I need to stop making alts.

In my headcanon, my SWTOR characters cross paths and form relationships with each other: Agent Asjary was at the same Academy with Quinn and competed with him to be the star pupil which resulted in some glorious hate sex; when they run into each other, she needles him unrelentlessly about being a Sith's lap dog and he mocks her low military rank. Warrior Kezmir hates that someone else has touched her property and is convinced that Vector is just a Quinn fill-in. Vector likes everyone.

Bounty Hunter Torv went to the Academy too, but got booted out early do to discipline issues. He has a crush on every boy - Lohkin, Vector, Quinn, Revel... - and has a habit of running into Trooper Ethrens, who keeps trying to get him to defect to the Republic so they can get married. Ethrens' older sister is a smuggler who does a lot of unsavory deals with the Empire; Cirawel had business with Asjary once, not realizing Az was an Imp spy. Not that Cirawel would have cared. She had a drunken fling with Kaliyo that left some scars and knows of Mako, but she's secretly glad that she doesn't have to work with either of them since they'd both upstage her. She's slowly becoming more loyal to the Republic under the influence of her crew.

Jedi Consular Sade keeps getting tangled in diplomatic issues that Vector is somehow always a part of, and she's convinced that Asjary is an assassin sent to destroy her/the Council. Az doesn't give a shit about Sade, though she has a passing interest in what Iresso has locked up in his head. They crash into each other as they're both escaping from some prison or something, and Sade's like, "you'll never get me, imperial" and Az is like, "brb loling forever."

Kezmir's run into Sade, too, and wants to crush her bones into a fine paste and spread it on crackers. Which is how she feels about most people, though, so Sade doesn't take it personally. Kezmir also wants to destroy Sade's padawan, but mostly out of jealousy because she doesn't have her own apprentice yet.

They stood at attention while he made inspections, two neat lines. When Jorgan got to Iresso, the solider managed to still look pleased with himself, despite the neutral expression. Jorgan ignored it as he searched through Iresso's uniform and bunk. Finding nothing out of order, at least nothing big enough to pull him out for, he finally gave in and motioned to the new tattoo. "You lose a bet, solider?"

Iresso grinned. "Got it in Nar Shaddaa during last shore leave, sir."

"Uh huh. Regulation number 670-1-"

"Refer to hair and cosmetics," he interrupted, then added at Jorgan's stare, "sir. I checked before I had it done."

He was still standing at attention, hands clasped behind him, shoulders flat, head up. And still grinning. Jorgan let that slide; Iresso was a good soldier, stupid personal decisions aside. It was a big one, from cheek down to collar. Some bad interpretation of Zabrak tattoos, Jorgan thought. "Had to be the face, huh."

"Hurt like a bitch, sir," Iresso replied cheerfully.

"You should the one Lir got!" Kaelan called out, and Iresso added with a snicker, "More like where he got it."

Down the line Lir leaned out of attention, shooting Iresso a dirty look. Jorgan snorted. "You can keep that to yourself, Lir."

It started out as pity.

The coldness of Skyrim extended to its people, and even in the crowded city of Windhelm she felt alone. Her entrance had been inauspicious: she’d interrupted a shake-down of sorts; two men intimidating a woman, who’d stood her ground despite the abuse. Things hadn’t improved from there. She walked from the slums to the estates and back through again, pausing at the graveyard, then warming her hands at the blacksmith’s fire.

There was a beggar there, a woman in rags who coughed and shivered, and nearly wept when Inswe fished a septim from her pouch. The guards walked by them like they were invisible.

She found Wylandriah’s soul gem and left the White Phial quickly, pulling her hood up and crossing her arms tight over her chest. Somehow it was colder than Winterhold, even without the snow and wind, and she made her way down the icy stone streets as swiftly as she could, ready to retreat back to the sun-dappled Riften. At the gates was another beggar and when she came closer she recognized him: one of the pair who’d harassed Suvaris.

He thanked her when he took her coin, giving no indication of recognition. But perhaps he couldn’t see her face under her hood. “I could be an elf,” she said, and he frowned down at her.

“Are you?”

She pulled the hood down, exposing her round ears. “Breton. But you couldn’t have known that.”

“No,” he said and stared at the septim lying flat in his wide palm. “Do you want this back?”

It was cold and it was dark, and Inswe was tired of the city and of Nords in general. “No, keep it. Go to the inn, get a warm meal.”

The guards pulled the gates banging closed behind her and Inswe didn’t look back until she’d passed Kynesgrove and all she could see off the city was its walls.

TVTropes whhhhhhy. I've been on this site all morning, ignoring all the work that piled up over the weekend. TVTropes, I wish I could quit you.

The site should have a way to make pages for your own characters. I know that would take a ridiculous amount of space, but unreasonableness aside, it be fun to make cohesive lists of the tropes that your characters, stories, universes make use of.

Commence boring RP shit that I am compelled to compile.
( Read more... )

It was nearly a vacation, and she laughed a bit of the irony of that realization. The Republic certainly knew how to build their prisons - another hallmark of their ineffectiveness.

She searched through the corpse of one of the unlucky guards, rifling through bloody pockets until she found the woman's passcodes. They moved out of the sunlight, back to the relative protection that the large coiling trees gave, and as she leaned against the cool wood, she compared it again to the massive prison the Empire had built to contain it's secrets. If Watcher X had been sent to Belsavis instead of Nar Shaddaa -

It was pointless to extrapolate on the past. Az dusted off her gloves and checked her map. All she could do was keeping moving forward.

...Have been mailed!

Have been mailed! Last postcards of this year. I got a new book of postcards from the MCNY; hope you guys like them!

BB
Working on: Make-out sessions
Word for this chapter: 636

I can totally finish this thing tonight. Congrats to those who have already won!

I can't believe how different my word counts are:

NaNo - 37144
Google Docs - 38118
Written? Kitten! - 38527

I call shenanigans!

BB
Working on: Getting the boys back to school.
Word for this chapter: 283

The plot's gone hay-wire. I'm trying to figure out how much plot this 50k needs to encompass. In my imaginary world of make-believe awesome, this book is part of a series... Just never planned how long this series was going to be. I need to figure out where the story is going to be at 50k so I can sort out the pacing.

Catching up on NaNo this weekend. November's been a busy month - lots of school work and other responsibilities - and now I have to contend with both Skyrim and Skyward Sword. Video games! I ask you!

This draft is awful. Maybe a smidge better than last years, but still eye-bleedingly bad. Most of the cast is nameless (I've got Name, Namer, Dickface, Name, Nambles, Name, and Name-Name), half the word count is from directionless conversation ("What do you want to do today?" "I don't know - What do you want to do?"), and I've jumped forward in time so many times that I completely lost when the story is taking place. And also while I might be able to hit the 50k, the story won't be anywhere near done. So all in all, a relatively successful NaNo! I wish I were one of those people who are able to develop perfect manuscripts, who plot everything in their heads and then merely have to let their fingers walk over the keyboard to get it all down. My method of writing is to vomit up letters and hope that words come out of the mess.

I'm not sure if I'll have time to finish it this year, but I'll be trying NaNo again. I'm Jaeness over there. Going with fantasy, yet again. This idea's been bubbling around in the stew of my brain for the past two years, and I'm excited to try to get it down on paper.

In preparation, and also because I'm a terrible procrastinator, I'm editing my 09 NaNo SQ. I've chopped it to pieces, exorcised the entire middle 10 chapters, and axed a bunch of characters. I hope the editing makes the plot more streamlined and not less interesting. Last year's attempt is a lost cause. It just wasn't meant to be 50,000 words. A long story maybe, or a novella but a novel it ain't. And someday I'll finish draft 3 of my 08 NaNo... Someday.

WriteWay has a free one month trial, so I'm going to see if the bells and whistles can help me better organize my thoughts.

Veld kicked the blanket off in his sleep and Charade grumbled as she pulled it back up from the floor, wrapping it around her shoulders before pressing against Veld's back. She could feel a headache thorbbing behind her eyes - too much wine with dinner - and buried herself deeper in the nest of pillows and sheets, blocking out the sunlight that was making its way gamely through the room's shadows.

When she got up she stumbled through a pile of their clothes, wadded up in clumps where they're thrown them off the night before. She kicked one of Veld's boots off her skirt and dusted it off before yanking it over her legs.

"Oi, where you off to?"

Veld propped himself on one elbow. His eyes were as red as his hair, which was standing up like he'd been struck by lightning, and Charade wondered again why she bothered with him at all. Mornings were for regretting the night before, she thought as she adjusted the skirt around her hips. Maker she needed a drink.

"Well?"

"Winger wants us all back. Someone's been taking out the gang; we need to re-group." She found her shirt under her boot and pulled it free, flapping it clean. Cleaner, at least, she thought as her nose crinkled at the smell. Dust motes floated in air for a moment, and Charade thought of the snow she'd used to play in as a child, when they'd lived in Orlais. But then she shook her head and slipped into her shirt. Didn't do any good to reminisce.

"Come back to bed. Winger won't miss you." Veld stretched his long arms above his head and flexed his sleek muscles, a display she suspected was more for his benefit than hers. Still... Charade grabbed her boots as she walked back to the bed, then sat on the edge. Veld's hands were warm on her back and she let him slide them up her spine, move to her breasts. When he started kneading like he was making bread though, Charade bent down, dislodging his hands, and stuffed her feet into her boots.

He snorted and rolled further away, dragging the blankets with him. Hay poked out from the seems of the mattress ant it scratched under Charade's knees as she worked on the boots laces and buckles. When she was done she stood over Veld, tracing the shape of his lean body under the covers, resting on the bulge between his legs. And then she leaned over him, jamming her hand down on his chest as she grabbed her bow and quiver from the other side of the bed. He yelped a curse that she ignored.

"Business before pleasure," she said with a shrug as she walked to the door. Not that being in the Invisible Sisters was much of a job. But not that being in bed with Veld was all that great. One day she'd do better. She owed her mother that much.

Rivers Til I Reach You
f!Hawke, on the run from Kirkwall, follows her lover Anders to Denerim, where he has partially begged, partially tricked Queen Cousland into protecting them. Out of the bargain, the Queen-Commander gets their help as she travels across Ferelden, chasing reports of Orlesian involvement in her own country's collapsing Chantry. Also: babies.

I've been severely neglecting my DA Big Bang fic. I got some substantial writing done on the train yesterday and just now did a word count: one-third of the way through. Not bad, but I'd hoped to have it done before NaNo started. ...Yeah, that's probably not going to happen. Slight consolation that the rest of the DA:BB community is procrastinating just as much as me.

She stayed their wedding night - of course she did, what kinda bride would go runnin' off when the hall was still filled with guests? - but it didn't take long for her to stop smilin' at him and start spendin' all her hours in her lab. Laboratory like she was some sort of topsider mage or somethin', with her inventions to keep her company. Course it wasn't just her tools keepin' her occupied. Heh, though maybe she and Hespith used a few of those tools...

Everyone said she's done with him, but that didn't mean that Oghren was done with her. When she stopped comin' to bed at all, not even when it was his birthday or their blighted anniversary, he found himself a bottle instead of another wife and drank and drank and drank until it got easier to convince himself that all was all right in their house and that she'd come crawlin' back, beggin' and moanin' for him again.

They weren't dreams, since dwarves didn't mess with the Fade like surfacers, but sometimes he'd get in one of these dazes from all the beer and the echoes in their empty home that his sword made scraping against the stone sounded like her voice sayin' his name.

---

The marriage wasn't a farce, not exactly, not from the beginning. Oghren's charm was like a whetstone, rough and grinding, but it made her sharper, and she left their "battles" with grins and flushes, and sometimes beard-burns on her chest that itched under her armor.

The invention - Ancestor's take it, it was perfect and was worthy of a Paragon's title - filled a void that once had been filled by Oghren. He was always there getting in the way, upsetting her notes and knocking over experiments. When she lay in bed her head whirred with new ideas, new trials to start, and her hands twitched like they were moving for her tools, even when they ached for rest. She snapped and him, shoved him out of the way before her burnt down her bench, the whole blighted house. He whined when she didn't want to stop for a blighted dinner, threatened when she wouldn't leave for some blighted Proving. It got easier to just ignore him, and Branka got good enough that his presence didn't interrupt her studies, not even when he started to plead.

When she read about the Anvil, there was a click in her like a lever being pulled into place. Hespith stayed with her in the Shaperate, holding up candles for her to read the ancient tomes, bringing ink for her to finish her notes, rubbing her shoulders when Branka cracked them hard enough to dislocate them. And she listened. And she learned. And, unlike Oghren, Hespith believed.

It was no question, then, what Branka chose to take with her into the Deep Roads and what Branka left behind.

Bhelen Aeducan/Jowan - Save the one last dance
There is no other place in Ferelden for him to hide, so Jowan slides through the gates of Orzammar into the depths of the dwarven city to plead with the king for protection from the unyielding templar force chasing his blood. When he gets an audience, Bhelen is more amused than awed, but with a wave of his hand he grants Jowan a room in the palace and a job that surely even he can handle: entertainment. But there is also the idea that the king's enemies will be impressed by a maleficar included in court, and Jowan, gaunt and pale and taller than everyone else, is certainly strange enough to inspire concern among the nobles.

At come party, some event to celebrate Bhelen killing someone or other for something or other, Jowan stands by the throne and tries to look menacing. Bhelen grins up at him, then clamps his hand around Jowan's wrist to yank him down to eye level. "Wojech Ivo swears that you cast some sort of spell on him to lose the proving."

Jowan tries to find the warrior in the sea of dwarven faces, but the beards blend together. Bhelen grunts and his grip loosens but doesn't drop. "Spread fear, if it's easier than working magic. But I want to see what you're really capable of."

"Whenever you wish, Highness."

Bhelen stands - not that it makes any difference, it's not like he's any taller on his feet - and reaches for a cup to raise for a toast. The crowd silences immediately and turns toward him, waiting for his blessing like congregation at the chantry. Afterward when the music starts once more, Bhelen has Jowan brought to him again. "Stay until the end," he orders. "At the last dance I'll find you again and you'll tell me what you've learned. Don't mingle, but watch who you can. Maybe you can see more from your perspective."

Jowan murmurs that he will, of course he will, but Bhelen's attention is already elsewhere. He adds absently as Jowan is waved away, "You'll be spending the night with me, of course. So don't grow to attached to anyone."

Later, as dawn breaks outside, Jowan comes to Bhelen with his cache of secrets and spells and they walk in companionable silence to the royal chambers. He is surprised when Bhelen has the guards strip him - for the king's safety, they explain as their swords rip through his robes. He is surprised, but not much. Conversation progresses as normal, as if all Bhelen's discussions are done in the nude, until the guards are dismissed and Bhelen commands, not unkindly, for Jowan come to him. Even on his knees, Jowan is too tall, so Bhelen orders him to lie prostrate on the bed. By the time the guards return to announce that court will soon be in session, Jowan has solidified his place at Bhelen's side.

Avernus/Ser Thrask - Stand Up
The Knight-Commander had overstepped her bounds again, sending Thrask to Ferelden to investigate a maleficar. She had said the mage was too close to the Free Marches, too dangerous to be ignored, too powerful for the weaker Fereldan templars to handle. She had done it to get rid of him, he suspected. Thrask had accepted for his own reasons, surviving the sail across the Waking Sea and the march through the mountains by prayer and stubbornness.

Getting past the traders who'd made camp at the decaying castle had been difficult, his armor and joints creaking in the freezing wind. He'd found the mage, as tainted at Meredith had promised, but too smart, too human to be a true abomination. Avernus talked, Avernus reasoned, Thrask was tired, Thrask was cold. He drew his sword and cleansed the magic miasma from the room, but Avernus in Warden colors instead of a robe continued wielding his quill, ignoring the staff collecting dust in the shadows and Thrask's arm aching under the weight of his shield shivering in his armor.

That night Avernus lit candles and tossed Thrask a bottle that was more vinegar than wine. The mage didn't sleep but lay beside the templar with a wheezing laugh. In the morning, Thrask woke up and stood up alone, then walked past the surprised traders and back down to where a ship waited to take him home.

Cailan Theirin/Finn - no one else to turn to
"I don't know," Finn said as he pulled another robe from the cabinet. "I think this is a bad idea. And by bad, I mean terrible."

"Stop worrying. No, this one doesn't fit either." Cailan yanked the robe down his arms and tossed it into the rapidly growing pile on Finn's bed. "Maker's breath, you mages are almost pathetically puny. I don't see why the templars are so afraid of you."

Finn glared over his shoulder, but Cailan's smile softened the insult. Finn sniffed disdainfully; the man had no right to make unkind remarks when he needed Finn's help to impersonate a mage to play a trick on the visiting, unforgiving Mother Perpetua. He was also stripped down to his smalls, which should have made him feel at least a smidgen ridiculous.

Not that he looked ridiculous. In fact, he looked rather marvelous.

Mistaking Finn's silence for a sulk, Cailan clamped his massive hand on Finn's shoulder (possibly breaking a bone or to there; maybe he really was puny). "Come on, old boy. I didn't mean to offend. You're the only one I could turn to. Imagine if I'd asked your enchanter Wynne? Or that one who looks like he's swallowed a lemon... Torrin."

"Try this one," Finn mumbled as he flung another robe over Cailan's thick arm. The hand on his shoulder squeezed gently and Finn could feel the warmth of it through the thick velvet of his own robe.

Have been mailed! I need to re-stock, I'm beginning to finally run low. Really like this months', especially the little Digimon drabble.

fannish5: Name five characters whose religious beliefs are important to them.

Dragon Age only!

1) Leliana - Her beliefs in the Maker diverge from those expounded by the Chantry, but her faith is strong enough to support her through the criticism she receives, as well as to encourage her to leave the safety of the cloistered life to join the Warden on his/her march toward death.
2) Sebastian - The man defines himself by his position in the Chantry. All of his decisions are filtered through his interpretation of the Maker. He lives and kills by it.
3) Anders - Oooh, Anders. Fandom's full of discussion about Anders' faith and his view of Andraste. He compares himself and his mission - not unjustly, I think - to the Divine's bride and her exalted genocide.
4) Merrill - The Dalish's religion is as shattered as their culture. Merrill keeps the old ways as alive as she's able, a bittersweet task that causes her to lose as much, if not more, than what she was trying to save.
5) The Qunari - I read somewhere that the Qun is sort of like militaristic Confucianism, which is fascinating. Sten, in the first game, bored me to tears, but the Arishok and his unyielding dependence on the Qun was creepily awesome. It's not that his beliefs are important, they are the absolute definitions of the entire world.