She never finds out who her father was. Sometimes she wonders — but never for very long.

(2)

His mother was a landowner's second wife, beaten and cast out for faithlessness hours after the Jin party left. No one asked if it had been consensual; no one much cared.

Very often during the first year she thought she was going to die — sometimes she thought she would rather die than drop even lower to survive — but she never did. Every morning she wondered what would kill her today, every night she wondered if she would never wake up, but it just kept not happening. For some reason she wanted to live. She learned to beg, she found a city, she met prostitutes who took it for granted she was one of them and didn't correct them — she just kept living.

It wasn't for the sake of the child. The child hadn't ruined her life — its father had done that all on his own — but it wasn't something she wanted.

Labor was excruciating, and when it was over and the women the other prostitutes called Older Sister offered her the baby to hold, she threw her arms over her face and begged her to take it away.

Older Sister asked once more, to be sure, and then carried the baby to the temple outside of town, set it down outside the door, knocked, and ran. She had never personally verified that the monks took care of foundlings, but they were said to rear up their fosterlings kindly, and it was easier on the conscience than leaving unwanted infants in ditches.

The boy is raised firmly but kindly — and entirely secularly; some in the temple do practice cultivation, but no one expects random foundlings to be able to join them and rubbing the difference in their faces would be unacceptably rude. He's taught to read and write, and if sometimes he still wonders what it would be like to fly on a sword he doesn't wonder what it would be like to fight monsters — at least he doesn't wonder past the age of thirteen or so.

He doesn't have a vocation, but that's all right. The temple helps him find a job as a clerk. He makes generous offerings.

It's hard to exercise proper filial piety when you have no idea who either of your parents are, just that you were abandoned. All he could do on the relevant holidays was thank them for giving him life, and thank them for leaving him somewhere safe, and give the rest of his attention to his fosterers.

(His mother never regrets abandoning him — she couldn't have built up a functional career as a prostitute with an infant in tow, and she still doesn't want anything of that man's — but she is… glad, a few years later, to learn he was taken in at the temple. She doesn't wish him ill. Just — far away from her.)

(3)

Her mother was a mundane noblewoman who visited Carp Tower — beautiful, bitter, and bored. Her husband, twice her age, tried to keep pace with cultivators in drinking and passed out early. She thought a suave, handsome cultivator might be more entertaining than the usual. She was mostly disappointed in the results. Her husband never suspects any infidelity. He can't imagine anyone would be so brazen as to have relations with his wife when he's in the same building.

If the child had been a boy, she might have felt a little guilty about passing it off as her husband's, but a girl would just be married off anyway — it didn't really matter. So the nobleman has a daughter.

She grows up in a luxurious but narrow world, reading everything she can get her hands on for a glimpse outside. Her mother is seldom demonstratively affectionate, but is deeply invested in her welfare and indulges her desire for books. She's beloved in the household — enough so that when it occurs to the oldest children of her father's second wife that she really looks nothing like either of her parents, they refrain from making open accusations for her sake.

She marries a man she's never met before. But he's kind, and doesn't object to her ever-expanding library, and comes to rely on her for the bookkeeping.

By that time she has her own suspicions, about who her father is — who her father is not, more — but  that's hardly something she can bring up.

(4)

His mother was a maid at a rural inn. The innkeeper did attempt to explain to Jin-zongzhu that this was not that kind of establishment, but Jin-zongzhu ordered him to send up his prettiest maid regardless, and raised the price he was offering, and the man crumpled.

He did feel bad enough about it the next day to give her maybe a quarter of the money.

She took that money, and the wages she was due, and the "tip" Jin-zongzhu tossed at her, and went back to the farm she was born on. It had been a successful, if small, farm until one of the battles of the Sunshot Campaign happened basically on top of it. Her father had been killed along with most of their livestock. The whole point of her work at the inn had been to contribute money to rebuild, and, well. Money was money.

Her sister-in-law was a shrewd bargainer, and Jin-zongzhu's stupid trinkets got them two pigs. The guilt money from the innkeeper put them over the edge to afford an ox. By the time they realized she was pregnant, they were secure enough that it wasn't a catastrophe.

The farm was out of the way enough that they didn't have much trouble turning her son into her nephew, and that was that.

He grows up working hard but still notably prettier than either of his parents — maybe even prettier than his aunt, who he's heard what passed for a local beauty at his age and who certainly didn't have any trouble finding suitors when she finally decided to marry after his grandmother died — but it mostly just means he gets more attention when he goes to the local villages for festivals or markets. He's a good boy, credit to his family, responsible with his little sisters and his cousins. He's got a mundane future, but a bright one.

Of course he knows who his father is? He's lived with him all his life.

(5)

His mother was a disciple of a minor sect, who might have been flattered and awed when the Chief Cultivator pulled her into his guest room, and was definitely pressured not to say anything indicating otherwise. They don't need trouble with Jin Sect. They won't make trouble with Jin Sect. Will they.

She was terrified she'd be thrown out when she told a senior sister she was pregnant, but instead there was a quick, quiet marriage to another disciple. On their wedding night she admitted she was pregnant; he admitted he'd been caught with another boy. The marriage was always a bit of a sham but the cultivation partnership turned real quickly. They worked well together, and built up a good joint reputation together, and three years later left together. (They weren't entirely ungrateful — many people in similar situations had been treated far worse — but the hurt lingered.) Their destination was another minor sect, one closer to where his parents lived, so the move could be explained away as filial devotion, saving face all around.

There's talk, sometimes, because they don't try very hard to hide the fact they seldom share a bed. It's usually brushed aside as probably a cultivational thing.

Their son grows up a promising young disciple. He doesn't have many close friends, has trouble really opening up to people, but he's always polite and hard-working and keeps his temper, and he's not bad at calming other people down, too, so he's liked enough. His parents are a little strange but they love him and love each other.

When he's thirteen the Jin Guangyao scandal becomes the talk of the cultivation world. His parents take a break from fussing over his half-dozen senior martial siblings still recovering from their imprisonment in the Burial Mounds to have a private conference, and that evening they pull him aside.

She never wanted to tell him this, she says. And maybe she should wait, but she might lose her nerve, and contrary to what she thought it seems like this is something he needs to know—

She cries. He cries. His father (definitely his father) cries.

He understands why they told him finally — they don't want him to end up like poor Lady Qin Su — but he wishes it wasn't necessary. He was happier not knowing. But if his mother can be all right after what happened to her, he can be all right after finding out about it, so he puts the knowledge away in a box and gets on with his life.

(+1)

Her mother was a prostitute who tried to be careful, who always tried to be careful, but nothing works all the time, and she got unlucky.

It was several weeks before she realized she'd been unlucky. By that time, Lanling was in full mourning for the sect leader and chief cultivator.

This was probably, she realized, probably the last bastard Jin Guangshan ever sired. Even the brothel proprietor agreed that had enough novelty value to make a pregnancy worthwhile.

It was suggested that, perhaps, she could go to the new sect leader. Everyone knew Jin Guangyao's background. Surely he would be welcoming.

She thought about what she'd seen of him, of the look in his eyes when he looked at the prostitutes, and found she wasn't sure at all.

She did not go to Carp Tower.

It turned out some non-cultivators would in fact pay money to listen to a woman tell salacious supposedly true stories about life in Carp Tower. (This was legitimate! She was the mother of Jin Guangshan's last bastard!) In fact, some of them would pay pretty well. Some of them paid quite well. She finished her pregnancy with less debt than she started. She spent the next few years saving carefully, and finally packed herself and her daughter off to a city.

A big city; a mediocre city. A city without much cultivator traffic, though of course they knew about cultivators there.

She got a job in an only somewhat disreputable teahouse, telling stories — some but not all of them dirty, some but not all of them supposedly true (and fewer of them actually true), some but not all of them using the names of real people (who would hopefully not be visiting such a large and mediocre city where they had no authority). …The teahouse proprietor turns out to be deeply involved in at least one information network, but that's not really her problem.

Her daughter grows up surrounded by musicians, entertainers, more than a few spies, and the nobility all the rest are feeding on. She learns reading, writing, coding and decoding, how to use a scandal to your advantage, five different musical instruments (although pipa is the only one she can be said to be good at), and poetry. Some of her poems are considered praiseworthy, although she's never quite sure if that's because they're actually good or because the pavilion could benefit from having a young, precocious, pretty, inherently scandalous poetess around. Hopefully it's both.

They more or less retired the 'Jin Guangshan's Last Bastard' gimmick when she was six or so, but then news arrives that the Jin Sect has done something even more mortifying, so it's back. She feels a little bad about it honestly. It sounds like the new sect leader isn't much older than her, and she still feels like she's in over her head just understanding what's going on in the teahouse.

Her nephew, isn't that a funny thought.

Her mother never has anything good to say about the cultivational world and she can't blame her, but this world can get tiring, too.

It doesn't matter, though. That family rejects bastards who are much less scandalous than her. She's sort of interested in that world, but not enough to try to push in when she's not wanted. It's fine.

(And somewhere not too terribly far away and yet in a different world, Ouyang Zizhen picks up a poetry booklet featuring a writer with the strangest pen name…)

[bottlesofrogue]

Orella - Ikemen Vampire OC

Image credit goes to: https://picrew.me/image_maker/41329

Basic Information:

Name: Orella Gender: Female Birth: November 3rd, 1629, Milan, Italy Age: Effectively 25 Height: 5’4” Weight: 122 lbs Hair Color: Pale Blonde Eye Color: Emerald Green Personality Type: ENFP-A Diplomat - Campaigner Occupation: Lady Family: Le Comte de Saint-Germain - Honorary Uncle (actually a distant relative)

Personality:

On the surface, Orella is a demure, well bred young lady, raised to fit in with others of her age and gender.  In reality, she’s been educated to think for herself, but consider others in her decisions.  Her life is guided by a set of principles that combine secular morality with religious philosophy, gained by the example of her guardians and an education centered around humanities.  Her training in decorum means that the first impression she gives is that of someone who always plays by the rules, and holds back her emotions.  But, once she gets to know someone, a different side to her emerges.  She’s a sensitive soul and she prefers to show her feelings rather than hide them.  This makes her eager to get to know people she is going to spend a lot of time with so she can drop the polite cover and let her inner self shine through.

Orella has a certain child-like wonder for the world around her.  She was raised with mostly women, in a very sheltered environment.  Whenever she was with larger groups of people, her guardians were always with her, always watching her behavior so they could tell her how to improve.  So when she finally gets away from them, there’s a sense of newness to everything she does.    She had read many things in books, but her actual life experience has been fairly limited, something she would like to change about herself.  While she’s very conscious of her behavior and how to act, in some ways she’s very guarded.  Her facade of politeness is a matter of respect, in her point of view, not a deception.  Otherwise she is very much without guile, and is not naturally suspicious of the motivations of others.

Hobbies:

She loves singing and dancing; there’s a certain energy to it that makes her happy.  She is very good at playing the violin, but she doesn’t like it very much.  In contrast, she enjoys the act of painting, although she’s not very good at it.  Orella really enjoys gardening, and it’s one of the few things that makes her spend time outdoors.  Orella had been taught quite strictly, so she doesn’t like studying for more than a little while at a time, but if she’s curious about something specific, she can read for hours at a time.

History:

Orella’s history is complicated, and she doesn’t know the full extent of it.

As far as Orella knows, she’s just an orphan Pureblood vampire who was raised mostly by mortals to keep her under the radar, but with the occasional Pureblood looking in on her from time to time.  One of these Purebloods was Le Comte de Saint-Germain, the man she lovingly refers to as ‘Uncle’.  What she doesn’t know is that her original fate was death as an infant, a time of life where all Pureblood vampires are vulnerable before they achieve their adult immortality and blood drinking habits.  Le Comte knew her fate was to die of the Bubonic plague, and went back in time to rescue her, knowing that brining her forward in time would not affect the time line since she had no place in it.  So while she was technically born in the first half of the 1600’s, she believed she was born sometime in the mid-1800’s.

Orella was raised in a small, re-purposed abbey in France, close to the boarder of Italy.  A small group of ex-nuns raised her, giving her a rather expansive education in the arts, but with very little science or math.  Religion was taught secularly rather than spiritually, and she was encourage to think about things and ask questions.  But she was also taught fine etiquette that would be the expectation of any well bred young lady in the late 1800’s.  The people that Orella associated with were carefully monitored by her guardians and overseen by Le Comte de Saint Germain, who visited her every few months.  She never realized that the version of Le Comte that visited her was one from the future.  Orella had no idea she was being groomed for a specific purpose.

Le Comte had rescued her as a baby for one reason: to help Leonardo.  After Leonardo’s bad experience with the visitor from the future he was never the same again, and Le Comte wanted to do something to ease the pain of his long time friend.  But any other mortal woman would just cause him that same pain.  A lesser vampire would be closer to the mark, but it would mean turning a normal mortal into a vampire, and Leonardo would not thank him for that.  That left a Pureblood.  But Leonardo didn’t like most other Purebloods.  Their selfish ways, and negative attitudes towards mortals were anathema to the gentle-hearted Renaissance Man.  So Le Comte needed a Pureblood that was different.  He couldn’t find one though, so he decided to create one instead.  He had gotten the idea after giving Leonardo’s family a bit of a stern talking to, but they were immovable.  So he told them he had a plan in hopes that they would back off.

Le Comte had chosen with care what he wanted the girl to learn, or not learn, and left very strict instructions of care for her guardians.  In return, they were promised great sums of money, and the use of the land and building after Orella was grown up.  He also made sure that certain smells and sights were introduced to her in a positive way to create connections that would lead her towards Leonardo without him having to overtly guide her in that direction.  The whole thing was risky, and he sometimes wondered about the morality of his decision, but he couldn’t bear the deeper sorrow in his friend’s eyes.

Orella’s early childhood was happy.  Her guardians were told to be strict and firm with the child, but give her a lot of affection as well.  He wanted her to be well-behaved, but not emotionally stunted.  Above all, she must not become jaded and selfish.  Sometimes people were added, or removed, from positions as Orella’s caretakers, as it was discovered that a new type of guardian was needed, or that someone was no longer good for the budding Pureblood.  They were eased in and out carefully, so as not to distress Orella.  She learned a little bit about loss this way, and how to deal with negative emotions.  She was also given several pets to care for over time, to help teach her responsibility and the fragility of mortal beings.  

The nuns didn’t know anything about the vampire side of her life; as children, the Purebloods were almost identical to mortals.  They could die, just as mortal children did.  However, as Orella got older, she was introduced to a ‘Doctor’ that would take care of certain ‘medical’ issues that were sure to crop up when she became an adult.  This was a lesser vampire that Le Comte hired to take care of Orella’s blood requirements.  He did not want her feeding from humans as a regular thing for two reasons.  The effects of the bite would introduce a world to her that Le Comte didn’t want her exposed to.  But he also feared that by seeing humans as simply a meal, and harming them to feed herself, she would lose some of her shine.

The closer Orella got to his actual time, the less Le Comte could risk visiting her.  So her last few years of being raised she didn’t see him at all.  He could only hope that things turned out alright.  The deal had been that when she was twenty-five years old, she would come to live with him, in his mansion.  As the time drew near, Le Comte was full of nervous energy.  He knew this could backfire horribly, but it seemed like the best chance he had for helping Leonardo.  Would Orella be everything that he intended her to be?

Orella blossomed into a very pretty young woman, the kind that any high-society parent would be pleased to have.  But the society she was destined for was not the common nobility.  Her ‘Doctor’ had taught her the things she needed to know about being a vampire, most importantly the need for staying fed and in control of herself.  Second most important was the need to keep her identity a secret from mortals.  The last thing that he stressed was the difference between Purebloods and Lesser Vampires, though only from a clinical point of view; Le Comte didn’t want her to become snobbish.  

Finally, Orella’s twenty-fifth birthday came around.  There was a celebration for her at her childhood home, and she was given many gifts as parting.  She didn’t know if she’d ever see any of them again, and the parting was quite tearful on her behalf.  Some of her guardians also shed tears, as they would miss her, while others were relieved to no longer have the burden of raising her.  But, as Orella dried her eyes, she began to look forward, instead of backward.  Being sent to the mansion to live with a bunch of men was exciting, but not for the reasons of romance or sex.  It was the thrill of a new experience.