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charincharge · 5 years ago

Note

Person A and Person B are co-workers who hate each other. They’re always competing with each other at work and they’re always getting into arguments. Then one day Person A is leaving an appointment with their therapist when they happen to see Person B waiting to see the same therapist in the lobby. I think one is perfect for rowaelin.

This was silly but fun. Word Count: 1,757

Aelin pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration, a horrible mannerism she’d picked up from her least favorite person. She could see her boss bite back a smirk as he noticed Aelin’s mirrored position from across the table. Aelin leaned back, removing her hand from her nose, refusing to have anything in common with the man who made her life a living hell. Fucking Rowan Whitethorn.

When Aelin had first joined Rifthold Marketing, she’d been excited to meet her team. She’d been warned she would be the first female to be hired as a senior account manager, and that it was a bit of a boys’ club. But Aelin could handle herself. She was fierce and opinionated and refused to be bowled over by any sexist asshole. But it turned out she didn’t need to be worried, the team of managers, who referred to themselves as The Cadre, invited her to their weekly happy hour her first day on the job, welcoming her with open arms.

Well. All, except one.

Rowan Whitethorn was a prick extraordinaire. He scoffed as Aelin sipped her chardonnay at their happy hour, frowning into his beer unhappily at her presence, and he hadn’t warmed to her since. It’d been four months, and every day he’d made Aelin’s life a living hell. Which is why for the life of her, she could not understand why Dorian, the company VP had asked them to work together on a new account pitch.

“This is insane, Dorian,” Rowan grumbled from his side of the table, his fingers ever present on the bridge of his nose, between his furrowed brow.

“As much as I hate agreeing with him,” Aelin said, clearing her throat. “Rowan is right.”

“I am?” he asked, straightening up slightly.

“Of course,” Aelin scoffed. “Us working together is ridiculous. I have an existing relationship with the account. Orynth Hotel Group is only taking the meeting because of me. They want to rebrand with me. Rowan has no business pitching whatever nonsense ideas he has to them.”

“Except Rowan also has an existing relationship with the client,” Rowan said, speaking of himself in the third person. It was something he did all too frequently, and it made Aelin’s skin itch every time.

“The existing relationship should not count if it’s not professional,” Aelin jeered, and Rowan’s lips curled into a sneer as his fist pounded on the table. “Who is she? An ex? You screw your way into all your accounts?”

“Excuse me?” Rowan gaped. “Dor, come on, she can’t say that. Not only is it not true,” he ground out. “But it’s grounds for harassment. I’ve worked with Maeve on three campaigns, and she specifically reached out to tell me she’d just joined Orynth.”

Rowan glared at his boss, who looked far too amused at his discomfort. Dorian sighed loudly.

“Which is why I need you to work together,” he said, giving the pair a small smile. “Orynth is a huge account, and we would be idiots to lose out because you two couldn’t come up with a cohesive pitch. I know I can count on my two best account managers to come up with something spectacular, yes?” He paused and looked at them. “By Friday, please.”

Aelin groaned and slumped back into her chair, nodding feebly at Dorian as he left the two in the conference room.

“Coffee?” Aelin offered, hoping to thaw the icy glare from Rowan’s eyes, but it hardened even more as he shook his head.

“While you waste time on that, I’ll gather my notes for you.”

Aelin tried her very hardest not to roll her eyes as she made her way across the hall to pour herself a cup of coffee. She could get through this. It was one week of her life. Just one fucking week where she’d have to spend every minute of her day with Rowan. She paused. Thank gods she had therapy tonight. Her therapist had heard far toto much about the infamous Rowan Whitethorn, and she had a feeling she’d be hearing another earful tonight.

When she made her way back into the conference room, Rowan had spread out a series of boards he’d drawn up across the table. The intricate pitch proved he’d already put a lot of work into it, but Aelin had done the same prepping for this meeting. She knew it was going to be a long battle between them. As she glanced at the boards, she couldn’t help but admire some of them. She hated that he was actually pretty talented. If only his attitude didn’t suck so badly, they might actually be a pretty great team.

“So?” Rowan asked expectantly as Aelin took a sip of her steaming mug.

“Your illustrations are beautiful…”

“But,” he ground out between his clenched teeth.

“But,” Aelin continued. “Orynth has worked incredibly hard to launch themselves as a luxury hotel brand. Cozy, family stay doesn’t exactly say – luxury to me.”

“I don’t know,” Rowan countered. “Taking time off work. Having a family. Sharing a meal. Feels like a luxury to me.” His eyes were suddenly sad, and Aelin felt slightly uncomfortable seeing it. She looked down at her coffee and when she looked back up, his eyes were back to their usual cold glare. “I suppose you have something much better?” he asked, his voice defensive with sarcasm.

“In fact…” Aelin laid out her own papers. Her boards weren’t anything close to Rowan’s meticulously drawn illustrations, but they got the point across. Rowan’s eyes flicked across them quickly, and she could see the eye roll he barely restrained.

“What?” she snapped.

“It’s just… sex?” he scoffed. “It’s so overdone. This isn’t a seedy Vegas hotel for a forbidden affair.”

“No, it’s… a staycation for an overworked couple who deserve time to relax. Away from their family. Time for themselves. Between sheets or otherwise. The luxury of being yourself.” Aelin used her best pitch voice and watched as Rowan barked out a loud laugh.

“You think that’s going to sell?”

“You’re infuriating!” Aelin said.

“You’re not much better yourself, Ace,” he spat, using Dorian’s nickname for her.

“Fine,” Aelin sighed. “Let’s scrap them both.”

“Fine,” Rowan agreed, pushing all the papers off the table and making room for new scratch. She was in for a long night.

Luckily, at seven on the dot, Aelin called it for both of them. They’d made a list of general areas to explore and a few sub headers without murdering each other. She deemed that extreme progress.

“Where you going?” Rowan asked as she gathered her things. “Hot date?” he asked, glancing at the clock.

Aelin snorted, thinking of her weekly date with her therapist. “Something like that,” she answered.

Rowan stretched, clearly annoyed. “I would have put in another hour, but who am I to judge? It’s not like we have to pitch something to Dorian in four days.”

Aelin didn’t dignify his taunt with a response, her fury rising up in her as she sped off to therapy.

“I wish I didn’t have to work with him. He’s just… rude,” Aelin concluded for her doctor, who sat listening to her intently. “All the time.”

“And you’re not?” Yrene probed. Aelin rolled her eyes.

“He started it!”

“Aelin,” Yrene sighed. “We’ve talked about this every week for months. Someone needs to be the first to extend an olive branch, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be him.”

“Well, it’s not going to be me, either.”

Yrene gave her a warm smile. “Did you think maybe that you two spar because you’re so similar? Obviously, I only know what you’ve told me, but maybe Rowan needs you to be the first to reach out.”

“Unhelpful session, doc,” Aelin laughed as she stood, the timer beside Yrene beeping softly.

“It’s going to be a stressful week for you, I understand,” Yrene said. “But, you can do it.”

Aelin walked all the way down to her car with Yrene’s affirmations ringing in her head. Should she reach out? Say something kind? It would maybe make this week better. Or maybe not, she sighed.

As Aelin reached for the car door handle, it didn’t open. She dug through her purse only to quickly see her key wasn’t there. She realized she’d left her car key on the arm of Yrene’s couch. She’d been in such an infuriated rush when she got there she must have forgotten to put it back into her purse. Yet another thing Rowan Whitethorn was to blame for.

She stalked back upstairs to the second floor, and saw that the light on Yrene’s door was on, meaning she was already in another session. Damnit. Aelin couldn’t wait around for another forty five minutes while Yrene’s eight o’clock appointment received their therapy.

Tentatively, Aelin knocked on the door. The chatter stopped from inside the office as Yrene opened the door a crack.

“Hi!” Yrene said, her voice high with surprise.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Aelin began, “But I left my car key on your couch.”

“Am I hallucinating?” a voice called from within the office. Aelin would recognize tthat voice anywhere.

“No fucking way…” she mumbled as she pushed the door open wider.

There, on her spot on her favorite couch in the room, sat Rowan.

“Did I conjure you? Said your name three times, and you appear like Bloody Fucking Mary,” he scoffed. “Date went badly?”

“I forgot my key,” Aelin said, crossing her arms defensively over her chest. All those times Aelin had complained about Rowan, and here Rowan was probably doing the exact same thing. Aelin couldn’t bear it.

Rowan’s eyes widened as he realized where Aelin had been. He reached over and grabbed her car key and walked it to her, handing it over.

“You know,” Yrene said softly. “You two are the only clients who sit in that spot.”

“Great,” Rowan sighed. “I’m going to need a new therapist,” verbalizing the thoughts that Aelin had just had.

“No!” Yrene called out as Rowan grabbed his jacket off the couch. “Rowan, don’t…”

“At least I get to keep something this week,” Aelin smirked, putting her key back into her purse. At her smug smile, Rowan growled and stalked back to the couch, plopping down on the opposite side. He flicked Aelin off, and Yrene gave her a soft smile.

“See you next week, Aelin,” she said, closing the door in her face.

No fucking way, thought Aelin. Never again would she be seeing the same therapist as Rowan fucking Whitethorn.

~*~

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#rowaelin #prompt #charincharge writes

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cursewoodrecap · 4 years ago

Text

Session 23: Medical Ethics

Y’all ever been to college?

Our new friend Vigdor has just pulled a pale, twitching human leg out of a poster tube, sheepishly admitting to Valeria that it’s his own.

Valeria blinks at it. “Well, it doesn’t appear to be bleeding demons, so that’s good?”

Shoshana sticks her head in the door, and has to pause to take in the sight. “Uh, bruh? Bruh? I have questions. Is that yours? I mean, like, yes, you HAVE it, but was it attached to-“

“That’s a bit tricky? It was amputated twice.”

“Twice?!”

“Once from me, and then, well, um. Once from an amalgam of sewn together body parts?”

(Gral and Shoshana pile into the room, because Oh, Lore?)

“When I was in the swamp, we were fighting a bunch of zombies led by this particularly nasty undead guy. We called it the Wailing Wight. At first it was just the usual undead hordes, but then a local leatherworker was found, torn apart and harpooned every which way, half his limbs torn off and stolen. After that, we started getting attacked by stitched together abominations cobbled together from human and animal pieces. I was there just trying to help the villagers, being a doctor and all. But that’s when I lost my actual limbs.”

“They got stolen, like the leatherworker’s?”

“I had to chop them off. Which, for the record, is not a fun time? The Wight’s harpoon has a kind of poison that rots everything it touches. So I had to amputate or, like, die. So I cut them off and his zombies, uh, stole them. And I managed to get one back? Kind of a long story. I don’t know how I recognized it, but – I guess I know my own leg like the back of my hand? Now I’m taking it back to Sturmhearst. There’s a weird fluid inside it; I want to study what’s going on with that so we can take care of the nastyboy in the swamp.”

“Well, I am generally against nastyboys,” says Shoshana, poking his foot in the ticklish bit. It squirms at her.

We’re headed to Sturmhearst anyway, so traveling together seems reasonable. We think about taking Fun Key Shortcuts, but that could backfire spectacularly, so we’ll play it safe and go the normal, boring way.

In the morning, we head downstairs. The inn is trashed. The stalwart barkeep Rene is not there; instead there’s a young elf sweeping out what debris he can. As we grab breakfast and the young fellow thanks us over and over for saving his friend’s life, Vigdor awkwardly wanders around casting Mending on chairs and tables that got a little too close to the tentacles and chainsaws. Shoshana doesn’t really do non-destructive magic, but she slips the barkeep some gold for repairs.

Vigdor’s too lopsided for a horse, so he’s gonna hop on in our cart. He’s very taken with the Eyegis, poking at it with fascination. “You can see the blood vessels in the eyes, despite no source for a blood supply! Do they have tear ducts? Have you ever seen the shield produce tears? Can you make it cry?”

Valeria gets very uncomfortable with this line of questioning and turns the eyes back into painted ones, put off by a Weird Stranger gettin’ all up in her business. Gral distracts him by asking about his fancy metal limbs.

Vigdor goes full technobabble on how the runes and machinery work. “Well, there’s three different kind of magical actuators on each joint, and they act as conduits for the dilithium crystals-” He knows the details secondhand from Bjork and none of us speak robotics, so if he ever needs serious repairs he’ll have to bring them back to Sturmhearst for the engineers to take a look at.

Valeria knows a bit about Jotunn runesmithing, but she’s never heard of it working to this degree of precision; before, she’d only heard of stuff like boats that row themselves, or a peg leg that has a little extra articulation. These are fully actuated limbs!

Val checks if the limbs are the same metal as our space wrench, but nope, they look like completely normal everyday metals. She’s not gonna inspect further, because she has RESPECT, unlike SOME people.

(“Hey, I didn’t try to pry the eyes open or anything!” Vigdor protests.)

She does notice one thing, though: Valeria recognizes runes from most magic systems even though she doesn’t know them well enough to use; her sister studied magic for a long time, so she knows what they look like. There’s one elaborate rune that appears on both Vigdor’s forearm and leg that is of no origin she’s ever seen.

“How long’d it take Bjork to build this thing?” Shoshana asks, squinting at Vigdor’s kneecap.

“Well, I was unconscious for a good bit of it so…between a week and 2 months? He was already working on it when I, uh, had to amputate.”

“…did you KNOW you were gonna wake up with those things on?”

“Oh! Yeah, yeah. It took a while ‘cause the original blueprints they found were for somebody, like…really short for a human or really tall for a halfling? Something in between. Bjork had to resize the whole model to fit a human.”

“He, uh, FOUND blueprints?

“I can’t imagine he’d have made blueprints for a person who didn’t exist? It was all proportioned very strangely. I don’t know too much about it, you’d have to ask Professor Bjork.”

(One of the players asks if the strange rune, perhaps, says ISTC in a language the characters don’t know. It DOES, and we’re all very pleased with ourselves for previous-campaign references.)

The long road stretches on before us, and we have plenty of time to talk as we spend a week or two heading north toward the coast. We fill Vigdor in on the four flavors of Curse and the concept of the Prisoners, and that we suspect there’s major Key nonsense going on up at the university. (Heh heh, “major key.”)

Vigdor and Shoshana bond over being locals. Why are foreigners so weird about trolls?

Vigdor really, really wants to look at Twombly’s glasses. We explain to him that the Key could take his desire for knowledge and turn him into a cackling, dimension-hopping madman with a few extra eyeballs. He still wants to play with the glasses. Valeria protectively hides the Key map, just in case, flashing her Hunt fangs at anyone who asks about it.

After like a week of pestering everybody, Vigdor gets to look at the glasses. Disappointingly, when not looking at the Key map, the colorful lenses just make everything look slightly more those colors. Maybe Gral’s lutestrings look weird, but that could be the placebo effect. He tries flipping around the many lenses in different combinations, and finds that all of them make him look absolutely ridiculous.

Eventually after many days of travel, we can smell the ocean and the distinctive stench of a large number of humans living in one place. Vigdor takes in the familiar sight of his college hometown. Shoshana is dumbfounded that this many people can live on top of each other, while Valeria thinks it’s a quaint little town.

Up to the west, Sturm Castle squats on a cliff above the city, like a big hippo of knowledge. It looks like it was once a reasonable castle shape, but it’s had new wings and towers built onto it haphazardly until it’s a weird sprawling network of jammed-together architecture. By the edge of the cliff, in one of the more sensibly-built sections, a majestic lighthouse beams out over the bay. In the city below, the largest building appears to be a grand temple, with its roof carved in the shape of an open book. The perimeter of the city is outlined by strange wooden and metal towers, two or three stories tall with conical brass roofs.

Eh. It’s only got one castle, so it can’t be that good of a city compared to Aurentium.

Our cart is briefly stopped for a quick examination at the gate by a friendly city guardsman. He’s flanked by two of the same enormous owl-masked guards we saw accompanying Quercus and Ulmus. “Hi, welcome to Sturmhearst, folks! What brings you here?”

We all awkwardly try not to look at Vigdor’s leg bag.

“I’m, uh, here to visit Dr. Emily Thorpe?” he tries.

“Oh, visiting the university. Don’t need yer life story. Where you stayin’? I can recommend some inns. Oh, and check out the Scholar’s Temple while yer here!” He hands us a brochure from the Sturmhearst Tourism Board and steps back. “ALL RIGHT BIG GUYS, LET EM THROUGH!”

The owl guards don’t move.

“Oh, uh, I mean –“ He fishes in his pocket and pulls out a whistle. “Lemme see if I can remember how the doc told me to do this.” He blows a few sharp notes on the whistle, and the owl guards promptly step off the road to let us through.

Huh.

Vigdor makes an investigation check on those guards, who definitely weren’t around back when he was in school. They’re pretty bulky for humans – no, honestly, they’d be bulky even for goliaths. He’d heard a story from Professor Bjork that the school was hiring goliath mercs and dressing them in owl masks, but the professor had sounded like he hadn’t believed it much. Supposedly they’re silent because they don’t speak the language, but Vigdor’s pretty sure Bjork speaks Jotunn, so that excuse doesn’t quite hold up.

Once we’re out of the guards’ earshot, Gral pulls a huddle. “Vigdor, the Key’s a more recent influence, so let us know about anything new or significantly more abundant – that’s where we’ll need to search.”

Vigdor hmms. “The big brass towers weren’t here before. And the owl guys didn’t used to be a thing.”

Gral cuts another glance back to the owl guards, considering. “…How much of a faux pas is it to remove a Sturmhearst person’s mask?”

“I mean, if you’re dealing with the plague, it’s kind of a dick move? And dangerous? But most people – it’s like, the same rudeness of grabbing someone’s hat or jacket. For some people it’s badge of honor or superiority, y’know, how amazing they were to get through the gauntlet of Sturmhearst. But mostly it’s a practical tool of the job. We’re not, like, afraid to show our faces.”

Gral nods. “So you wouldn’t have to duel them, then.”

“W-what?”

“Oh, with bards it’s like ‘you are not deserving of your title’ and you have to duel about it. You know, like, how dare you slander my name, I’ll have to fight you for my honor?”

“Oh, uh, no, nothing like that. The mask is proof of office, that’s all.”

Before we get investigating, though, it’s late and we should rest. Vigdor wasn’t a palling-around-town type, but he rolls a nat 20 and knows the best inn in the city – not one of those touristy places on the square; the best-kept-secret on a side street that only the locals and regulars know about.

We have a lovely night around the docks of Sturmhearst. Shoshana spends like fifteen minutes just staring out to sea, because they MAKE boats that big???? This much water even EXISTS????? There’s a dragonborn ship from Aurentium, a goliath ship from Jotunhein, a couple of Galwan freighters, and even a ship crewed by colorful macaw aarakocra. (History check: while the Aquilians mostly died out, some of the ground-based aarakocra cultures survived. Valeria’s met macaw traders before in Aurentium; they tell lots of stories and do GREAT impressions.)

Valeria, meanwhile, holies some ocean water. They say Galwan clerics swear by holy seawater; salt repels demons, right? It’s gross harbor water but, whatever, it’s holy now. She also beats a sea captain at Man-go, presumably dock style. The inn’s equipped for foreign travelers, so it’s got a whole bar of draconic and goblin spices!

Gral, meanwhile, discovers the inn is near a bath house and enjoys finding out what a sauna is.

Morning comes, and Sturmhearst U awaits. Vigdor knows the main campus has the colleges of Engineering, Science, and Medicine, while the satellite campus across the bay houses the college of Ethics, which includes humanities like economics and history.

Valeria rolls for Order of the Rose knowledge. The Order actually has an arrangement with Sturmhearst when they’re working in Valdia – whenever the Order is sent on disaster relief, some Sturmhearst ethicists are sent to help coordinate. Valeria’s never worked with them personally, but the impression she’s gotten from her fellow knights is Not Great. From what she’s heard, they’re supposed to do triage and help direct the knights, but it seems like they spend the whole time sitting around debating absolutely horrible things. “Hey, if we brewed up some necromancy, could we use the skeletons of plague victims to transport supplies without spreading the infection?” Apparently they just sit around in corners debating whether that kind of shit is kosher or not, without ever actually DOING anything.

Also ethicists wear white instead of black like most Sturmhearst scholars, which is just pretentious. We then poke fun at an Order of the Rose knight calling anyone else pretentious.

Vigdor studied at the College of Medicine; he’s a doctor. But that’s not where he’s taking the leg.

“Why not Medicine? I mean, it’s a human body part, innit?” Shoshana asks.

“It’s…I have some concerns…regarding the, um. So, along with this leg, my arm was stolen, right? Not long after the arm was stolen, the sewn-together amalgams got a lot, uh, cleaner.”

We stare at him.

“…as if whatever stitched them together had my medical training.”

…oh.

“I’m a little hesitant taking that info to the College of Medicine,” he admits.

“Why?”

“There’s a lot of ‘for the greater good’ stuff with the College of Medicine sometimes. The College of Ethics keeps them in check. Anyway, there’s actually this thaumochemist I want to take a look at it.”

(We’d know the discipline as alchemy, but she hates that. She’ll go on a whole tirade about it. Somebody yells “Full Metal Thaumochemist” and we accidentally take a commercial break. We’ll never get tired of that joke.)

More of those owl guards are at the door, supervised by a businesslike white-coated member of the College of Ethics. His mask is a bit more abstract than the ones we’re used to; not modeled after a bird face like the regular scholars’. He lets Vigdor in with no problem, though he’s a bit suspicious of the rest of us. We’re with a doctor, though, so he’ll let it slide. “Welcome to Sturmhearst, may your visit be enlightening.” He does the same whistle we heard before and the guards step aside. Gral’s a string guy, he can figure out the notes easily enough but he doesn’t whistle.

“Nothing goes on here without Ethics knowing about it, huh,” Gral observes.

More owl guards are stomping around, some carrying heavy objects. Vigdor knows where he’s going, but asks an owl guard for directions, as an experiment. The owl guard doesn’t even notice him. He steps in front of the guard, who just steps around him very politely.

The castle is a nightmare to navigate, like Hoeska, but we have an expert tour guide. “The old keep, the part that used to be a castle – that’s where all the 101 classes are and the whole working hospital. All the additions are laid out super weird, and then there’s the tunnels underneath. The Chem students had WILD parties down there, they brewed up all SORTS of stuff. The lighthouse is a real lighthouse, but it’s also where admin is, and the dean’s and headmaster’s offices. Oh! DO NOT cross the librarians. Each college has its own library? Like, theoretically they share the whole collection, but which college keeps which books is kind of a blood sport…”

Shoshana and Gral hang back, feeling out of place. “Bards don’t really have a college, exactly?” Gral explains. “It’s more of a pilgrimage. I met the elders of each village and they imparted wisdom upon me?”

Shosh feels like an uneducated hick even by that standard.

We take a hairpin turn in one of the Science buildings and run into Professor Quercus! Or at least someone with a bird mask and a similar voice, chatting with some other masked scholar. “Ah! Yes! We made a lot of excellent discoveries before we started to run into problems – you see, there hadn’t been an event in some time, but if we could get in there to the source, we could really – well, my goodness! These are the people I was telling you about, who gave me such wonderful notes!” Quercus turns to us, sounding rather delighted. “I certainly didn’t expect to see you here. Welcome to the world of knowledge! What brings you here? I thought you were having adventures and derring-do!”

“Well, it turns out our adventures led here!” Gral tells him.

Quercus nods enthusiastically. “I’d show you around, but I rather need to speak to the bursar! If you need anything, I’m sure you can find my offices without too much problem. And please, if you’ve encountered any interesting monsters, I’d love to hear details! Especially if you have samples!” Despite his keen excitement, Professor Quercus rolls a four and fails to notice our Shusva accessories.

“If you ever need a cup of tea and a biscuit, you’re welcome to stop by my office! I’d be more than happy to speak with you! And if you could do me a favor – well, I wouldn’t mind having you with me when I speak to the bursar! See, our expedition to Holzog has hit a bit of a snag. The events with that mist stopped happening, you see. Luckily, we managed to identify which house you were going to, and we were all set to investigate, but then the Baroness put a squadron of those damnable Condotierri to prevent us getting in – “

Gral shrugs, deliberately casual. “I don’t know why you’d go back; there’s not much to see besides what’s already in the notes.”

(Vigdor immediately rolls insight to see if Gral is lying. Unfortunately for him, bards are excellent liars.)

“Anyway. The bursar’s giving me an earful about continuing to fund the expedition. I’m considering withdrawing from Holzog and asking him to redirect the funds into a different project! For example, lots of interesting monsters have been seen around Barroch lately!”

Yes, definitely, we want him to go somewhere that’s not a Tempting Key Portal. Valeria and Gral tag-team Persuasion checks to sell him on interesting cases of monsters we’ve heard of around Barroch. If we’re fuzzy on the details – well, all the more reason to have someone get out there and take a closer look!

Quercus is rather taken by the idea. “If you would, Mr. Duu –“

“Um, actually, Duu is the tribe, my family’s name is-“

“-yes, if you could write me some letters, I might find it useful making the acquaintance of the locals while setting up camp. Sturmhearst hasn’t established an official relationship to your people yet’”

Gral agrees to write up a formal letter explaining the mission of Sturmhearst and the expedition to make introductions a bit smoother; the word of a bard will go a long way in gaining the cooperation of the orcs of Barroch. He’ll do a personal letter of introduction for Quercus, and a general letter to Shieldeater’s administration to explain who the heck these weird bird people are.

“Wonderful! Bring it by my office!” He gives us directions that make NO sense to anyone but Vigdor. We’re pretty sure several of those compass directions aren’t real words?

“Oh, and if you see an angry tall woman stomping around, tell her I’m not here! She’s mad at me for some reason I can’t discern. Good day!”

He scuttles off, presumably to hide.

We definitely want the gossip on that – Ulmus was mad at him about funding, and she definitely dissed his field of study. Is this what academia is like?

Vigdor confirms that the professors have all kind of weird beefs, interdepartmental politics, and personal feuds. “One of my professors gave me a B- in amputation – shows what he knows – purely because I was taking some classes outside the College of Medicine and he got all offended. It’s a lot of politics and bullshit, they’re all more concerned about their careers and publishing than actually important stuff.”

We find a door with a brass plaque: Dr Emily Thorpe, Thaumochemist. There’s a paper list tacked to her door with a list of courses: “Intro to Potion Brewing,” “Principles of Alchemy Thaumochemistry”

Vigdor knocks. “Yes, who’s there? Come in!” a voice calls.

“It’s Vigdor! Vigdor Gavril!”

“Ah, Vigdor!” A halfling woman in the requisite bird mask waves from behind a counter where she’s handling a set of proper Movie Science bubbling beakers and flasks. “Yes, you sent me that letter! You had something ‘interesting’ for me!”

“Yes, and you will see why I couldn’t be more detailed!”

She notices his metal arm as he starts pulling open his heavy waterproofed case. “Oh! I heard that Professor Bjork was giving you his prototype! How’s it working?”

“They’re loud and heavy and uncomfortable sometimes, but I have limbs! Can’t complain! But then I, uh, found one of my limbs again.”

He goes over to an open table and pulls out his entire-ass leg with a flourish, plus vials of hair and blood and strange unidentified liquids. Her eyes widen.

“Ah, this is yours!” She watches his toes wiggle. “Well, you don’t see that every day.”

“Yeah, I found it stitched to some kind of unholy undead abomination.”

“And that explains the Knight of the Rose. Hello, Kyr.”

“Kyr Valeria Argent, at your service!”

“Dr. Emily Thorpe, at your service as well, I guess? Pardon the mess in my lab, it’s not much but it’s home. Hand me that vial?” She pulls out a syringe and takes a sample of not blood, but oily black liquid, from the leg. “It will take some time, but I can write up a thaumaturgical profile without much difficulty. Do you mind if I keep it?”

“You can hang on to it. But I would appreciate discretion.”

“Yes, this will stay between me, your friends, and – oh, this is Hugo, he’s my teaching assistant. He’s been helping since the school was mobilized.” She turns to Vigdor’s clearly uneducated hick friends (not you, Valeria, you’re very fancy) and explains:

“In times of crisis, the University turns from education to innovation. Were this a disease, we’d be researching cures! If demonic, we’d be researching weapons or dimensional banishment. We haven’t really received direct orders this time, so everybody is doing their own thing, which I can’t say I mind. Mostly I’ve been helping other researchers with the practical application of their theorems.”

She scribbles out a hasty list. “Hugo, if you can go to the library and put these books on order? The Vigmar and the Auspelius especially would be useful, but don’t let the librarians kill anyone over them. And the Principles of Advanced Anatomy – tell them I won’t ask. But I do need it.” The grad student nods and hustles out of the room.

(Shoshana insights, out of paranoia. Hugo’s a good egg, though he might refer to thaumochemistry as alchemy.)

“Now, Dr. Gavril, do you want this leg back? How intact-“

“Want it back? Like, in the abstract, or on my body?”

She pulls out a vial of bubbling acid. “I’d like to put some of this on it and I’d like to see what happens.”

He blanches slightly. “Uh. Um. I have some proprietary-“

“Aw, no acid then,” she grumbles, stowing the acid with an audible sigh.

“Only do something you would do to living person’s leg. That they would survive!”

“How would I know? I’m a chemist, this is only, like, my second dead person!” She pauses. “…well, fifth.”

Shoshana starts looking around at all the alchemy equipment curiously. Everything here is clearly labeled with numbers, and letters that feel like numbers, and complex formulae, which hedgewitch potionery doesn’t really account for.

There’s a knock at the door. “Ah, that must be Hugo. Come in!”

Valeria instinctively body-blocks the leg from view.

It is not Hugo. In walk 3 white-clad ethicists. The gentleman at the front is in fancier robes – we suspect he’s the kind of fellow who has tenure – and he wears a powdered judge’s wig atop his mask. We immediately don’t like it. His two companions peer around the lab – one has a jeweler’s loupe built into the lens of his mask, and the other is carrying a big chime with runes carved into it, clearly a magic item of some sort.

“Dr Thorpe,” the leader intones.

“Sorbus,” she replies disdainfully.

“I see you have guests, is now a bad time?”

“Is it ever a good time?” Emily makes a point of tending to her samples and beakers busily.

“I suppose not. We have come to ask a few follow-up questions. Have you been visited at all by Professor Matthias Macker? Has he followed up on the project you were working on together?”

“I told you, no! I had no potions strong or precise enough for what he needed, and he’s never spoken to me since. That was months ago!”

“And no one has seen him since then. You understand why we need to know what you discussed.”

“Yeah, not since you quarantined the whole surgical wing!”

“That is not what I’m asking about. Has Macker’s assistant Greta Ruble visited you?”

“No. She’s a good kid, though, don’t hassle her.”

“We are simply making sure she is not a danger.”

Emily sputters angrily. “A danger to who?!”

“I cannot tell you that.” He turns to Valeria. “Kyr, it is always a pleasure to see a member of the Order here. I suppose if you’re here we can be assured nothing… unethical is happening,” he says, unpleasantly oily. “I am Professor Rigmor Sorbus of the College of Ethics; I lecture on legal and judicial ethics. These are my assistants, Charles and Pippin.”

Valeria bows with the precise degree of politeness required. “Kyr Valeria Argent, at your service.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance. In these times of mobilization, it falls to us as ethicists to supervise our colleagues’ noble efforts. Please, I implore you: if you see anything untoward or suspiciously unusual, I request you report it to the nearest representative of the College of Ethics.”

Emily butts in. “What happened to Eric Pelbort, his other assistant?”

“Mr. Pelbort has transferred to the College of Ethics and is assisting us with some research. We will let you know if that changes.” He tells her dismissively. “Kyr Argent, the College of Ethics has always been proud of our long association with the Order, and I would like to extend our deepest condolences for the tragedy of the Crusade. Should you have need of any assistance whatsoever, do not hesitate to ask. Our offices are on the satellite campus across the bay. If you were to visit, I’m sure many would love to speak to a paladin of the Order of the Rose.”

“We have business here, but I might be able to make time to stop by,” she equivocates.

“Very well. I will let you all get back to whatever it is you’re doing with that leg,” Sorbus says, turning neatly on his heel and taking his leave, his toadies hurrying in his wake.

(Yes, you guessed it: That was Professor Rowan, with his Tort Wig and his assistants Pip Loupe and Chime Charles.)

“Those guys give me the creeps,” Emily grumbles. “They used to be fine, but lately they’ve been doing this whole inquisitor act.”

Vigdor’s always known these guys as douchey blowhards. But now they’re douchey blowhards with AUTHORITY.

There’s always been a divide between Ethics and the other three colleges roughly the size of the harbor! The sciences don’t believe in debate, they believe in experimentation! Anyone who can spend an entire week talking without action is wasting time and breath. The College of Medicine thinks even less of them – they just get in the way of progress!

(IRL we all respect medical ethics, but Sturmhearst WAS founded on a fine tradition of graverobbing and leeches.)

Vigdor is primarily a surgeon, or he was, when he had two fully functional hands. (Two players at once: “HE GOT DR STRANGED!”) He had quite a few classes with Macker, the chair of the surgery department. Most people didn’t like the guy, except his surgical grad students who would defend him to the death. A bit of a hardass about proper procedure, but that’s probably not a bad quality for a surgeon. He was a local institution, so it’s pretty alarming he’s somehow gone rogue.

“His whole lab was quarantined?”

“The whole teaching wing, actually,” Emily tells us.

“Are there people in there? Some kind of sickness?”

“Not that I’ve heard. Ethics just put guards outside the labs and blocked everyone from going in. They’ve done it to a couple places around the school recently. The excuse is that someone was doing ‘unsafe experimentation’ that’s ‘poisoned the area’ or something?”

Wack. “How long have these quarantines lasted?”

“They don’t really end? A couple stopped after a few months, but some have been there for a year! Nobody goes in or out. Sometimes the white coats go in, but it’s pretty rare and they don’t stay long.”

“Is that what all the guards are for? Where’d they all come from?” Vigdor asks.

“Medicine used to be the ones, uh, hiring them.” (A quick insight roll notes that she hesitates on the phrase “hiring.”) “Lots of them still answer to whoever they were originally assigned to. But recently Dean Chidor from the College of Ethics took over that whole program, so a lot of the newer ones answer primarily to the ethicists. I mean, they all dress the same, so it’s kinda hard to tell? I haven’t asked a lot of questions, I’ve been trying to keep my head down since the whole thing with Macker.”

“What actually happened with him?”

“He’d been acting weird for a while,” she confides as she starts sticking pins in the leg and wiring them to a voltage generator. “He’d been working on something, some kind of extreme surgery – I think he was looking into a method of surgically removing Curse corruption. He was hitting roadblocks, though; he called in me and Alma Ulmus, who’s a College of Medicine bigwig.”

“Yeah, we met her in Bad Herzfeld!”

“I heard she’s here again, stalking around the halls complaining about funding. She knows more about his project than I do. Anyway, Macker sent me requirements for a healing potion he was gonna administer as part of some surgical procedure. I couldn’t get anything as powerful or precise as he needed. I’m a thaumochemist; I don’t know medicine that well. So it was beyond me to do that amount of gross tissue damage repair as controllably as they wanted it. I mean, I made some pretty nice innovations as far as the theory of potioncrafting, I’m hoping to get published as soon as it goes to peer review.

“But I couldn’t do what he needed, and eventually I got shut out of the project. Then one day he vanished. Alma set off for Bad Herzfeld and Macker stopped coming out of his lab. His assistants were still going in and out, but not long after that, the ethicists quarantined the place.”

“Has anyone else been quarantined?” Valeria asks.

“People from all three colleges got hit. I dunno about other ethicists, I haven’t heard about them quarantining anything of their own. But everyone else has. A group of engineering students were building a defense system to be deployed out to the Scar, and all of them got quarantined. Here in my department, Dr. Vilman – remember him? Stupid goatee, did a lot of stuff with crystals? – got shut down. Sometimes they quarantine the whole lab; sometimes they just shut down a project and everyone working on it gets a ‘guest lecture position’ over in Ethics. Sorbus said they got one of Macker’s assistants, Eric Pelbort. He had another one, Greta Ruble, but I guess she’s given them the slip.”

Emily’s got experiments to do on that leg, so we’ll let her get to it. As we head out, Gral asks one last question. “What’s up with those guards, by the way? Why do they only respond to those whistles?

“Uhhhh,” she says, as we fail our persuasion check. “They, er, don’t speak very good Valdian. Mostly foreigners, goliaths, the like. The whistles get their attention.”

Gral sighs and doesn’t push it. Vigdor’s already making plans to pickpocket a whistle. Valeria, since she has a direct invite to talk to the ethicists, considers the unheard-of paladin approach of Just Asking Them Directly.

First, though, Vigdor wants to check out the quarantine of Macker’s lab; he knew that professor well, and we’re all curious what’s been going down.

We walk on over to the surgical wing to case the joint. There’s a single owl guard blocking the hallway, presiding over a small barricade. A pleasant sandwich board sign states “Area quarantined by College of Ethics, apologies for the inconvenience.”

We try to walk in and the enormous guard holds out a hand to stop us. Shoshana tries to wiggle around him, like a cat trying to get at your dinner, but he impassively blocks her every move.

Gral tries a smoother approach. He begins with small talk; the guard doesn’t even twitch. He starts asking prying questions about the surgical ward. No response. Fine, then: he switches to Orcish, a sinister undertone weaving through his voice as he uses Words of Terror.

An insight roll reveals completely unchanged body language.

“Either they’re immune to fear or not a humanoid,” Gral reports back. “Not a single emotion. Definitely not goliath mercenaries.”

“Tryin’ to talk your way into the surgical wing?” says another chatty passerby. “Good luck. They got all the medical cadavers locked up in there and they won’t let us in.”

(Cadavers? Oh shit, we bet that’s the guard factory, theorize the players.)

“Oh, are you a med student?”

“Yeah. I work with Professor Herberts, or I used to, anyway. We needed a couple cadavers to do this comparison study about spleens; we got some weird ones from out in the wood, we compare spleens to see if place with thing don’t worry about it; need control spleen. And then these BIG DUMB IDIOTS wouldn’t let us in, and Herbert got transferred to the College of Ethics all of a sudden. He’s been gone a couple months.”

“How long do professors usually transfer for?” asks Gral.

“I mean, they usually pop over to give a lecture or two and come back by the end of the day.”

(Vigdor happens to remember that the College of Ethics also runs an asylum. They live in a big spooky castle and do dissections with guts and stuff, it can do a number on your head! Some of the ethicists have branched into the field of psychology. No reason to mention this when people are having extended stays on the ethics campus, of course…)

The student shrugs. “I gotta get to lecture. If you manage to get in there, any chance you can bring me back a couple spleens?”

We wave goodbye noncommittally, though Vigdor insists he can pop a spleen out of a corpse like a yolk from an egg. He’s a good surgeon!

Anyway, Vigdor went to school here, and the dice are on his side; he knows a side path through an old abandoned classroom into the surgical suite. He pops the lock on the door easily; all the undergrads used to go this way when slipping into lecture late, to get past the TA keeping track of tardies.

The guard is in earshot but facing the other direction, and he’s not even blinking, much less scanning around. Gral casts Silence on us and our very clanky party slips by easily.

Shosh sticks her head into the TA’s office. Nothing really stands out, but she swipes some interesting-looking notes from the desk drawers to look at later.

Meanwhile, Gral and Vigdor go into Macker’s office. The desk is an absolute mess, which is very unlike the guy Vigdor used to know. There are wheeled chalkboards crammed into the office, covered in scribbles and anatomical diagrams. Paging through the notes and glancing over the chalkboard, Vigdor makes a decent medicine check and can at least figure out what problem Macker was working on.

Based on what Dr. Emily told us, Macker’s trying to develop a surgical procedure. The issue is that whatever he’s doing would cause so much physical trauma that it’d kill the patient, and he’s looking for some way to prevent that. There are lists of healing options: formulas, spells, potions, nonmagical stabilization methods to keep the patient alive while various tissues are extracted from the body.

Gral’s unimpressed. Healing methods? That’s pretty tame for forbidden knowledge.

To Vigdor’s experienced eyes, this stuff looks mega-advanced and highly experimental, but Gral’s right – it’s not anything you’d scramble to censor.

Weirdly enough, the place doesn’t look ransacked, only disheveled and a little dusty. Macker’s notes haven’t been moved since he was here. Maybe this isn’t what the ethicists were after?

We head to cadaver storage while Valeria keeps watch. Cadaver storage is creepy as hell, but only because it’s, y’know, a room full of cadavers. A lot of the bodies, kept stable with Gentle Repose, appear to be Cursed, but that’s hardly weird. What’s so crazy they’d keep it hidden from everyone?

Vigdor opens the door to the dissection labs, Gral’s Silence deadening any ominous warning he might have had from the room beyond. Yes, the table here’s been recently used, and the bizarre symbols scrawled on the chalkboards have spilled onto the surrounding floor and walls, but Vigdor’s eyes are drawn to where the chalkboard peels away like skin to reveal a strange, multicolored, impossible space. The floor begins to take the shape of a stone hand that projects out into the shimmering void, joining a daisy-chain of enormous hands that form a walkway out to a marble platform floating in space.

Gral takes his Silence spell with him and runs to get Valeria.

Eyes starry, watching entire worlds and impossible shapes spinning through iridescent mists, Vigdor takes his first heady hit of Key taint.

As we cut session, Valeria considers that the ethicists may actually have a point.

#the cursewood #Session recap #sturmhearst university #gral omokk'duu #valeria argent #vigdor gavril #shoshana bat chaya #The key

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johnboothus · 5 years ago

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9 Things You Should Know About La Marca Prosecco

Prosecco is all about approachability. The fruity, fresh sparkling wine pairs as well with food as it does an afternoon by the pool, and makes a classy yet affordable Mimosa. Of course, there’s more to Prosecco than its easy likeability; and La Marca is a brand to get to know it by.

La Marca produces the two major types of Prosecco. It uses the sparkling style’s marquee grape; and the brand embraces the levity of the Prosecco lifestyle without losing its roots in one of Italy’s most iconic winemaking traditions. Here are nine more things to know about La Marca Prosecco.

La Marca is not a winery; it’s nine wineries.

Sometimes, like the guy who invented the Choco Taco, you have a good idea for a product, you make it. When you’re a winery looking to put your grapes into a bottle, behind a brand, you might not always have sufficient product — hence you have wineries joining forces, and grapes, forming cooperatives that very literally pool their juices to produce one brand. La Marca is the umbrella brand of nine wineries that joined forces (and so cut costs, organized resources, etc.) in the Veneto and Friuli-Venezia-Giulia regions.

La Marca’s wines are made with a grape synonymous with ‘Prosecco.’

Glera is actually the main grape in any Prosecco, including La Marca. If we’re getting technical, Glera is a synonym for the Prosecco grape, which was ultimately renamed just Glera (and is also multiple grapes). That change came in late 2009, when a region within the Prosecco region was named a DOCG and it became much more important to keep the “Prosecco” name pure (see below for more on DOC vs. DOCG).

Stressed Glera makes easy, breezy bubbly.

Glera grapes get a bit dull when they live the easy life on flat land (think of the movie protagonist pre-workout montage/definitive conflict). However, like most any wine grape, when the variety is grown on sloping ground (and so has better drainage and inconstant sun exposure — a good thing, trust us), Glera develops different characteristics. In general, the flavor is brightly acidic and generously aromatic, with lots of soft stone fruit flavor (think white peach skin), some honey notes, and a bit of clean citrus (i.e., not a Lemonhead, more like the citrus in that massive bar of lemon rosemary soap you almost impulse buy at HomeGoods).

La Marca is a great way to get to know Prosecco levels.

La Marca does two Proseccos — their basic and the Luminore, a “Prosecco Superiore.” If you buy a bottle of each you can teach yourself about the evolution of Prosecco wine. See, Prosecco isn’t just a crisp, clean, dangerously easy-drinking good time. It’s actually a complex wine with a fairly distinctive production method (see below) and genuine variety when it comes to nuance of expression. And production standards between the DOC and DOCG varieties make for a price difference of about $10 more for the Superiore. (The ABV is the same — 11 percent for both.)

What makes it ‘Superiore’ is (mostly) production region.

La Marca’s flagship Prosecco is from the Prosecco D.O.C., which is a region in northeastern Italy. Their Luminore is from the Conegliano Valdobbiadene D.O.C.G., a smaller region within the region that’s subject to stricter standards (since 2009). Among those stricter standards is, of course, location, but also a required higher percentage Glera grapes in the overall product (if a winemaker is inclined to blend), and lower yields of the grapes themselves (a vine with lower yields tends to produce more interesting grapes). The finished Proseccos have a slightly heavier mouthfeel in the Superiore region, with more apple notes, and even creamy peach, as well as zippy citrus that licks your palate clean (metaphorically).

Speaking of ‘zippy,’ it’s made using the ‘Charmat’ method.

The Charmat method may sound like a forthcoming HBO series about the non-traditional methods of an eccentric psychiatrist, but it’s actually just the way Prosecco gets made. In this method, wine undergoes secondary fermentation in large stainless steel tanks, as opposed to the traditional method, in which it ferments a second time in the bottle. The name refers to one of the two inventors of the method, Eugene Charmat, who improved on the tank method invented by Federico Martinotti. There’s less contact with the “lees” (or dead yeast cells) in this method, yielding less toasty bread tastes and more fresh fruit flavors, aromatics, and acidity.

La Marca’s label has a signature color, like Tiffany’s.

Not so much that you’ll feel the impulse to say “yes, yes, a thousand times yes” to a glass of La Marca Prosecco, but the soft eggshell blue color on the small La Marca label (and other packaging) is similar enough to the signature Tiffany Blue to confuse, delight, and cause a Pavlov-esque flop sweat response in anyone whose relationship is nearing that “rock” stage.

Celebrities like Rachel Bilson want you to love La Marca — and love yourself.

Who better than doe-eyed Summer Roberts of the O.C. to help usher in the #Celebreaks campaign? It sounds like celebrating a good session in one of those recreational demolition rooms, but it was actually a pretty nice marketing campaign aimed at encouraging everyone, especially women, to celebrate life’s everyday successes ”like taking a bath or just going to the market by yourself” — ideally with tiny bottles of La Marca bubbly in hand.

La Marca inspires poetry.

La Marca has been recognized as many things. Among the many consumer reviews of La Marca is one that’s particularly poignant: “A soft way to forget.” We assume they mean, forget the stress of the day, and responsibly enjoy your sparkling afternoon.

The article 9 Things You Should Know About La Marca Prosecco appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/la-marca-prosecco-guide/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/9-things-you-should-know-about-la-marca-prosecco

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isaiahrippinus · 5 years ago

Text

9 Things You Should Know About La Marca Prosecco

La Marca is not a winery; it’s nine wineries.

La Marca’s wines are made with a grape synonymous with ‘Prosecco.’

Stressed Glera makes easy, breezy bubbly.

La Marca is a great way to get to know Prosecco levels.

What makes it ‘Superiore’ is (mostly) production region.

Speaking of ‘zippy,’ it’s made using the ‘Charmat’ method.

La Marca’s label has a signature color, like Tiffany’s.

Celebrities like Rachel Bilson want you to love La Marca — and love yourself.

La Marca inspires poetry.

The article 9 Things You Should Know About La Marca Prosecco appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/la-marca-prosecco-guide/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/619471895072555009

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imogenbennettblogsdp · 5 years ago

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Transmedia storytelling - session 6

again as said in previous blog (week 5) I am virtual learning from my home, which as in that blog I felt not as productive as I would have in a class room but under the circumstances I find I accomplished and learnt quite a bit. Also the working in Pjs is a plus...

Web 2.0 is something we have touched on before, in the first sessions which is important as Web 2.0 has become something everyone is very familiar with (even if they don't know what the word means) and that Social Media, with social media its very much broadened to a active audience, we are contanstly looking, creating and thinking about what we are seeing which can be pretty much anything. take my edit instagram account for example, I am constantly seeking new techniques by others (almost collaborating by sharing editing styles with people and I am making ‘User Generated Content’. Also Web 2.0 offers audience participation ‘Participatory culture’, for example the Comment section. this allows the viewer to give feedback, praise and even abuse (even though that's not what its particularly meant for) This gives the viewer a feel of incorporation towards the creator (or photo, video, information- if on wiki).

*Referring to the voice over presentation video* the way marketing use ‘User Generated Content’ is very interesting and it has changed the ways we receive ads and how marketers approach sponsoring etc, I wanted to look more into it/ provide evidence to this and with two popular examples being - Youtube and Game ads. when you watch a video on youtube by a content creator what do you usually get:

Ads.

Youtube (a popular Web 2.0 website) is a Queen Bee hive for Ads... swarming. compared to old visual Ads being Ads on tv in the commercial break or flyers, these ads can be incorporated in the video, being at the beginning of the ad like the 1st picture above, or in collaboration with the creator of the video. I found this very intriguing and interesting, Im quite fascinated by idea of marketing and this little investigation (even tho I'm pretty familiar by being a YouTube veteran) so perhaps in future I can explore it more.

As I am watching the ‘Harry Jenkins film’ I now feel more supported in what I have said previously in the Blog, Mostly where I mention my instagram account, he says “what were seeing in the digital age people are taking media into their hands... and innovating and experimenting” with that media which Is exactly what I am doing, I am taking content and mixing it up making it into my own.

‘Conversion Culture” Having different platforms to see it (say youtube, insta and TikTok) which is shaped by us rather than corporations, we have control. we can all collaborate and mix information together (on say wiki) which leads to much more complex ‘than what someone in a board room can come up with on their own’. I also found this interesting and very off topic to the video but I realised that a very Recent and Popular example can be how the Convid-19 information is spread out, TikTok a very content creator based app which mostly is used by younger generations and if you go on it now you'll see a lot of information on how to stay safe and social distance during this pandemic which is very interesting... Could it be argued that kids are paying more attention because they see this entering ‘their world’? not just seeing it on the news (which they might not watch as heavily as the app).

interesting as It creates more of a world for the viewer

Talking on the Transmedia topic of having multiple platforms I was shown the Blair witch project website. This fascinated me and reminded me of my personal experience With this, ‘Ingrid goes west’ a film near and dear to my heart, which is mostly based on instagram (and how it effects us) #LIFE. I was reminded of this film as the creators also made Ingrid's and Taylor’s (the influencer in the film) instagram account real which is quite fun and I enjoyed looking into it and felt like she semi excited in a way, provided more of a world outside of the film.

Taylors instagram* I found this so clever and funny, with the captions down to the T. also something to note that loads of fans are allowed to interact with Taylor like Ingrid did, Commenting quotes (especially “Damn girl that looks yummy as fuck!” which is a popular comment you'll see). Its clever if you ask me. I myself have to admit to commenting that quote as- well. (but I'm being involved!)

Watching the ‘Transmedia storytelling’ video with a cinderella adaptation. watching this had made me think. about A- what story I want to create/adapt. and B- how it links so well to todays generation. And yet again watching this reminded me of something I have seen that is off similar structure. An Ad for the social media app ‘Own it” created by BBC. showing how little connections through sharing can lead to bigger things. (this made helped me understand the Transmedia storytelling video more as I know its all about the connections between things and seeing it visually really helped.)Im not looking forward to doing this task though, storyboarding and mind maps are not my friend and I don't enjoy them, (I may have mentioned this before) but I like to freestyle it and see where it takes me instead of planing and expecting etc. Also Im not a fan of Lucid Charts, I find it hard to use and complicated to what it is which I know is unproductive as I should be using a variety of sites to improve my skills but you can't help but hating something... Lucid chart is my kryptonite.

For my Transmedia story I decided to do it based off of Joker (2019), I chose this as it has a major event in it which I felt I could use events for, also I really like the film so why not.

I started to think about what I would focus the story around and it was hard to pin-point a certain one, I did pick joker killing the 3 men on the subway (Spoiler!) as that is essentially in my opinion what cracked him into becoming the ‘Joker’. *Refer to the story map in google docs*. Being honest I didn't enjoy it as much as I though I did, I found it quite confusing for what I had to do for a while (so like what directions do I go in? what characters do I use?). Something I also didn't like which is strange is that I didn't like making all the social media accounts... strange because I usually make tons in my own time (I have 6+ personal instagram accounts :/)

I did start using the software ‘Zeebob’ but I found it quite (this will make me sound snobbish but,) cheap. I just felt it limited me and to what I could create and just didn't seem realistic,

so I made two on here but ditched it and went for the real thing... making actual accounts for the posts. Guess which is which... the 1st one is zee bob and second is an actual account I made. The upside of making the actual accounts is having the freedom and more ability to do more things (like on twitter I can retweet stuff that I feel the character would and who they follow which adds personality to the account.

Of course the downside of making actual accounts is that I couldn't fake the likes or followers which takes away the realism to the accounts.

Out of all the accounts and social media’s I created, surprisingly the @GothamNews was my favourite, probably because i spent the most thought on this; creating the logo (on Canva) .. and finding the cool retweets like the van which I thought was like striking gold to add to the realism.

I did make a mistake that i knew occur from using the same account and changing it (E,G, I made a twitter account and kept changing the name,pictures, retweets etc)... Notice that Arthur’s and GothamNews background photo is the same... well I just noticed that too and its why I need to pay attention to it. so tiny lesson to myself for future and if I was going to do this for real I would create separate accounts and spend more time to trying to find the fitting photos for each character and why? it makes more sense for the news account to have trash as (in the film) Trash was the relevant topic, but joker not so much - he doesn't strike me and the recycling type.

While making the accounts I tried to add as much passive detail as I could... adding the subtle detail, like (as I mentioned) who they follow, retweet, like, what's in their bio, what's their background photo etc. referring a little to one of the earlier sessions in visual design (semiotics 'Denotation and Connotation').

(especially Jokers) I paid attention to the way joker writes, to my knowledge he isn't very educated so his writing is very childlike and he writes how he hears (eg when we see him write ‘hope my life makes more cents etc) it so that was a nice detail I added.

here are some notes I made for when I was thinking about the map:

- plan event - riot

- bruce Waynes dad saying “stop trash/ campaign

- joker “maybe my life would make more cents if I was dead”

- Marty “tonights show will be interesting “

- jokers video going on air

overall I think I will take the idea of broadening the ‘World’ I create (with film) by creating different platforms. I found this lesson a lot harder than I would of found it in class due to my focus being lost and feeling like im not putting 100% into it unfortunately.

And who knows maybe ill get loads of followers on one of the accounts and become famous.

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sempiternalsandpitturtle · 6 years ago

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Practical wisdom for businesses that are ready to take blogging seriously

If you’re reading this, you’re likely sold on the merits of business blogging. Whether your goal is to build brand awareness, drive top-of-funnel traffic, cultivate thought leadership or all of the above, right now you’re more interested in the “how” of blog management than the “why”.

So let’s cut to the chase.

What you’ll need

Besides realistic expectations and a willingness to not half-bake this thing?

Writers

We need to acknowledge the obvious before we talk strategy or search engine optimisation: blogs need written copy. Even a video blog needs words to give pretext to the audience, and to Google (because search engines parse text). And for that, you need writers.

Do you hire in-house? Handle the writing on your own? Contract freelancers? Outsource to a blog management agency?

If you are your brand (a motivational speaker, a musician, a personal trainer) and you have writing chops, you may get away with handling the bulk of your blog writing.

Even then, you’ll need an editor – someone eagle-eyed and attentive to detail to keep you honest (are you being consistent with your use of title case or lack thereof? Are you using Oxford commas? Are you rambling? Are you sure it’s a good idea to post that?).

If you’re a business with an actual marketing team, you probably don’t have time to ideate, create, edit and post high-quality blog content, in which case, you’ll have to weigh a few options:

Creating an internal blog management team is expensive. As well as the salaries you have all the other costs and risk that come with hiring people. Maybe not the best route, especially for SMBs.

There’s no shortage of interns seeking experience, but they tend to be seasonal and unseasoned. A mixed bag, at best.

Freelancers are a good, cost-effective and low commitment option, but you’ll need someone internally to assign, curate, edit and post blogs (same goes for interns).

Finally, you could commission a firm that staffs agency writers, editors, strategists and project managers.

Generally, any business that’s serious enough to have a formal marketing budget will get more bang their buck going the agency route (and we’re not just saying this because we have skin in the game). You get more than just writers with a blog management service, which is a perfect segue into the second thing you’ll need …

Tools and technology

You need an actual blog. That means you need a web content management system for uploading and posting content.

WordPress is the undisputed lord of open source CMS. A third of the top 10 million websites are powered by WordPress, and no wonder: WordPress is easy to set up and it has a plugin for just about everything under the sun. You have to pay for domain and hosting (but you probably already knew that). Other great CMS (which we meticulously graded in a recent post) include:

HubSpot.

Joomla.

Drupal.

Squarespace.

Moving on to Google Analytics – the single-most important content marketing tool in the known universe. It shows you, among other things:

Pageviews.

Number of new and returning visitors.

Traffic sources.

Bounce rate (aka, number of users who split after viewing one page.)

Average session duration.

Conversions.

A skilled content strategist looks at this data and uses it to diagnose what you’re doing wrong on your blog, what you’re doing right and what you can do to improve (this will be important when we talk about commercial goals later on).

Other blogging functions that require some solid tools?

Keyword and topic analysis

We recommend:

Google Trends: Search for a phrase and see how it’s trending. Totally free.

SEMrush: Not free, but worth it if you want to perform competitive keyword analysis and identify new key phrases that pertain to your products and services.

MarketMuse: Again, not free but worth the cost. Identifies topics, secondary keywords, average word count (a good indicator of depth) and top-performing pages for a given keyword.

Ideation resources

For inspiration (and affirmation) as you develop blog ideas:

AnswerThePublic: This free tool analyses Google and Bing to generate a list of questions that actual searchers have asked pertaining to your chosen keywords.

Buzzsumo: If you go the freemium route you’re limited to two free daily searches; otherwise it’ll cost you. This nifty tool shows you, among other things, the topics that have performed well on specific social media channels.

When all else fails there’s a Google search. Scroll to the bottom of the page for “Searches related to” your query.

Apparently, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Google seems to think that people who search for “apples” aren’t looking for fruit.

Writing tools

Seems obvious, but worth pointing out.

Google Docs: A free alternative to Microsoft Office (which Google now seamlessly integrates with). Enables track changes, formatting, version control and the whole nine yards. Google Sheets also comes in handy as an organisational tool.

A style book: We recommend AP Style (not free), but you can create your own in-house style guide if you want. This will help multiple writers create more polished, uniformly styled content across a blog.

Graphics

Because grownups like pictures, too.

Giphy: It’s easy enough to liven up a blog post with a free, relatable GIF.

Canva: With 8,000 design templates, two folders to help organise designs, 2 gigabytes of storage and more, Canva makes it pretty darn easy to create custom imagery for your blog content.

Conversion tools

For gathering emails and building a list of subscribers. Below is a list of free pop-up contact forms:

WPForms (lite version).

List Builder for Sumo.

MailMunch.

If you handle some or all of your blogging in house, there’s a laundry list of free resources to get you started, which is refreshing given the time commitments and costs of operating and managing a blog in house.

Also worth pointing out: The tools you actually need will be influenced by your strategy, so let’s talk a bit more about that.

A strategy

We won’t go into too much detail here, because we’ve already done that elsewhere.

But the abridged version is as follows:

Every blog is evidently driven by a clear commercial goal. But every commercial goal is an end; smart blogging is about identifying the right means to that end. Let’s say the leads you get are good, but you need more of them. Your immediate blogging goal, then, should be to increase traffic. Verify that your efforts are working by tallying monthly visitors prior to launching your blog campaign, and then a month or two into the campaign to track progress. You can concurrently drive traffic and build out lead gen strategies if you have the means. But if you’re short on resources and can’t do everything at once, get the traffic part down pat, and then evolve to lead gen.

Be analytical as you implement your strategy. Say you have good traffic but poor session duration. This could signify poor keyword selection (note that sometimes searchers don’t use the correct name when they look for things). It could also mean your content isn’t covering a keyword in enough depth. Start analysing content that’s performing best for the keywords your brand is targeting (could be from competitors, some of your own content, from industry blogs and so on). Identify topics they may be covering that you aren’t (again, MarketMuse is an excellent tool for this).

In that same vein, you need a clear picture of your target audience. Create detailed reader personas. Identify those readers’ objectives and their pain points, the types of industries they work in, their professional titles, their age, how they like to consume their content and so on. This will help you figure out the types of content that will be of greatest value to your audience. It will also help you nail down your writing voice, use appropriate pop culture references, etc. (Many a “Lethal Weapon” reference will be lost on 25-year-olds.)

Putting all the pieces together

Ok, so we have writers, some tools and a strategy built around a commercial goal. Good start, but you’ll also need someone to manage the strategy and someone to manage the execution.

Respectively, that translates to:

A content strategist or consultant: These experts use your commercial goals and website metrics to orient your blogging efforts but also your content marketing strategy at large. For instance, SEO is crucial if you’re attempting to drive more traffic to your website. If your traffic is steady but your list of leads is thin, you might need to create a new mechanism for bringing visitors deeper into the funnel (e.g., links to gated collateral in your blog content). Whatever the case, you need someone in your organisation who is Google Analytics certified to identify the surest path to success for a given goal, track the results of your efforts and reorient based on outcomes.

A project manager: A project manager works as closely with strategists as the writers and designers who produce blog content. They oversee every phase of execution, from the ideation of content to any supporting functions (orchestrating interviews with subject-matter experts, communicating strategist’ keyword research findings to writers, setting deadlines, proofing drafts, posting content, distributing content and, eventually, promoting content).

The relationship between writers, project managers and strategists needs to be open and collaborative. Put them in silos, and you’re asking for friction and misalignment of expectations (trust us, we’ve learned from experience).

This is partly because content marketing is cyclical. You strategise based on the status quo and a projected end goal. You do. You review. And then you revisit based on what you’ve learned. This means processes, workflows and tool sets may need to change rather extensively between campaigns.

Sometimes you may even have to pivot quickly on a project, and if the stakeholders involved in that project don’t have clarity into the “why,” they’ll be dubious of directives that come from other departments. Point is, you can be the most SEO-savvy person in your hemisphere and still fail at coordinating a well-oiled blog management machine. The big picture: Blog management is about more than your blog.

What do we mean by this?

Here’s an example: Blogs can be great for capturing emails if you incorporate a “subscribe” button or a contact form somewhere on the page. But you will need to give your visitor something in exchange, like a whitepaper, infographic, eBook or industry analysis report. Are you budgeting time, money and effort for those downloadable assets that allow your blog to drive deeper-funnel interactions?

And even before that, do you have enough of a web presence to actually generate any blog traffic in the first place? Think about it from the perspective of a social media marketer. You need blog content so you have something to share with followers. But you need social media channels so you have followers in the first place to promote your blog content to. It’s impossible to tease the two apart.

This is to say, anyone can create a blog. Anyone can write. Anyone can do keyword research. But blog management isn’t just about blogging.

It’s about your business and how you create value during the entirety of your sales cycle – from first contact, all the way to post-sale engagements.

That takes more than incisive writers, creative designers, diligent editors, SEO tools, an effective strategy and the staff to orchestrate the whole thing.

It takes vision, it takes corporate buy-in, it takes time and, most importantly, it takes commitment.

Like we said, no half-baked efforts here.

from http://bit.ly/2EV2URB

#content marketing

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