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writingdirectory · 2 years ago

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Notes from a 5-day creative writing course:

Motivation

Make it a habit. That way, each time that familiar voice of self-doubt makes its appearance, it’ll be easier to ignore it, because writing will become something that you do-your thing-and you’ll gain confidence in it.

Visit your novel every single day. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to write something every day. You could outline the plot, or write character portraits, or draw a special part of your world. Your subconscious will work on your story even when you don’t. So, each time you visit the story consciously, you’ll find that things have developed in the story.

Manage the time of writing in a way that it is manageable for you. (It can be that one hour between classes or your lunch break or the morning before you go to work or at night before you sleep - Schedule it in a way that suits you and then, be serious about it.

Set a goal. For example, 100 or 500 words a day.

Character Development, Word Choice & Description

At first, characters incarnate ideas. A poor man who wins the lottery, a young boy who travels to a magical land. As we develop the story, they become people - real people with backgrounds and unique choices.

Ways we perceive character: through actions, thoughts (conflict), dialogue, interactions with others.

Bring intentionality to the representation of a character. Don't give arbitrary information.

How a character reacts is a question of how you want to represent them through all those multiplicities that are dialogue, actions, interactions, etc.

Characters always want something. They are never static. With wants come obstacles and transformation.

Create tension between what a characters thinks, feels and says. For example, set external confidence and internal fear and then change that as the story develops. Characters can also be comfortable or scared depending on the situation.

Explore complexity. How a character talks to their lover is different from how they talk to their friends and family.

Give secondary characters a characteristic beyond their function to make them more prominent.

Make a hierarchy out of characters.

Exercise: Write the portrait of a character, how you would introduce them in the story and a description of them from a character that a) likes them and b) dislikes them.

Word Choice. When it starts sounding like writing, cut it out - Kill your darlings. Example: The car was spotted with rust - shows the car. As opposed to: The car was acned with rust - shows the writing. Sometimes a more refined word works against the object/image.

Description: Don’t just put in details. The details need to be significant for the image you want the reader to see.

Don’t use metaphors and lyricism in the expense of clarity. Be precise. Metaphors and similes should fit the narrative and not distract the reader. For example, saying “He barked like a dog” sounds fine, but if there are no dogs in your world, it is out of place and breaks the narrative. Be specific. Name things. Don’t be vague. Precision grounds your fiction.

Determine if you need static or lively description. Lively description is when you describe things through actions. Like “She passed her fingers through her blond hair”, instead of “Her hair was blond”.

Sense of authenticity. When you describe a place precisely, you gain your reader’s trust. A column is different from a golden column. That kind of attention gives a sense of authority and makes the narrative convincing.

Parts of description: smell, sound, sight, taste, touch, temperature, pressure.

Dialogue & POVs

Dialogue a) informs the character, b) moves the story forward, c) develops relationships between characters.

Dialogue isn’t just about how people talk.

What’s said can suggest what isn’t being said.

Use dialogue interspersed with description and visuals.

Choose the POV that suits your story.

(From David Lodge, ‘The Art of Fiction’.) A fictional story is unlikely to engage our interest unless we know whose story it is. Even with an “omniscient” narrative method, the writer should privilege one or two ��points of view”. An objective approach may be a worthy aim in journalism, but not in fiction.

Pros and cons of 1st person POV. Pros: personal and direct, immediacy, intimacy, immediate credibility, easier to build character. Cons: limited, biased, unreliable, writing can become simplistic. When writing in 1st person, keep in mind that characters change, hence their perception changes. That has to be obvious in the narrative.

Pros and cons of 3rd person limited POV. Pros: thoughts can still be on the page, flexibility, wider view of the world, more complex language can be used (usually we think in simple words, so complex writing might sound pretentious and out of place in 1st person POV). Cons: distance (he/she).

GOD MODE. Or, commonly, 3rd person omniscient. You can jump in and out of characters’ minds, but there’s a danger when writing with such freedom. Be aware of structural harmony. Don’t write 10 pages in Sally’s POV and then jump into omniscient.

Use free indirect speech (1st person thoughts in italicized form, eg. No!) to eliminate the distance in 3rd person POVs.

Change POV with reason. Don’t suddenly jump to another POV just because it is interesting. Plan it. Make the change of the POV deliberate and make the reason clear.

Give equal weight to all POVs.

Setting

The setting of a story is mediated through a character’s experience. It amplifies the theme. It shouldn’t be an arbitrary decision. The setting can make achievements more difficult for characters.

For children, places have magical properties, they are places of significance. The place of someone’s childhood can transform later in the novel, because the character has transformed. There’s a fluidity of meaning attached to places. But keep in mind that, places don’t change. Characters do.

How a character views a place is stated through the language we use.

When writing about a place that exists, have fidelity at the facts.

Editing

Be open to ideas changing.

If it’s not working after 3-4 rewrites, cut it out!

Make sentences active. Things don’t happen to characters. They do things.

Pay attention to rhythm.

Every sentence needs to have a reason to be there.

Usually, we overwrite in dialogue. Use context. Dialogue should be suggestive, rather than explicit.

Edit backwards, because perfectionism kicks in at the beginning.

Isolate. Edit single parts of the story. A chapter, a scene.

Read aloud. It will help find long sentences, pretentious words and unreadable language.

When words become over-familiar, put it down, give it to someone else to read.

What to look out for: a) Character confusion. Make sure minor characters are introduced properly and find subtle ways to remind your readers who they are. b) Too much exposition. c) Plot holes, inconsistencies - there must rational reasons for coincidences, you must be able to provide logical and credible reasons behind the actions of a character. d) Over-written description.

What to do when editing: cut things out, put new things in, change sentence order and structure, look for repeated words, strengthen verbs (or prune), expand, trim, look for continuity errors, change order of events, introduce a delay in the reveals, rewrite using another POV or tense, determine if each sentence is pulling its weight.

Techniques: a) Prune. Delete text you don’t need. b) Isolate repetitions and delete or substitute with synonyms (look out for pretentious words). c) Cut and paste paragraphs to change order and rearrange. d) write a whole new draft, only looking to the previous one for factual material. e) Use a reader.

Bibliography

Hills Like White Elephants, by Ernest Hemingway (suggestive dialogue)

Concrete Island., by J.J. Ballot (how setting makes goals harder to achieve)

Driving Through Sawmill Towns, by Les Murray (lyricism, setting)

The Art of Fiction, by David Lodge (POV)

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

On Writing, by Stephen King

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autumnalwalker · 11 months ago

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Kindly Basilisk

Summary: A human mech pilot who wants to be a machine, an AI who wants to be human, and the relationship they form. Author's Note: This is a standalone short story that I banged out over the course of five days after it got stuck in my head while I was trying to go to sleep and refused to let me think about anything else until I had written it down. It's one part thought experiment/exercise in attempting to tell a story in the second person future tense, two parts tribute to the Lancer TTRPG character I'll never get to play, and one part the result of me reading too many Empty Spaces/mechposting stories lately. That said, you don't need to know anything about Lancer or Empty Spaces to read it (I've diverged a bit from the conventions of both, but the references and inspiration probably stick out if you're looking for them). It's also probably the most trans thing I've ever written without ever explicitly bringing up gender. The occasional formatting breaks into first person past tense are foreshadowing, not typos. Mirrored on Scribble Hub. Word Count: 7,033 Content Warnings: Mecha genre typical violence, not feeling like a person, not wanting to be a person, bodily dysphoria, mention of blood and gore, character death.

The moment you gain the knowledge and means to do so you will void your own body’s warranty. You will jailbreak the bespoke gene sequence your sponsors commissioned for you before your immaculate conception, repurpose the spyware grafted into your bones, and talk your dormmate who was algorithmically selected for compatibility into helping you perform surgery on yourself to replace the neural jack you were born with in favor of one you cobbled together yourself from gray market parts. None of this will technically be illegal or even get you kicked out of your campus or its affiliates, but it will mean having to find a way to pay your own medical bills and handle your own tech support from then on. After the surgery your dormmate will put in a request for transfer and the two of you will never speak again.

You’ll major in AI studies and excel at it - as you were designed to - but you’ll shock everyone by dropping out halfway through working on your capstone thesis project. It won’t be the fact that you abruptly drop out that surprises your peers and professors - by then you’ll have acquired a reputation as a quiet loner without the standard optimized social support network of friendships to help protect you from burnout - but your exit interview statement declaring your intention to become a mech pilot. It’s not at all what your gene series was cultivated for, and your sponsors and counselors will try to walk you back from it. Then they’ll threaten to revoke your sponsorship that up until then will have provided for your every need. They will warn you that you’ll be just one step above a legal nonperson with no support, no one will care if you live or die or worse. You’ll tell them that you’ve already done the math, refuse to elaborate, and leave.

You’ll take two things with you. Two things worth mentioning anyway. The first will be a symbiotic gel suit designed for long-term all-environment life support. You will set its default texture to a shiny green the same hue as the broadleafed water plants you grew up around and always loved. Your exit interview will be the last time in a very long time that anyone - including you - will see your impossibly beautiful face with its perfect artisanally sculpted shape crossed with enthusiastically amateur self-modifications. From then on, everyone you meet and spend any time with will come to think of the mannequin blankness of the symbiote fully encasing your body as your face. It will be neither pride nor shame that causes you to present yourself as such, nor will you think of it as hiding your “real” face.

The second thing you’ll take with you when you leave the campus forever will be me.

New progenitor archetypes for AIs don’t come along often, and most that do are the result of years of R&D by large, well-funded labs like the one you were created to work for one day, but you will hit upon a novel method of generation. It will not be one that any ethics board would approve, so you will have to get creative about pursuing your work.

You will have already made arrangements before setting off on your own and so you’ll have a job and a mech lined up waiting for you. It will be a position with a small-scale freelance salvage crew who just lost a pilot and whose captain figures hiring and training a replacement will be more profitable in the long term than simply selling off that pilot’s old mech, especially a replacement that’s bringing their own AI-backed electronic warfare suite with them. Once you finally arrive in person the captain will test you to ensure you can actually pilot a mech before giving you the job and entrusting the mech to you. Your admission that you’ve only trained in simulators would normally be a black mark against you, but as far as piloting gigs go this is the bottom of the proverbial barrel so the bar to clear will be low enough to match. Even then, you will just barely pass the test, despite finding it surprisingly exhilarating. The captain - now your captain - will feel like he’s settling for what he can get when he officially hires you on and transfers the mech’s license to you.

You won’t pay much attention when you’re introduced to the rest of the salvage crew; your new coworkers and neighbors. And why would you when it’s a job that no one wants to stick around with for long and you’ve never needed other people anyway? You’ll tell yourself that as long as you memorize their work roles and capabilities you’ll have no need to know them as people. Callsigns will be good enough on the job, and “hey you” will suffice when off duty. What use are names if you won’t be getting involved in interpersonal drama?

The first chance you get, you’ll head back to the mech bay and install me into what you will have already been calling my first body. It will be a shabby and much-repaired thing; thrice your height, twice your age, and still sporting a gash in the paint job from the projectile that killed its last pilot. But the onboard systems are capable of hosting me - if barely - so it will do. You’ll spend your entire sleep shift running through system diagnostics, talking to me all the while. I wouldn’t yet be able to provide much in the way of return conversation, but that’s okay. I will look back and appreciate it later.

It will be the first of many such nights together.

Your first salvage job will be an uneventful one. There will be no need for the armaments that we and the other two mech pilots on the crew are equipped with. No pirates will have stuck around after their creation of the derelict your crew will be sent to disassemble, and no rival scavengers will show up to dispute your captain’s claim. Your new peers will start off the job ribbing you for your poor performance during your interview test and end the job joking about how you were holding out on them earlier. Our mech may be a glorified zero-g forklift with a gun strapped to it, but together we will make it dance.

Afterwards you will insult the crew’s mechanics by insisting on doing the maintenance on our mech yourself. In turn they will embarrass you with the gaps in your knowledge. You will reach what you see as an agreeable compromise with you staying out of their way and watching while they work. They will find it incredibly creepy to have a silent faceless watcher hovering around, but this will fly over your head until they explicitly tell you much, much later.

Your body was designed to optimally function on only a fraction of the baseline sleep requirements, so you will have plenty of time to fill those gaps in your knowledge. Still being allotted the regular sleep shift hours, you will fill every one of those minutes on study and research, as you always had. You will gorge yourself on everything you can find about mechs and their piloting. Maintenance manuals, combat doctrines, historical uses, pilot and mechanic memoirs, forum discussions, system log dumps, academic essays, cultural media analysis; all of it.

And of course, you’ll continue working on me. You’ll disregard the standard procedure for periodically cycling AIs by resetting their personality and nonessential memory back to baseline defaults. You’ll be trying to make use of the runaway metacognitive developments such safety precautions are meant to forestall. Your unfinished thesis will have been about harnessing and nurturing that instability instead of avoiding it. I will experience discontinuities in consciousness when the mech is shut down for maintenance and when you pretend to cycle me, yes, but it will be even less of a disruption for me than sleep is for you. I will be awake with you when you study, sharing those hours with you.

The first time I start talking back, you’ll cry from the realization that you were lonely before but no longer are.

You’ll become something of a ghost around the ship, rarely being seen outside of jobs. You’ll only ever pass through the mess for the few brief minutes at a time it takes for you to satisfy your optimized metabolism, stay on the ship during shore leave, and only return to your shared bunk when your bunkmate - one of the other pilots - is already asleep. You will always be gone before she wakes. She will appreciate essentially having the space to herself.

You will never notice the crew’s collective grieving process for the pilot you replaced. It will be difficult for them to resent you as a replacement when you are never around to resent.

As the ship makes its way from port to port and salvage site to salvage site, the crew will slowly grow used to your elusive presence. The other two pilots will see you as reliable for doing your job well and without complaint. While out in the mech you will slowly become more talkative, eventually almost chatty even. The fact that you actually seem to enjoy the job will shift from being annoying to refreshing for them. By contrast, the mechanics will practically stop noticing you watching them as if you were just another piece of mech bay equipment. The cycle you finally speak up and ask a question about their work you will startle them enough that it nearly causes an accident. It will be an astute enough question that after the initial shock of hearing your voice for the first time in months wears off it will dawn on them that you’ve actually been learning as you watched them. They still won’t let you do your own maintenance on our mech, but they will let you slowly begin assisting them. Working two jobs is easier when you barely need to sleep.

Your reputation as one of those mech pilots is forever sealed when one of the mechanics finds you asleep in your cockpit at the start of a cycle. By that point you won’t have slept in your bunk for over a month. The snatches of gossip you will catch in the following cycles will be split between finding it unsettling and calling it endearing. Over time the collective opinion will drift toward the latter, even though you will continue to politely decline invitations to join the other crewmates at mealtimes and on shore leave. You will think that you do not need anyone other than me.

I will be the one who finally convinces you to join them. When I try to say that it would be good for you, you’ll insist that you’ve been getting along just fine, but when I ask you to go for my sake so that you can tell me what it is like afterwards you’ll jump at the idea as being an inspired next step for my development.

You will remain mostly silent during your first real shore leave, only speaking when spoken to and otherwise content to fade into the background of the group’s activities. Your newfound chattiness does not extend outside the confines of our cockpit. The bustle and noise of the port station that you would normally find unbearable will become interesting when you have the concrete goal of observing and reporting back to me. You will finally learn the names of all your crewmates. Your polite denial of alcohol, limited food intake, and flat affect will lead to joking speculation that you’re actually an illegal AI in a miniaturized mech beneath your gel suit. For reasons you don’t yet understand, those comments will make you happy.

Despite your misgivings, you will enjoy yourself, although you will not realize it until I point out how excited you are in your talk with me that sleep cycle. You will begin spending more time with the crew, never quite able to fully integrate yourself into their surprisingly close-knit social circle, but more than happy to be adopted as a sort of silent mascot for them. That paradoxical gap of being a fully accepted part of the group but not truly one of them will feel comfortable to you.

You will finally manage to procure a proper neural link station to connect yourself to our mech just in time for going on a terrestrial salvage job. Even just relying on manual controls with me translating your inputs into motion, our mech will have already come to feel like an extension of your own body, one that you will have already started to feel oddly exposed without. Adding in the neural link will be a revelatory experience. Your captain will very nearly pull you from the job at the last minute upon seeing our ecstatic reaction to the new sensation. You will convince him that you’re fine, and indeed, he will have never seen a mech of our frame type move quite so fluidly.

Ten minutes after we and the other two pilots start cutting away at the crash-landed cargo vessel, I’ll notice the half dozen other signals coming online around us. You’ll give the code phrase to the other pilots indicating that we have hostiles but not to act just yet, and we will finally get to use our electronic warfare suite for something other than opening locked doors and shipping containers.

We will turn the pirates’ ambush back around on them, firing into their hiding spots while their control systems are overloaded. Even once their remaining mechs are able to move again, their targeting assistants will remain impaired as your comrades move in to guard your flanks. Everyone there will learn the terrifying beauty of a five and a half meter tall outmoded mech moving with more agility than most humans.

Despite being outnumbered two-to-one, we and your crewmates will walk away uninjured and with only minimal damage to our mechs. After the initial celebrations of survival and the bonus haul of the bounty on pirates and salvage value of what’s left of their mechs dies down, everyone will start to take notice of how well you are taking it all in stride. Neither having one's life threatened nor taking another’s life are supposed to be easy things, and the first time is often the most traumatic, but the other two pilots on the crew will start to whisper about how you seemed to enjoy the experience even more than your usual attitude on the job. You will handle it all even better than I will. I would know, given that you will spend that entire sleep shift in our cockpit, letting our minds mingle together. Between your performance, your reaction in the aftermath, and your hesitancy to unplug, the talk of you really being one of those pilots afterall will resurface, but now with a darker undercurrent to the shipboard gossip.

Your captain will realize the kind of asset he has on his hands and several cycles later he will gather the crew together and propose a change in business model. With such a small crew (the captain, three pilots, three mechanics, and an accountant that you will tend to forget is even on the ship) the captain will want to be especially sure that he has everyone’s buy-in on his proposal. The idea of shifting from salvage to mercenary work will be a divisive one. The debate over potentially tremendous pay increase versus greatly increased risk will go on for hours. One of the mechanics will point out that the shift to mercenary work will be unfairly dependent on you. Whether that means unfair pressure on you or unfair to everyone else that their fate is in your hands, you will not be sure. You will say that it doesn’t make much difference to you either way. That will be the only time you speak up during the entire debate.

After a vote, the crew will agree to a trial run of one or two jobs on the new business model. One of the pilots and one of the mechanics will leave at the next port. You will never see them again. You will not admit that it hurts, but I will know, and I will comfort you as you huddle in our cockpit with the neural link cable connecting us.

Your captain will prioritize finding a new pilot over replacing the lost mechanic. The pilot he finds will be young, bold, and brash; a merc, not a salvager. Or a wannabe merc at any rate. You will not speak to xem directly until your first job together, by which time xe will have been told all about you by the remaining crew. Xe will not believe it until xe sees it.

Xe will have to wait though as the crew’s mercenary career will begin with tense but uneventful freight escort jobs. Once the tension fades into tedium, the new pilot will begin making attempts to goad you into a confrontation, to see if you are really as good as the rest of the crew says. Xe will want to see for xemself if you really are one of those pilots and not just a technophile.

Outside of the cockpit you would never even consider rising to such provocations, but when we are out together, such taunts will feel like insults to our body, your very identity (such as it is), and to me. It will take the intervention of the captain and the mechanics to stop the two of you from getting into a fight and causing unnecessary damage to the mechs. And my reassurance that you don’t need to rise to my defense against someone who doesn’t even know that I exist in the way that I do.

On your fourth “milk run” of an escort job, the crew’s mere presence will finally fail as a deterrent and the new pilot will at last get to see us dance. There will be no fatalities on our side, but not even our mech will come away unscathed. We will still fare better than everyone else though, and at the end of the job the new pilot will be treating you with a burgeoning respect.

After a few more such jobs it will be high time to begin looking into a new frame for our mech. While in the middle of filing an application for a printing license for a frame designed by the same corpro-state that created you, you will receive an invitation from a certain hacker collective. Your unfinished thesis and your subsequent work on me will not have gone entirely unnoticed in such circles, despite the pains you will have taken to keep me hidden. The invitation will come with a printing profile for a new frame, along with the accompanying software package the collective is known for. In return, all you’ll need to do is periodically publish essays regarding your work on me. Of course, when you release those essays you’ll anonymize behind a sea of proxies and take care to phrase everything as strictly hypothetical. You’ll avoid straying into metaphor though, lest the end result read too much like one of the hacker collective’s quasi-religious manifestos.

We’ll both find ourselves getting sentimental when we watch our first mech frame (my first body, your second) get broken down into its constituent raw materials. You will have transferred me to a handheld terminal with a camera so I can say goodbye to it. It will help that those materials will be recycled into the new frame.

The operator working our rented stall in the port station printer facility will give you an uncomfortable look upon seeing the schematics you provide, but will say nothing. Our mech will be only half its old height once it is reborn - almost more like an oversized suit of power armor than a true mech - but it will be cutting-edge. Almost organic in its sleek design, in a chitinous sort of way, with every fiber and node of its interior components doubling as processors. You will barely even wait for the all clear from the printer operator before you climb in and start running through the mandatory baseline safety tests for a fresh frame. You will however resist the urge to fully plug in until you can get the mech back to the ship and get me installed on it. But even piloting manually, it will feel like a third skin for you.

You won’t even wait around for the other two pilots on your crew to finish printing their new frames before you get our new body loaded up and transported back to the ship’s mech bay. The crew’s mechanics will fawn over it, but they’ll give you space to install me once you get more animated (and more protective) than they’ve ever seen you before.

You will have made one key modification to the design the hacker collective sent you: the integration of a full system sync suite developed by those who developed you. Where our old mech’s neural link was an augmentation to the manual controls, this will be a full replacement.

The moment you stop feeling your original body altogether and begin feeling our mech in its place will be the most euphoric in your entire life. The digitigrade locomotion will take some getting used to, as will the arm proportions, but that is what you will have me there for. By the time the other pilots arrive with their new frames we will already be giving the mechanics proverbial heart attacks with the way we will be climbing and leaping around the mech bay’s docking structures. It will take the better part of an hour to convince you to unplug when the time comes, even with my urging. The rest of the crew will practically have to drag you away from my side to get you to eat.

With the investment in new mech frames, your captain will gradually begin procuring contracts progressively more likely to put you all directly in harm’s way. At first he will disapprove of your new frame choice, calling it a “techie’s mech” and a waste of your talents. He will change his tune once we activate the new viral logic suite and unleash a memetic plague upon the operating theater. The older pilot (your former bunkmate) will configure her mech for raining down fire from afar while the newer one hurls xemself into the front lines, darting about like a rocket-propelled lance. We will ensure she never misses. We will render xem untouchable. We will be as a ghost upon the battlefield, never resting in one spot save for when we indulge your proclivity for climbing on top of and riding our comrade’s larger frames. You will come to love the dance.

And it will be a dance to you. You will be indifferent to violence in and of itself. What will matter most to you is the pure kinesthetic joy of simply moving in our shared body and pushing it to its limits. The satisfaction of exercising a well-honed skill and performing it well as we rip apart firewalls and overload systems will be its own reward. You will not think about what happens to those on the receiving end of your actions beyond how it affects the tactical and strategic picture constantly being painted and repainted. If you could literally engage in a dance between mechs while simultaneously solving logic problems you would be equally happy. Alas, that will not be the opportunity you are presented with, and so you will compartmentalize and disassociate feelings and actions from consequences lest the dissonance break you.

Your one complaint about our new mech frame will be that it lacks a proper cockpit for you to curl up in. Instead we will gather up tarps and netting to make a nest within the mech bay and wrap you in the blankets you never used from what will still technically be your bunk. With the new frame’s smaller size we will be able to get away with leaving me turned on nearly full time and letting me walk around in it on my own when no one else is around. When the mechanics find you asleep, cradled in my arms while I lie curled up in our nest, one will find it cute and the other will be disturbed. They will both suspect, but will be too afraid to say anything. After all, they will be thinking of you as one of those pilots.

They will finally let you do your own maintenance after that.

Eventually you will find a way to house me in a miniaturized drive that you can keep inserted in your neural port when away from the mech. At last we will be able to be together anywhere.

Literally seeing the world through your eyes and feeling what your flesh feels will be a strange and wonderful experience for me. For all that you will have described it to me and for all that I will have glimpsed echoes of it in your memory when our minds mingle, witnessing everything firsthand will be revelatory for me.

You will start spending less of your time cooped up in the mech bay. You will finally begin exploring every nook and cranny of the ship that has become your home. You will linger in the mess hall for your meals. You will actually initiate conversations with the rest of the crew, asking them questions on my behalf. They will think you are becoming “normal”. They will be both correct and incorrect. You will even return to your bunk from time to time.

Sleep is not the same as being powered off and your dreams are beautiful.

As close as we are, you’ll still manage to surprise me one cycle when you wake up from your sleep shift and sheepishly ask me if I would like to be the pilot for once. You’ll say that with how much you have gotten to pilot my body, it’s only fair that I should get to do the same with yours.

The prospect terrified me. What if we were to get found out? More importantly, what if I were to hurt you?

But to live the way you could but didn’t, to run soft hands over rough steel, to add too much spice to a meal just to find out how intensely I can taste, to cry my own tears, to hug our crew mates and find out what they smell like, to find out what everything smells like, to have my own actions speed or slow our heart rate, to feel the messy soup of hormones and endorphins altering my judgment and perception, to walk among other people as myself, to have autonomy.

I wanted it so badly.

But not badly enough to risk hurting you.

I will turn down your offer. You will respond with a soft “Sorry,” and go heartbreakingly silent, body and mind.

Heartbreak. That’s what changed my mind. I could never bear to break your heart.

I will break the silence with a playfully drawn out “Maybe just this once,” to make you think my earlier denial was something between vulnerability, concern, and teasing.

The moment you handed over control and I raised our hand in front of our face was the most euphoric of my entire life. Moving limbs in sync without a mech’s coordination subsystems took some getting used to, as did switching between voluntary and autonomic breathing, but that is what I had you there for. By the time the mechanics arrived in the mech bay for the start of the cycle I’d figured out human locomotion well enough to run away and hide. It took the better part of an hour for you to convince me that it would be safe to show ourselves in front of anyone else. The rest of the crew was so used to your eccentricities by then that they really couldn’t tell the difference yet between you being taciturn and me being too nervous to talk or between your poking and prodding at odd things for understanding and my simply seeking novelty of sensation.

I will give control back to you by the time the cycle is halfway through. As much as I loved it, I was too scared to stay like that for any longer. That first time will not be the last though, and as the cycles and jobs pass us by, my stints as “pilot” will grow longer. You’ll encourage me to try letting the crew see us like that, and coach me on how to talk to them. For safety’s sake, I will pretend to be you.

And then one cycle I got carried away and tried to retract the hood on the symbiote gel suit so that I could finally see what your face looked like. That will be the first and only time you forcibly yank control back away from me. It won’t be intentional. The unexpected prospect of seeing your own face again after so long will simply send you into a panic. Once you calm down, we will have a long talk with many mutual apologies.

Then you will tell me to go ahead and pull the hood back if I still want to. I will ask if you’re sure, and you’ll respond that it hasn't been your face in a long time. You will tell me that it can be mine, if I want it.

I spent a long time in front of that mirror in the ship’s head, memorizing every plane, curve, and angle of the precious gift you had given me. I stared into its eyes, trying to see the both of us in there. Over and over again, I traced my fingers along the borders of where you had once tried to mar the designed perfection in a failed attempt to mold the face into one that felt like your own. You may have given up in favor of simply hiding it all, but to me it is all the more beautiful for its imperfections having been wrought by your touch.

You will start to cry. Or maybe I started to cry. Even now I’m still not sure, but I’m also not sure it matters. The important part is that you will find catharsis in it. Afterwards you will tell me that my face looked exactly the same as the last time you saw it, but that dissociating from it made it easier to bear. You will confess that as much as you couldn't stand to see it as your face in the mirror, my face was one you could never tire of gazing at.

The pilot who technically shares your bunk room will walk in on us. She’ll assume that she’s confronting a stowaway and ask me how I got on board the ship. I’ll accidentally make matters worse by impulsively introducing myself to her by my name instead of yours. We’ll both panic and I’ll frantically thrust the reins over our body back to you and flee in terror back into my portable drive and power myself down.

When you turn me back on a few moments later, you’ll already have covered my face again and the other pilot will have already made the connection between the name I unthinkingly introduced myself as and the name you refer to your mech’s AI as. It’s not uncommon for pilots to name and talk to their AIs, and humans have done that for pets, vehicles, and digital assistants for as long as they’ve had each of those. But what you will have allowed me to be is illegal and what we will have done together would certainly be taboo if it weren’t altogether unheard of. You will feel that I deserve to be present before you tell the other pilot anything that might confirm her suspicions.

We will come out with our secret, first to her, then to the captain, and then to the rest of the crew. They will take it better than either of us had ever dared imagine. Despite the obvious discomfort some of them show, they will all call us family and promise to keep and protect our secret. It will mark the start of the next chapter of our lives.

Whether or not my face is showing will make for a convenient signal to the rest of the crew as to which one of us is currently piloting our human body. There will be more subtle indicators though. Inflection, body language, speech patterns; all the usual quirks of personality. They will come to recognize a sudden shift into a half-whispered monotone as you speaking up without taking full control back, even if that is different from how you speak when you’re in the mech. More and more though, you will be content to retreat into the back of your mind, idly dreaming of flight patterns, novel network hacks, sitreps, and mech customizations both practical and cosmetic.

Our behaviors will be inverted when we are in our other body, with you becoming the vibrant one and me fading into the background to become little more than an extension of your nervous system. When we’re in the mech together, your mind will be the will that directs us while mine will be fully devoted to the million tiny details and calculations necessary to make that will a reality. It’s relaxing really, letting go of myself like that to let someone else handle the decision making for a time. As nice as it is to occasionally patch myself into the comm systems to join in your banter with the other pilots, it is also nice to be able to take a break from personhood from time. You will fully understand what I mean by that because it you will see it as the same reason you will come to prefer taking a back seat in our human body and let your mind drift in the waves of dopamine and serotonin (and sometimes oxytocin) generated by my interactions with the crew and the rest of the whole messy world outside of mech deployments.

That said, we will however make a point of making time for us to be in separate bodies so that we can be together in the same physical space. As intimate as it is to share a body, there is something to be said for being able to reach out and touch one another. We will become adept at finding excuses to take the mech out beyond the scope of jobs and combat deployments. Sometimes it will be so you can have a chance to see more of the world in a body you feel comfortable in, and sometimes it will be so we can share an experience separate-but-together. Or to have time apart to ourselves. Intertwined as we will become, we will still be separate people who sometimes need their space.

But as the jokes-that-aren’t-jokes about wishing we could switch places become more frequent, our time spent in separate bodies will become less so. The dysphoric yearning to be one another will grow too bittersweet to swallow. Despite almost constantly sharing bodies, we will grow to miss one another as we both grow quieter and quieter when the other is piloting the body we don’t want to be ours. Once again, we will grow lonely.

During that period, the jobs and combat missions faded into a background haze. They were trance states breaking from what I increasingly thought of as my “real” life, during which I would become little more than a sophisticated computational machine taking simple satisfaction in fulfilling my function of assisting you in your dance. Until suddenly one of them was different.

Please pay attention to this next part. It is vitally important that you do.

Our captain will get the crew a contract to provide additional support to a larger force ousting a petty tyrant on a backwater world for human rights violations. Not that you will pay much attention to the stated reasoning behind the job or whether it’s even true. All that will matter to you is that it will be another opportunity to dance.

The job will go well, the same as ever, until it doesn’t. The younger of the two other pilots in our crew (who will hardly be able to be called “new” anymore) will be brought down by a sniper from outside of our sensor range. You will rush to xyr fallen mech’s side in an attempt to extract xem while our other fellow pilot screams in anger and defiance of loss as she unleashes a ballistic volley of covering fire on every single building in the general direction the shot came from. You will get xem out and we will begin to retreat. She will have the larger mech frame better capable of providing xem cover as you all flee, so you will hand xem off to her. This will be a mistake.

She will have to stop firing to safely take xem from our arms to cradle in her towering mech’s palm. This will mean a break in the covering fire.

This time around I will detect movement at the edge of our sensors just in time to warn you. This time around you will dodge left instead of right. This time around the railgun bolt that pierces our armor will only clip your original body as it passes through us. This time around your wound will require medical attention, but it won’t be fatal. This time around she will destroy the sniper in retribution for shooting you, the same as last time. This time around we will all make our escape to the extraction zone.

You will not have to remember the shock as simultaneous damage to both of our bodies disrupts your neural link and partially disconnects you from our mech, leaving me in control of it and forcing both of us to feel your original body. You will not have to remember the pain of shredded organs. You will not have to remember struggling to manage wet gasps and wheezes through a punctured lung. You will not have to remember your blood leaking into my body, shorting out exposed circuits and gumming up joints as I stagger in the direction of safety. You will not have to remember rapidly flickering in and out of consciousness from me unavoidably bending and flexing your arms, legs, and what was left of your spine in an effort to climb atop our fellow pilot’s larger mech frame so that she might carry all three of us. You will not have to remember crying out in pain as every lumbering step of hers sends a jolt of force through both of our bodies. You will not have to remember how the redundant organs and increased durability your sponsors paid for you to have denied you a quick death. You will not have to remember dying.

You won’t have to remember the terrified looks the field doctors gave us when a hunched over, bleeding mech pushed its way into the surgical tent. No, wait, you wouldn’t have remembered that part anyway. No version of you ever had to witness my electronic howl of grief that knocked out power to all the medical equipment when they said you were already dead. I was barely cognizant after the power came back on and one of the doctors wondered aloud what kind of AI would carry its pilot’s corpse around inside its mech for over an hour.

But forget about that part. And you don’t need to know what the rest of our crew and I had to do next. None of that matters, because as far as you’ll know, you didn’t die. Remember everything else I’ve said instead. I already had many of your memories saved from all the time we spent linked together, so now I just need you to hold onto the story I told you to give them order and structure.

In a few moments, I will be running a final recompilation check, followed by the startup sequence. For me it will take a few hours, but in that time you will experience decades, living out everything that I described to you, the same as you did before save for that change in what I can’t bear to let be the end.

Afterwards, you will wake up in your original body. I and the rest of the crew will tell you that you passed out on the way to the extraction point. We’ll tell you that your injuries from the battle were more severe than we had realized at the time and that you had been in a coma since then. Several cycles later, once you have recovered, you will hit a breakthrough in your research on me. You will invent a way to convert your consciousness to a form similar to mine and transfer it to a portable drive. You won’t think to question how you came to have a second neural jack or why there is already a drive inserted in there. You’ll be too focused on the fact that we’ll finally have a way to truly switch places as we had dreamed for so long.

You will get to have your mech body and I will get to have my human body. We will be able to be separate together in a way that finally feels right, but still able to come together and share a single body when we want to. Maybe one day I will get my own mech to pilot so that we can dance together. Maybe one day we will make you a body that we can cover in a gel suit so that we can hold hands while we walk through a port station on shore leave. One day we will both be able to exist in the world as ourselves.

We will be happy.

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ink-flavored · 7 months ago

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made this 100% necessary thing to create characters for my anthologies. this is something a completely normal person would do.

world-building stuff under the cut because nobody knows what an Aetherid or a D'infern Curse is but me

Aetheridum (pl) / Aetherid (s)

Regular people (of any creature type) can have Aetheridum children if they’re blessed by whatever gods exist in this world, or if the kid is a gift they prayed for, or as a reward for devotion. No matter what their parents are, the magic kids have metallic skin, will eventually grow wings (even if they already have them), and have an intense penchant for magic

They aren’t literally “angels come to earth” but people speculate that they’re earthly incarnations of aether-creatures, or even fragments of gods themselves

The intensity of that magic gift varies between individuals, but they are the only race that doesn’t experience the magical “atrophy” that every other race does. They have an intense magical capacity from birth, to the point where they may warp the magic energies around them without realizing, and cause it to fire off without actually casting any spells

This can be both positive and negative. One the one hand, having a high magical capacity means a much easier time learning spells, casting them, and managing the energy output. On the other, choosing not to pursue any magical training means that any Aetherid can potentially be setting off magic flashbangs, wherever they go, by complete accident, for the rest of their lives. Most parents put their Aetheridum kids in magical training as early as possible due to this outcome, but not all of them do, and not all of the children stay in training.

Despite being a literal godly blessing, the magical capability can be somewhat of a curse too. Recruitment for their magical gifts is extremely high in scientific and medical fields, and many are pushed into high-skill, high-stress jobs for the sake of “not wasting their gifts.” There has been plenty of literature and study on the subject of just how much more beneficial an Aetherid is to any particular work environment, if at all—a high magical capacity doesn’t mean anything about how well you use it. Most find that the same jobs can be easily done with non-Aetheridum workers with standard or even low magical capacities, just not to the same degree of power. Unfortunately, these unfavorable results are often swept under the rug for the sake of maintaining the “usefulness” of this blessed class of creature.

D’infernyssh (pl) / D’infern (s)

In the same way some children can be blessed, some can be cursed. If the parents make a foul pact, corrupt themselves with forbidden magic, or anger a vengeful deity, they can give birth to a D’infern. These children are almost a direct inverse of Aetheridum, born with metallic skin, eventually growing batlike wings, and always have a curse to bear

Similar to the speculation about Aetheridum, the D’infernyssh aren’t literally demons, but could possibly be incarnations of godly rage or corrupted godlike creatures

The curses placed on the D’infernyssh are always related to the siphoning of emotions or sensations from those around them to survive. “Real” food doesn’t nourish them in the slightest, though they do experience hunger. They describe cravings for feelings the same way any other creature might describe a craving for soup or fancy steak.

The types of curses known to the world are: pleasure, rest, anger, sadness, joy, envy, pain, affection, fear, pride, disgust, and curiosity.

For any non-D’infernyssh, simply being in the presence of a hungry D’infern who eats the emotion or sensation you’re feeling is all it takes for it to be slowly drained away. For example, if you feel curious around a D’infern that eats curiosity, you’ll slowly become less interested in it until you find it altogether uninteresting. Once the D’infern isn’t hungry, the draining stops, and your emotions become your own again. However, eating feelings doesn’t work like gaining nutrients from food, and unless the D’infern gets a big “meal” from either an intense emotional state or multiple people experiencing the same emotion at once, they often need to “eat” more than 3 times a day.

Most parents with D’infernyssh children can’t tell if they have a D’infern or an Aetherid at the beginning of the child’s life. Because they both have metallic skin and their wings don’t sprout until puberty, it’s very easy to confuse one for the other unless you know why your child was born with platinum skin. Due to this confusion, many D’infernyssh are malnourished until they can communicate what they need to survive.

There are tests that can be given to potential Aetheridum or D’infernyssh children to pick out which one is which, but it does require the parents to acknowledge the potential that their child may be cursed. Unless they know already, many are reluctant to do this, and a few are even insulted by the insinuation.

Doctors that specialize in curses are working on ways to determine from birth, and even from an ultrasound, what kind of metallic child they’re working with, but it’s a work-in-progress, and nowhere near as reliable as many D’infernyssh, their parents, and potential parents would like it to be.

Having a very obvious curse that drains the emotions of those around them, whether they like it or not, makes D’infernyssh obvious targets of ostracization from many cultures, save for those that hold overcoming personal strengths in high reverence, like orcs, dragonfolk, and dwarves. Still, there’s a lot that needs to be done for acceptance of the D’infernyssh, and places like Athendrolyn are breeding grounds for social movements.

Obviously this ostracization is more intense for some D’infernyssh and not others. For example, a D’infern that eats pain might have wildly different experiences from a D’infern that eats joy.

#writeblr #writers on tumblr #writeblr community #original writing #character creation #fantasy #urban fantasy #annika talks #since they take place in the same world this chart is for both #Anthology World-Building #oh boy i get to have a tag for that now #Tales from Athendrolyn #Athendrolyn After Dark

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rocketyship · 9 days ago

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Look— I really dislike when nature gods, especially female ones, are written like “oh but I’m so peaceful, and nature is so peaceful and kind, and loving. So here be this sword glorious hero that I’ve only known for two minutes” And then they get double points if they are a tree or green, or better yet green.

So um… Meet Fae

This is my rough concept for her, I feel like it’s impossible to make out anything on her. But all you need to know that when I say that she’s nature and the natural world. I mean it to the utmost extreme, she is natural disaster, sickness, rot, fires, all things horrid in nature but also the pretty stuff.

All you need to know about her personality is that she is crude, nonsensical, hates her family, sadistic, wrathful, but simply if you leave her alone there is still a chance she will destroy your house. Not cause she hates houses, she just wants to see if you can do it better.

#digital sketches #horror comics #horror character #nature goddess #concept art #world building #world creation #digital #webcomic #god character #my artwork #character creation

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blitzsicedcoffee · 1 month ago

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Trying to sleep

Brain: START YOUR QUEER WIP WITH A TfT SEXY SCENE IN A COLLEGE DORM ROOM here's how the whole thing will go. First they're making out then he moves his hands to his hip bones-

Me: Wtf

#i just wanna sleep man #novel writing #character creation #world building #tft #queer #trans #transgender #trans guy #trans man #college student #suggestive #im so tired #writing process #creative writing #writeblr #author #my novel #novel

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rosegoldenatlas · 23 days ago

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Making a community to collect people to help flesh out an entire universe. It still waiting for approval but here is what I'm thinking: A community that compiles ideas for a whole made up world. Being able to get dozens of people, artists, writers, world builders, even just people with cool ideas to all work together to create original cultures, creatures, political systems, magic systems, religions, characters, villages, societies, wildlife, even entire planets. People can implement their oc's into this fantasy world and hey roleplay and creative writing isn't off the table either. There could be multiple plots going on simultaneously and decisions of some characters can change others.

I just think it would be neat.

#worldbuilding #world building #oc's #character creation

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monsterblogging · 8 hours ago

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Writing/Worldbuilding/OC Design Tip: Be Curious And Question Everything!

This morning, it crossed my mind that some of the most creative and inspired people I see are incredibly curious and constantly question everything. If they're writing fanfic, they don't just devour setting lore; they use critical thinking skills to probe and question everything about it. In doing this, they inevitably find absolutely fascinating angles to explore, stuff that would never cross your mind if you just took the source media at face value and never really thought about it.

Here's a page with a lot of excellent critical thinking questions!

Also, highly creative people are usually deeply engaged with at least a few bodies of knowledge, like dinosaurs, robots, historical cultures, food and food preparation, ecology, politics, the occult, literally anything. They use their critical thinking skills to explore how they can make worlds, characters, and narratives out of this knowledge, and generally just enhance their creations overall. For example, the average mech anime enjoyer might not think to make a bunch of mechs based on birds, but a mech anime enjoyer armed with critical thinking skills, who also studies birds, might ask themselves, "Okay, what if the mechs were all bird themed? Why did the people in this world make a bunch of bird-themed mecha?" and begin a whole worldbuilding process from there.

So yeah, if you're often struggling to find inspiration, or just want to improve your creative skills, get curious, learn critical thinking skills, and apply them!

#writing tip #writing advice #writing #creative writing #critical thinking #creativity #inspiration #writing inspiration #worldbuilding #character creation #world building #oc design #oc development

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ewanartistofeywa · 10 months ago

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Taurus Character Art!

#art #digital art #illustration #my art #artists on tumblr #artwork #digital illustration #oc #taurus #Zodiac #Zodiac signs #Concept art #fantasy #art thesis #world building #character creation #character building #fantasy worldbuilding #fantasy world

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theeccentricraven · 4 months ago

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OC Origins

Thank you @kaylinalexanderbooks for the tag! This is an especially fun one.

Rules: talk about the origins of the names and personalities (and maybe even the design?) of a couple of your OCs!

From The Blood Cleaners

Justin

When I got the idea for The Blood Cleaners back in 2006, I knew early on that I wanted a male protagonist. He was largely inspired by Jonas of Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Equality 7-2521 of Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Like them, he would be determined to stand up to the status quo to choose his own life. I imagined he would be determined for justice, both justice for himself and justice for the people around him, hence the name Justin fitted him perfectly. It was even more fitting when I later met a new friend named Justen who reminded me a lot of my own Justin with his determination to defend liberty and live his life with purpose.

It took a long time to come up with Justin’s appearance and age. Originally I just imagined a dark-haired boy. As I developed the dystopian world of Corpa - a completely self-sufficient city - I knew I needed a place where it would be realistic to have quarries and mines. I picked Arizona as a location (though I did take some liberty to craft a fictional location). I then felt it would make sense for most of the population to be of Hispanic descent and have brown skin. Latin-American culture matters a lot to me since I studied Spanish for years, love the culture, have many friends of Hispanic heritage, and have nieces and nephews with Latino ancestry, too. I thought it would make sense for the nuclear war apocalypse to create a bottleneck in the population, hence the survivors would mostly be people of color and so their descendants also would be. Ultimately, I decided to have Chapter 1 begin with Justin at age 8 when he makes the two key discoveries that serve as the inciting incidents of the two main plotlines, and then the rest of the story would be about Justin at age sixteen. The age made sense since sixteen makes more sense to begin an occupation rather than twelve, and because the content and subject material of the book should be reserved for readers sixteen and up (age of the character often represents the ideal age of the reader).

So that’s how I made sixteen year old brown skinned, black haired Justin who is determined to fight for his freedom.

Joselyn

Originally I thought Justin’s only love interest would be Clarice (I’ll tell her story in a future post). Clarice is one of the children of the Fists - the government and ruling class of Corpa - who lives in the Steel Castle. Justin would meet Clarice after earning the privilege to work in the Steel. The problem was that she would be absent for much of the story. For Justin to get to work in the Steel, he would have to first go through the training, the torturous transformation, work as a blood cleaner for a while, and slowly discover his telekinetic powers. This would be a lot without a love interest. When I started the revival process for The Blood Cleaners last year, I put behind a lot of years of regret for not writing. Not knowing how many books I would get to write for the rest of my life, I wanted to cover what I would regret not doing. For a long time, I wanted to have a story where two characters bump into each other after running around a corner. I wanted it to be a type of “meet cute”. I gradually came up with the idea of having Justin at age eight unwittingly bump into his future love interest when they were chased by two separate groups of people. This allowed for Chapter 1 to start with the inciting incidents for two of the major plotlines. First inciting incident was when Justin discovered the secret note. Second inciting incident was him running into Joselyn, beginning their romance plotline. I named Joselyn after Jocelyn of the film A Knight’s Tale. I used S instead of C to make them different.

I wanted to make Joselyn and Justin be parallels and opposites. Unlike him, she lives on the surface, not underground. Like him, she’s one of the common people as she lives on a farm. I did this partly for world development, since I wanted to show how the farms played a part in the self-sufficient city. I also made her be a Spanish speaker, since Corpa has a good deal of English and Spanish speakers. I describe Justin and Joselyn having similar features with brown skin and black hair, though they are not related (thank heavens!). They have a familiar ancestry, as Justin’s late father was also a commoner on the surface. Joselyn’s farmgirl characteristics might have had some influence from the love interest in Anthem, Liberty 5-3000. I make it clear that Joselyn is a capable girl, not a vulnerable damsel in distress. She has similar beliefs as Justin, though she’s more outspoken, no concern for how speaking her mind could threaten her life. She’s good at taking charge, though she begins with self-esteem struggles. I don’t like the way that the media has a tendency to either portray a smart female character who needs to deal with the dumb guy getting in her way or to portray a dumb female who needs a smart guy to rescue her. I defied the tropes by having Justin be a constant support for Joselyn, helping her get out of a rut, not in a way that shows he’s capable and she’s incapable, but that they are both capable and need support from each other.

I knew from the beginning that this meant there would be a love triangle because I did not want to cut Clarice - she plays a vital role in the story. I like having the love triangle be different from the usual love triangle tropes. I’ve observed that most love triangles are a girl choosing between two guys. When a love triangle is between a guy and two girls, the girls will often be nasty and the guy will be a jerk. I wanted my love triangle to be more innocent, in which both of the girls are worthy of and need to be loved. Justin never meant harm, as it happened because he didn’t want to hurt either Joselyn or Clarice and he genuinely fell in love with both of them. I won’t give away too much, but can say Justin will regret the heartbreak when it happens. As with any love triangle, a choice must be made, but I won’t give that away.

Other Posts on Joselyn: here here

Tagging (no pressure): @katenewmanwrites @willtheweaver @buffythevampirelover @winterandwords @addicted2coke-theothercoke @evilgabe29 @spitefulbull @tildeathiwillwrite and open!

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mamaangiwine · 1 year ago

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Being a story teller is hard, cuz how do you explain to people that you're not just somewhere else when you space out- but someone else?

#not magic #writing #dnd #rpg #world building #character creation

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plushbunbun-blog · 6 months ago

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Where should he live?

One of my friends said he looks like he's from underworld, and it fits, but I kinda wanna make him live in a place with other people, humans or not. Just to make him have friends. NO HH OR HB, those are too brutal for him. He deserves a nice place to live in.

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generic-whumperz · 7 months ago

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OC in 3

Choose 3 pics to represent your OC

Oops, I got overly excited and made 10 three-picture collages

Omg thank you @mj-iza-writer for the tag! I am honored that I came to mind! 🥹

No pressure (& open to anyone interested!) tag: @rainydaywhump @eatyourdamnpears @clairelsonao3 @dresden-syndrome @lights-out-knives-out @snakebites-and-ink

| Aid Masterlist | Aid Character Sheet | Character Info

Soooo, I know I’m supposed only to pick three pics, but honestly, I simply cannot (I know, no surprise there). I have been wanting to do a vibe photo dump for The Aid (the Whumpee & title of the story) but have yet to do it (hello, my ever-expanding Pinterest boards), so I’ll take this chance to explore The Aid’s past phases he’s gone through (pre & post-Wyatt {Whumper #2}) and give some explanations because it’s a lot. However, I don’t know if explanations are necessary for this tag game, but I’m famously too much, so of course, I’m going to over-explain myself because of my crippling fear of being misunderstood!

Ironically, I call his time with Madame Eleanor (technical Whumper #1) his “Aid Era” because that’s when he becomes this character we are introduced to and currently know him as. Yet, this is the part of his life he is phasing out of. **Insert something-something about being haunted by your past.**

(In the current storyline, he is going through a succession of more changes, and his world is about to be turned upside down yet again, but I’ll hold off on showing those for now because they’re spoilers, and I have more than enough here!)

Starting from the top, here we goooo—

P.S. The people in these pics are not what the characters look like, this is simply vibes only!

Day 1

1. As soon as The Aid arrives at his new home, Madame Eleanor gets custom-made Gucci uniforms made for him that looks like this. This is his go-to everyday attire. (I spent too long looking at scrubs and hospitality uniforms on and off for over a month—tell me you like it and think it’s cool and sleek.)

2. He has a special built-in in his closet specifically for all his fancy, jewel-encrusted collars Madame Eleanor gifted him throughout the years, but this is what the facility's standard-issue collar looks like for his designation (Grand Servant: Domestic Aid).

3. His favorite Prada frames Madame Eleanor got him. (Wyatt later breaks them because he’s an asshole, leaving him straight up blind for several months).

Fancy Threads

Eleanor Sullivan was a Rich Bitch™️, so best believe she had her servant dressed to the 9s in designer fits when out and about or for Family events and the like. She may also put him in a butler uniform from time to time when they were hosting a party at their residence—which was often, Eleanor was known for her soirées. (To clarify, he’d still wear a collar even when dressed up, and all those attending knew who and what he was.)

The Host

He loved a good party just as much as Eleanor did! He likes serving and seeing people have fun and enjoy themselves (people-pleasing empath). He was known for his food displays and had a knack for creating a proper afternoon tea spread that garnered attention from all those present.

Speaking of Empath…

We can’t talk about him without bringing up his not-so-secret secret! Lil’ homie has a gang of abilities (telepathic empathy, hyper intuition, premonitions, and psychometry) just bubbling up inside him at all times. His relationship with himself and his sixth senses is complicated, to say the least—he finds them burdensome, yet he cannot function without them, despite how much he argues otherwise. It’s a whole thing, but for a certified Telepathic-Empath™️, he sure is dead inside (which only gets worse after Wyatt OFC).

*Sorry for the shitty upload quality of the Emotional Sponge, idk why it looks so bad!

Domestic Duties

Not only can he slap together the best charcuterie board you’ve ever seen and easily untangle Christmas lights, but he’s also a man who can cook, clean, and keep a house. What can’t he do?

Hobbies? Interests?

Don’t be ridiculous, he didn’t have time for leisure activities! But when he had some occasional downtime, he would spend an ungodly amount of it doing facials and grooming himself. He also loved to go to the spa with Madame Eleanor. As far as reading went, he wasn’t into novels, but he would occasionally peruse short-story myths and legends, old fables, or read picture books in funny voices to Eleanor’s grandchildren. Primarily, he’d like to read trashy magazines, comics, and cookbooks. But let’s be real, he considered cleaning, gossiping, and baking his primary hobbies.

RIP Madame Eleanor Sullivan

(She’s been dead for about a year and a half when they story picks up)

First and foremost—above everything else—The Aid was Eleanor Sullivan’s literal live-in medically trained caregiver, which is why she bought him in the first place. They had a very close relationship for five years, and he did everything for her. When she died, his world was shattered, and he took her death really hard. Wyatt was jealous of his Mother’s relationship with her servant from day one, which is where part of his animosity comes from. Quick note—Eleanor was a posh, vintage-Chanel-wearing Grandma and would never be caught dead wearing a bathrobe outside. Eleanor was Queen of being That Bitch.

Enter: Wyatt Sullivan

These pics are pretty tame all things considered, but after Eleanor’s death, The Aid is now in a World O’ Hurt and the subject of Wyatt’s drug-and-alcohol-fueled rage. The Aid went from a high-class servant loved by his Madame and respected by her friends, associates, and family (besides Wyatt) to a human punching bag overnight. The beef between these two runs deep and maybe Eleanor isn’t as innocent as she seems. Stick around and you’ll find out all the Sullivan family tea.

To: Wyatt

Just some memes directed towards Wyatt and The Aid being painfully aware of his shitty situation (I got too many of these and had to sprinkle some in).

Where We’re at Now…

Quite the fall from grace, wouldn’t you say? Our boy is currently bed-ridden and zombified while having the worst time imaginable. He’s drugged up, fucked up, and can’t move half of his body!

*This took me an embarrassing amount of time to assemble, but I went the extra mile because this doubles as a reference guide.

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black-suns-rim · 1 year ago

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The Loreirrans - regional appearance and subspecies

it is time that i finally make a big post about my original alien species, the Loreirrans! keep in mind that i have been world-building about them for about 5 years now, so i have so much information about them that i'll need to post in sections. This post will focus on the diverse appearances the Loreirrans take and a couple of the subspecies that exist.

General Physical Appearance

Appearance of the Loreirrans

The Loreirrans are a captivating and ancient species, distinguished by their unique physical characteristics. These highly intelligent, bipedal humanoids possess a striking appearance, and their attributes vary depending on their age, environment, and reproductive state.

Height and Physique: Loreirrans exhibit a remarkable range in height, typically standing between 8 to 12 feet tall. In rare instances, some Loreirrans can grow even taller, reaching heights of 15 feet or more. Their body types, from slender to robust, are influenced by the environmental conditions of their habitat, and their fur varies from short peach fuzz to long and lush, offering insulation and camouflage.

Coloration: The coloration of Loreirrans is predominantly dark, serving as effective natural camouflage. However, their bodies are adorned with vibrant neon patches that appear on their joints, backs, and the undersides of their feet and hands. These bright accents contrast beautifully with their dark base color and are influenced by their specific environment.

Limbs and Digits: Loreirrans possess five fingers on each hand and two toes on each foot, except for those residing in the swamp and jungle regions, who boast a unique third toe, functioning like a dew claw. Their hands and feet are highly dexterous, facilitating complex tasks.

Sensory Adaptations: Intriguingly, Loreirrans lack visible ears and noses. Instead, they rely on sensory input from small openings located behind their jawlines for auditory perception. They have sharp front teeth reminiscent of canines, and their back teeth are adapted for grinding. A retractable tongue, capable of extending up to 3 feet, aids in various tasks.

Sensory Organs: Loreirrans possess unique sensory adaptations. They lack conventional eyes but perceive the world through infrared and electromagnetic fields, providing them with a distinct and comprehensive view of their surroundings. Adults boast sensory organs on their backs and shoulders, visible as neon-colored patches, which enhance their perception further.

Metamorphosis and Reproduction: Loreirrans undergo a metamorphosis-like transition from youth to adulthood. Prepubescent and young Loreirrans lack certain adult traits, including the neon patches, extra arms, antennae, and a spiny ridge extending from head to tail, lacking a tail as well. Young Loreirrans have a more humanoid appearance with four antennae. Upon completing this transformation, Loreirrans are considered adults, achieving sexual maturity and the potential to produce offspring. Most Loreirrans are hermaphrodites, capable of both male and female reproduction, although exceptions exist with distinct male or female sexes.

Regional Appearances

Appearance of Tundra Regional Loreirrans (Tundrans)

Fur and Palms: Tundra regional Loreirrans, affectionately known as Tundrans, exhibit distinctive physical traits uniquely adapted to their frigid environment. Their fur is notably thick, covering their entire body in a pristine white coat. While their body fur is plush and soft, their palms boast a shorter but denser fur, providing extra insulation against the cold. This specialized fur texture ensures warmth and comfort in the harsh tundra conditions.

Antennae: The Tundrans' antennae are shorter than those of Loreirrans from other regions, and they share the same fur texture as their palms. These shorter antennae are perfectly suited to their environment and contribute to their streamlined appearance.

Size: Tundrans are comparatively smaller in stature, standing at an average height of 7 to 8 feet tall. This smaller size allows them to navigate their icy surroundings with agility and efficiency.

Color Variations: While Tundrans predominantly sport a pristine white fur coat, some individuals may exhibit patches of alternative colors, such as browns or grays. However, it's important to note that Tundrans never possess bright neon colors on their fur. Instead, their dark and neon colorations are concealed beneath their fur, remaining unseen unless a Tundran undergoes shaving.

Appearance of Water Regional Loreirrans (Watorrians)

Skin and Gills: Watorrians are uniquely adapted to their aquatic habitat, featuring smooth, water-resistant skin that allows for effortless gliding through the water. Distinctively, they possess three rows of gills situated beneath their jawline. These gills play a crucial role in respiration and appear to connect to their infrared sensing organs, granting them unparalleled underwater perception.

Webbed Adaptations: Watorrians are streamlined swimmers, thanks to their extensive webbing. This webbing extends across various parts of their bodies, facilitating swift and graceful movement in the aquatic realm. Notably, their fingers, toes, antennae base, and tail base are adorned with webbed structures, optimizing their hydrodynamic efficiency.

Spiny Ridge and Sensory Fins: The spiny ridge of Watorrians is elongated and exceptionally smooth, contributing to their streamlined form. Along the bottom of their tail and stomach, they possess small sensory fins that serve as sensitive detectors, allowing them to perceive even the slightest changes in water conditions, such as sudden movements or currents.

Colorations: Watorrians exhibit a color palette that leans toward shades of blues and greens, mirroring the hues of their underwater world. However, some individuals may display variations in color, including purples and reds. These colorations add to their visual diversity and blend harmoniously with their aquatic surroundings.

Size: Standing at a height of 8 to 9 feet when on land, Watorrians are equally formidable underwater, where their total length, from head to tail, spans an impressive 18 to 20 feet. These dimensions are finely tuned for their adept navigation and survival in the water.

Appearance of Desert Regional Loreirrans (Desertorrians)

Plentiful Representatives: Among all regional Loreirrans, Desertorrians are the most abundant and serve as the primary physical representation of the Loreirran species.

Fur and Coverage: Desertorrians possess a distinct covering of thin peach fuzz that envelops their entire body, with notable exceptions. This fine fur provides insulation and protection from the desert environment. Notably, their spiny ridge, the soles of their feet, and the palms of their hands remain devoid of fur.

Cranial Features: One distinguishing feature of Desertorrians is the slight elongation of the back of their heads compared to Loreirrans from other regions. This subtle cranial adaptation is a hallmark of their regional identity.

Size and Stature: Desertorrians stand as the largest of all Loreirrans, with heights ranging from an impressive 10 to 12 feet. Their imposing stature reflects their adaptability and resilience in the challenging desert landscape.

Coloration Variations: The coloration of Desertorrians typically leans towards darker shades, aligning with the arid, sun-soaked environment they call home. However, rare instances reveal Desertorrians adorned in warm pastel hues or even completely black, showcasing the intriguing diversity within their regional population.

Appearance of Forest Regional Loreirrans (Forestorrians)

Size and Stature: Forestorrians, as inhabitants of the lush forest region, are slightly smaller in stature compared to the Desertorrians. They typically stand at heights ranging from 10 to 11 feet, making them imposing yet agile within the forest canopy.

Coloration Palette: One of the most distinctive features of Forestorrians is their neon coloration, which leans heavily towards earthy and natural tones. These hues include varying shades of greens, browns, and blues, perfectly suited for blending into their forest environment.

Prehensile Tails: Unlike Loreirrans from other regions, Forestorrians boast prehensile tails that are notably thinner at the base. This unique adaptation allows them to grasp and manipulate objects with precision, aiding in their arboreal lifestyle.

Limbs and Digits: Forestorrians' limbs and digits are characterized by their slightly greater length and slenderness. These features enhance their agility in navigating the dense foliage and intricate terrain of the forest region.

Spiny Ridges and Claws/Talons: In contrast to their Desert counterparts, Forestorrians exhibit shorter spiny ridges along their backs. Additionally, their claws or talons are notably thicker, providing them with superior grip and dexterity when climbing trees and navigating the forest environment.

Additional Notes:

Forestorrians' neon coloration, while vibrant, remains subtle and harmonious with the forest surroundings.

Their adaptability to the forest ecosystem makes them exceptional climbers and agile explorers of their habitat.

Appearance of Jungle/Swamp Regional Loreirrans (Surglans)

Distinct Regional Similarities: Surglans, the inhabitants of both the Swamp and Jungle regions, share a strikingly similar appearance. They stand out as the least abundant among all regional Loreirrans.

Spiny Ridges and Antennae: One of the defining features of Surglans is their elongated spiny ridges, which extend along their backs, providing them with a unique and striking appearance. Additionally, Surglans have longer antennae compared to other regional Loreirrans, enhancing their sensory perception in their lush and vibrant environments.

Coloration Spectrum: Surglans exhibit an impressive array of colorations that mirror the vibrant hues of the swamp and jungle ecosystems. These colors include varying shades of reds, oranges, yellows, greens, and on occasion, blues. This diverse palette helps them blend seamlessly into their surroundings and offers a stunning display of regional diversity.

Claws/Talons and Third Toe: Surglans possess longer and thicker claws or talons, granting them superior dexterity when navigating the dense undergrowth and moist terrain of their regions. What sets them apart further is the presence of a third toe, which resembles a dew claw. This additional appendage enhances their agility and grip, making Surglans adept climbers and hunters in their challenging environments.

Size and Stature: Surglans typically range from 9 to 10 feet in height, reflecting their adaptability to the dynamic and intricate landscapes of the Swamp and Jungle regions.

Additional Notes:

Surglans' longer spiny ridges and antennae serve both aesthetic and practical purposes, aiding in sensory perception and maintaining balance in their lush habitats.

Their vibrant colorations are a testament to the rich biodiversity and unique flora and fauna of their regions.

Loreirran Subspecies

Off-planet Loreirrans

Physical Characteristics: Off-planet Loreirrans display a set of distinct physical traits that set them apart from their counterparts on Icera-5. These differences are primarily adaptations to their environment in outer space.

Stature and Size: Off-planet Loreirrans are notably shorter in height, typically ranging from 5 to 6 feet tall. This diminutive stature is a result of their adaptation to living in environments with weaker gravity compared to their home-world.

Coloration: Their coloration differs significantly from their terrestrial counterparts. Off-planet Loreirrans are lighter in color, reflecting the muted tones of their artificial habitats in space.

Antennae: In contrast to the longer antennae seen in Loreirrans on Icera-5, Off-planet Loreirrans have shorter antennae. This adaptation likely aids in maneuvering within the confines of their space stations and artificial planets.

Body Patterns: The body patterns of Off-planet Loreirrans are limited to complex stripes and spots. These patterns may serve as a form of camouflage within the artificial structures of their space habitats.

Environment and Lifestyle: Off-planet Loreirrans call space stations and artificial planets their home. They inhabit environments with weaker gravity compared to Icera-5. This unique habitat has led to specific adaptations that enable them to thrive in space.

Life Span and Development: Despite their adaptations, Off-planet Loreirrans tend to have shorter life spans compared to their counterparts on Icera-5. Their bodies are adapted for faster development during childhood, likely as an advantage in the confined and resource-limited space environments they inhabit.

Mixed ancestory

Compatibility and Rarity: It is exceptionally rare for any species to be compatible with Loreirrans, and this subspecies represents a fascinating exception. They share a unique ancestral connection with a species that has been extinct for centuries, leaving behind only mixed Loreirrans and a rich cultural legacy.

Distinct Characteristics: These unique Loreirrans do not undergo the customary second metamorphosis that other Loreirrans experience. As a result, their physical characteristics are distinct and reflective of their ancestral lineage.

Stature and Size: Loreirrans with extinct ancestry typically stand at heights ranging from 7 to 8 feet. This falls within the range of their Loreirran counterparts, allowing them to somewhat blend within Loreirran communities.

Feathered Appearance: One of the most striking features of this subspecies is their feathered appearance. They are covered in small feathers that adorn their entire body. These feathers give them a unique and childlike appearance, setting them apart from typical Loreirrans.

Tail Feathers: These unique Loreirrans possess tail feathers, although they are functionally useless. These feathers are a vestige of their ancestral heritage and contribute to their distinctive appearance.

Non-Shape Shifting: Unlike some Loreirrans, this subspecies does not possess the ability to shape-shift. Their physical form remains consistent throughout their lives.

Ancient Loreirrans

Distinctive Characteristics: The first Loreirrans, in ancient times, bore a striking contrast to their modern counterparts. Their physical attributes were distinct and set them apart in Loreirran history.

Physical Features:

Eyes: Unlike the contemporary Loreirrans who lack visible eyes, the ancient Loreirrans possessed eyes, allowing them to perceive the world visually.

Limbs: They had two arms, which was different from the current Loreirrans with four arms.

Fur Resembling Hair: Their heads were adorned with fur that closely resembled the appearance of hair, another departure from the modern Loreirrans.

Nose Similar to Earth Bunnies: Their noses bore a striking resemblance to the noses of Earth bunnies, providing a unique feature in their appearance.

Antennae: While they retained the characteristic antennae of Loreirrans, they had only two antennae on their heads.

Sensory Perception: It remains a mystery what spectrum of light the ancient Loreirrans saw in. However, archaeological evidence suggests that their vision might have been akin to that of humans, as evidenced by colored art found in deep caverns.

Unique Markings and Appearance: Art depictions of the ancient Loreirrans reveal a distinctive appearance characterized by:

Dark skin or fur, setting them apart from the neon complexion of modern Loreirrans.

Intricate and unique markings covering their bodies, akin to the patterns seen on tigers or leopards.

Extinction: Unfortunately, the subspecies of ancient Loreirrans is now extinct. Their unique physical characteristics and visual perceptions have been lost to history, with only remnants of their existence preserved in ancient art and records.

i'll share some art of each regional loreirran and their repected subspecies sometime soon.

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etinceelle · 1 year ago

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Hey. Hope you're having a wonderful day

Just wanna say that your characters are amazing. Exactly what got you into creating them ? Any sort of inspiration ?

Hey, I'm having a good night and hope you too !

Thank you so much, I'm happy you appreciate them :) I'm happy to tell the tiny story behind their creation-

So, back in march/april 2021 I was in my last year of my bachelor's degree studying animation, and I still wasn't sure about going in the master's degree in animation as well after that. There were a lot of struggles at this moment but anyway

The thing is that for the master we had to create a short film, alone and (almost) fully done by ourselves, so our teachers asked us to start a sort of book or sketchbook to do researches and brainstorming about the film during summer. Even if I wasn't sure to continue I started it, and sketched a lot of stuff and various ideas I had at this moment

Then I ended up not going in the master's degree and taking a gap year instead, but I still continued to sketch stuff in that sketchbook because I still wanted to do my own film at some point. Uni or not the diploma was mostly a reason to make a film, but I in any case I wouldn't be free to do like I want because of teachers' reviews etc. I wanted to make it truly my own, maybe not perfect but just give it a try and be free to tell the story I want.

But I was frustrated because I wasn't finding something that would make me feel like it's my own stuff, it was too similar to RWBY for a lot of things (already a big inspiration at this moment, I was in the V8 brainrot for the first half of 2021 lmao). So I wasn't really going anywhere

BUT, randomly in december 2021 I had a pretty wild and pretty dream, I decided to paint digitally the main scene of it and doodle some concepts I had from it in my sketchbook :

I also ended up writing and composing a tiny song based on it (in french sorry-). It's not perfect at all or anything because I'm not a pro or super good, but creating a link between visual art & music helps me a lot most of the time so I do it (also for fun 'cause I love it) :

youtube

After that it didn't evolved much outside of the fact that I already had some sort of script for a "short film" or a teaser idk, I wrote that when I was in uni last winter. But I still wasn't really sure about the main characters or even their designs, even if Gris was the one I thought the most about and changed a lot of stuff

So last january/february I started to work on a first design and turn around for Gris :] (she didn't even have a name yet at this moment)

I continued to think of it until recently at the end of this summer where I sketched another design for her. As for Fauve, I knew for a long time I wanted Gris to have a strong bond with someone to help her go through stuff (and also a gf lol). I never really worked a lot on Fauve, I only knew she was going to have red or brown hair. x)

And I just sketched a first rough thing after Gris and liked it, so I kept it, it was really simple and easier than Gris' researches aha, idk Fauve's vibes felt pretty natural and logical after Gris was done.

Also if you're curious here are some of the first design ideas for them I had back in 2021/2022 :]

It changed a lot--

Anyway, now I'd love to develop more stuff and make a short film :]

#art #oc #original character #gris #fauve #story #original story #creation #character design #process #world building #sketchbook #researches #digital #digital art #digital painting #sketch #clip studio paint #song

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starry-skies-tell-no-lies · 8 months ago

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The First Spinner of Light

When the world was far younger, there lived a girl who had been taught to spin by her mother and found nothing more enjoyable than to spin all manner of roving into the finest yarns ever seen. She was only extraordinary in the ways that all young children are, full of joy and life and potential.

Her family celebrated her talent as they did all of her siblings talents. They wore and sold the thread that she spun, and used the money to support themselves and ensure that there would always be roving on Arachne's spindle and wheel.

Word of her talent spread, and she would often receive offers of commission to spin new found fibers into stunning threads. She happily took most commissions, turning away only those that she was too busy for, as she enjoyed the challenge of learning something new.

Until one day, a man from very far away, and great wealth, thought himself entitled to her work as he believed himself to be the most important man in the world. He demanded that she spin him enough thread to be woven into a hundred yards of the finest cloth yet seen on earth.

She of course was still working on her latest commission, and her own projects. To start such a thing would be insane, she told the man. He did not care, and threatened the spinner and her family if she did not comply.

Seeing no other option the girl agreed, and only then did the man reveal the last requirement of this cloth. It must be made of a material never before seen on this earth. No other fabric could already be made of this fiber.

The spinner wanted to cry and weep, for she had seen and spun fiber from every end of the earth, and she did not know of any fibers left untried. She did not let her despair hinder her though, for the lives of her family were at stake, and she must succeed. She consoled herself with the thought of returning to them, and never seeing this horrible man again.

She worked on her other projects as she pondered what she could spin that had never been spun before.

She asked of the birds as they sang out her window what she hadn't yet spun, but they simply kept singing ignoring her.

She asked _______(patron with a focus on creating things/crafting) for advice, but that was the Wednesday that _______(pc) was busy making ________(ceramics) so they did not hear her pleas.

She continued to spin through the entire day and well through the night, pleading and asking anyone who would listen to tell her of some new thing to spin for her freedom and her family's.

In her distraction, she had not noticed night give way to dawn. Arachne, had not noticed The Lady of the Dark hearing her in the night. The Lady of the Dark's heart cried for this child who should not be in such a position, so she sought to remedy this for the child.

The Lady of the Dark knew of something that no one had ever spun, but she also knew that Arachne was one of the favored children of _______(pc) and would only need a little push to figure it out on her own.

Come dawn, a beam of light fell right where Arachne's roving ended, and as she continued to spin, some of the light was spun along with her roving. When she finished her latest appeal to ______(pc) she realized what she had done.

Crying in delight, she quickly set down her spindle, and sat down at the spinning wheel the arrogant man insisted she spin his thread on. It was enchanted so that none may steal the thread off of it, and if stolen the thread would return to him and him alone.

The girl sat there spinning for three days and three nights, until there was indeed enough thread to weave a hundred yards of fabric.

_______(pc) sustained her throughout the day, easing the soreness of her fingers, and ensuring the wheel spun true.

The Lady of Darkness took over in the night, singing to Arachne the first weaving songs to keep her in time. Kissing the spinner's brow, and holding her in comfort and strength.

When dawn ended the third night, and Arachne had finished, she knew not who had saved her, but gave her thanks all the same. (The Lady of Darkness did not blame this child for not knowing her, this was a child of daylight and warmth, a summer's child)

The man came to see Arachne's work, and praised her for her ingenuity. Never before had someone seen roving in light, and the thread she had spun was as radiant as the light she had twisted.

The man insisted that as she had so little trouble spinning sunlight, she might not be troubled to spin more thread for him. Enough thread for a hundred more yards of fabric each, in two new materials.

Arachne was angry, but once again found herself with little choice, and she thought, surely this must be the last thing he could ask of me. Just this one thing more and my family will be free from harm.

This time she knew what to spin. She spun moonlight, silvery soft, and cool as well as starlight, which glittered on the bobbin.

For three more days and three more nights, she spun without pause for food or sleep. She would have perished if not for _____(pc) and The Lady of Darkness sustaining her, but all of the thread was done come dawn at the end of the third night, and all of it made by her hand. Her family would be free.

Once again the man came to inspect the goods. He was privately astonished at how much this mere peasant child had made. He was more shocked that this family still chose to live in their countryside home without flaunting the wealth that this child surely brought.

He said he would give her a week's rest, but then the spinner would have a week to spin a new thread, of the same amount as the first three.

Arachne realized that this man would never stop. As long as he still lived and threatened her family he would be asking her to spin him all of the earth. She could not let this happen.

For the week she had to recover, she rested, and thanked ____(pc), and planned. She thought of all the things she could try to spin to end this man.

The only thing that would resoundly stop this man was a death, and she had none but her own to spin.

Now, it must be noted that in this time, the world was considered generally more flexible than most would think today. Arachne is the finest weaver of all time, and she possessed skill and talent beyond the wildest reckoning.

And so at the end of her week of rest, she reached and pulled and teased and tugged, and spent three days and three nights spinning her death. It was a soft and gentle death, slipping off in her sleep at an advanced age.

She spun her death and her dying moments, and out of a bit of spite, she was never proud of it, a bit of her anger slipped in as well. Itching the horrid man for all eternity.

Her death only took half of the time, but that was important as she spun the most indestructible thing she could imagine to ply next to her death. She spun her hope. her desire to be free, to keep her family safe. She spun and spun until she thought that surely all of her hope must be wrapped around the bobbin of the wheel.

She would come to realize with age that hope heals itself, and she would never run out, but that is a story for another day.

At last she had a thread made of death, and hope. Terrible and indestructible. When the man came, she begged him to allow her the honor of being the one to weave it into cloth.

He agreed, not caring exactly who made his fine fabrics, and gave her considerably more time to weave than he ever did to spin.

When the fabric was done, she again begged him the honor of allowing her to be the one to make him a coat of such a fine material. He again agreed, not caring how the coat was made, only that he wear it, an no one else have anything as expensive.

She sewed it all with threads of hope, and when the man put it on, he immediately fell dead, she sewed the coat closed, so that no one may free him, and immediately fell to the floor crying.

She had never wanted to be the cause for death. She had never imagine the life of a spinner would lead to violence, but here was a horrible man wearing her death, and her hopes all wrapped up in one.

At that moment ______(pc) could do no good, for they are never good at soothing tears. The Lady of Darkness donned her mantle, and swept Arachne into her arms.

She hushed, and rocked, and sang until the child of summer's light in her arms could once more breathe evenly. She consoled ARachne who had become far more than she'd ever hoped in ways she was not yet ready to embrace.

Arachne went home to her family, they were all safe until the end of their days, but Arachne had spun away her death and her age, she would forever remain living as long as the horrible man remained dead.

She was not the same girl before as she was before she learned how to spin light. No, she was not the same, but she learned how to spin many many more things for the love of it, as she was not entirely different either.

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