Sunday, November 27, 2011

Superheroes and Supervillians and their DnD alignments

Superman: Lawful Good
Batman: Lawful Good
Spiderman: Neutral Good
Captain America: Probably Lawful Good, but maybe Neutral
Punisher: Lawful Neutral
Daredevil: Lawful Good, duh
Wonder Woman: Lawful Good
Wolverine: Chaotic Good (but often pretty close to Neutral)
Professor X: Neutral Good
Cyclops: Lawful Good
The Hulk: Chaotic Neutral

Doctor Doom: Lawful Evil
Joker: oh boy is he ever Chaotic Evil
Green Goblin: Chaotic Evil
Galactus: True Neutral
Thanos: Neutral Evil
Bullseye: Chaotic Evil
Lex Luthor: Lawful Evil
Magneto: Lawful Neutral
Sabretooth: Chaotic Evil
Venom: Chaotic Neutral
Carnage: Chaotic Evil
Doomsday: Neutral Evil
Darkseid: Lawful Evil

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Dead Billy (part 4)

‘Guys?  It’s me, Billy.  The door’s locked, guys.  Guys, can you unlock the door? The door’s locked.  We never lock the door.’
Gavin and Sean were looking right at each other.  Neither of them was blinking.  Gavin raised a finger to his lips.  Sean nodded weakly.
‘Hey, guys, you’re there, right?  It’s me, Billy.  I heard you talking.  You’re in the living room, right?  Just unlock the door, guys.’
Slowly, shaking, Gavin turned around and started walking, quietly, not turning back to look at Sean. 
‘Why didn’t you take the knife out, guys?  It hurts so bad.  Please open the door and take it out.’
Gavin walked right past the door and over to the microwave.  He took out his Hot Pocket.  He stood there at the counter, facing the cabinets, eating his Hot Pocket.
‘Guys, please open the door and take out the knife.’
Gavin dropped his Hot Pocket, turned around and ran.  He ran through the kitchen, out the door and down the street.  He didn’t turn around or look back.  He just kept running. 

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Dead Billy (part 3)

Gavin found Sean in the kitchen, staring out through blinds held open between two fingers, the room lit only by streetlights.  The cupboards were paint-flecked and scratched, the counters dirty, the sink full of dishes and silverware that were starting to smell rank.  There was a butcher’s block in the middle of the floor a little above belt-height, upon it only a large carving knife.  Gavin closed the basement door behind him and locked it with the old skeleton that was still perched in the lock.  He took the key out and put it on the little nail nearby, then walked over to turn on the lights.  
‘No, don’t!  They’ll know we’re here!’
‘Who’ll know we’re here?’
‘The people outside!’
‘What people?’  Gavin walked over to one of the windows and peered out.  The street was lit by the dim amber of the streetlights and the passing reds and whites of the cars that occasionally drove through the neighborhood.  Most of the other house lights on the street were out, it being long past most normal peoples’ bedtimes, but there was an occasional window light here or there, mostly on the second floors, if the house had a second floor.  Not that there were any silhouettes in them or anything.  Gavin checked the cars that were parked along the street, but they all looked empty, and absolutely none had their lights on.   ‘There are no people.  And even if there are, so what?  We turn the lights on, what’s that matter to them?’
Sean gave Gavin a look like Gavin had just grown an extra head. ‘I told you. They’ll know were here!’
‘Well they won’t need fucking lights to know that, Sean!  We fucking live here!’
‘They’ll know we’re up to something!’
‘Up to something?  In our own place?  Why would they care?  We’re always up to something in our own place.  So are they.  And we’ve never been bothered yet.’
Sean didn’t say anything, just went back to staring out the window.  Gavin sighed.  He took his finger off the light switch, walked over to the stove and used it to light a cigarette.  A real one.  Sean took another hit on his meth pipe.  Gavin took drags in silence, trying not to shake or stare at the basement door.
After a couple more hits, Sean said, ‘We got to get rid of the body.’
A quick sharp drag from Gavin.  ‘How?’
Sean hesitated. ‘I think I saw some show once?  Where they filled this big plastic tub with some chemical, and then put the body in it.  That shit dissolved everything, skin, hair, bone.  Then they just poured it down the toilet. It worked great!’
Gavin grimaced.  He didn’t like the look of their toilet already.  He would never be able to stomach using it if they poured Billy down it. ‘What was the chemical?’
‘Uh, I don’t know.’
‘Well, what was the show?’
‘I can’t remember,’ whispered Sean in defeat.
‘Probably just a television show anyways.’
Sean took another hit.
‘Okay,’ he said, shaking anew, ‘why don’t we chop him up and feed the parts into the furnace?’
Gavin shook his head.  ‘We don’t have that kind of furnace.  There’s no opening for you to shovel things in.’
‘Fuck.’  Sean set down his pipe and picked up the carving knife. Gavin slid over to the far wall. ‘We are going to have to chop him up,’ said Sean, holding out the knife.
‘Well, don’t use that.  Use a meat cleaver, or a saw.  With plastic underneath.’
‘After that, we drag him out to the car, right?  In bags?  Then drive him to the dump and through the parts in there.’
Gavin shook his head again.  ‘We can’t risk anyone finding the parts.  They’ll know we did it. There can’t be a body.’
‘Oh shit,’ said Sean.  He set the knife back down, put his head in his hands and started sobbing. 
Gavin reached over the butcher’s block and scooped up the pipe.  ‘You’ve had enough of this tonight. I’m going to bed.’  He walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway towards his room.
In the morning, Sean woke up to sounds coming from below.  He jumped into his pants and ran down to investigate.  The door was unlocked again.  Downstairs, the television was on.  It was Saturday, and cartoons were playing.  Sean was on the couch, still wrapped in his blanket, eating a bowl of Count Chocula. 
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘He looks better,’ said Sean, motioning towards the body. ‘I mean, he doesn’t look worse.’
Gavin looked at Billy.  His face was white like a silent film star’s.  His eyes were made of glass, and his mouth was tilted open like he was about to start drooling.  He almost seemed like he had been stuffed and posed. The hunting knife was still jutting out of his stomach.  It hadn’t settled or anything. 
‘We should really pull that thing out,’ said Gavin.  He didn’t.
‘He hasn’t even started smelling,’ chipped in Sean.  ‘Maybe he’ll just stay like that.’
‘He just hasn’t started decomposing yet.  Wait a couple days, and everyone on this street will know that something in here is dead.’
‘So we have a couple of days.’
Gavin looked over at the coffee table.  There was a pipe there, loaded with weed.  From the look of his eyes Sean had taken a few tokes.  Gavin walked over, picked it up, and took one himself.  ‘Yeah, we have a couple days.’ He looked around.  ‘C’mon man, we have a TV upstairs.  Let’s get out of here.  This place is giving me bad vibes.’
When they were back upstairs, Gavin locked the door again, and hung the skeleton key back on the nail.  He made himself a bowl of Captain Crunch as Sean watched cartoons.  When, he was finished, he put on his brown bomber jacket and combat boots, filled up his pockets with product, and told Sean he was going out.  He rode the El Train for a couple of hours, just going from one stop to the end, then getting off and taking another line to somewhere else.  Eventually he ended up at the Quad of the campus.  Saturday was college day, at least for him.  He hung out around the periphery, in the shadows, waiting, and when one of the students came up to him, they would shake hands, and Gavin would pass them a small plastic bag, and they would pass him a ten or a twenty.  He was all out, around five o’clock, he took the El back downtown to a bar he liked, had a beer and watched nothing on TV, watched some of the cougars hit on the young professionals.  None came near him though.  He respected that, the sense of a mark they had.  They knew he was the kind of trouble they didn’t want.  Not that he minded.  Gavin’s taste in strange ran a lot younger.  There was this one girl he had been thinking about a lot lately, late at night before bed, this little street urchin girl he had seen in a squatter’s nest near the bombed out industrial district.  Short, pale, skinny, with purple hair and wide eyes.  Didn’t say a word.  She was maybe sixteen, if that. 
Gavin only dealt pot.  He got it from this old hippie, the kind who had gotten into the drug trade long ago and who was lowdown enough and professional enough and dealt with harmless enough product that no one had bothered to get rid of him when the organization above him got shaken up, which was rare as it was.  Pot wasn’t like Coke or Horse or Meth.  No one really got into shooting matches about it.  That’s why Gavin kept to it, and not Meth and Coke like Sean.  Though Sean spent more time using than dealing. 
Billy though.  Billy had been different.  Billy had been hardcore into psychedelics, acid, shrooms, peyote, prescription antipsychotics.  That and the occasional hit of heroin, they were almost like a religion for him.  He was always listening to Timothy Leary tapes, videos of Ram Dass, whoever that was.  Oh, and reading books by Anton LeVey, Alistair Crowley.  Black magic, black metal, and opiate and psychedelic drugs.  That was Billy, in a nutshell.  Intense motherfucker.  He was always staring at you, making eye contact and not blinking, like he could hold that eye contact, he could convince you of anything, because whatever he was talking about was something he had to convince you of.   And now he was just staring at the floor, at nothing at all.  Because he had gotten it into his head to perform an actual black magic ritual and stick a hunting knife in his chest.  ‘Dumb motherfucker,’ Gavin whispered to himself.  ‘Stupid, stupid, needy dumb crazy motherfucker.’ He finished his beer, paid his tab and left. 
He got back to the house a little after sundown.  Sean was still watching television.  What had been cartoons was now an edited-for-television movie.  They used to have cable, but after the three of them kept forgetting to pay the bill it had gotten cut off.  Gavin went to his room, took the wad of twenties and tens out, put them in a rubber band and hid them in his sock drawer, in one of his socks.  He went out to the kitchen, took a Hot Pocket out of the freezer and put it in the microwave. 
‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Sean. He was smoking a massive blunt.
‘Yeah?’ said Gavin, leaning against the archway between hallway and living room. ‘What about?’
‘About Billy,’ said Sean, with a look like, ‘what else would I be thinking about?’
‘Yes, but, what about Billy have you been thinking?’
‘So, this magic book, that Billy used?  He got it from Damien, right? In fact, he maybe stole it, right?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Well, Damien might be angry at Billy.  And we don’t want him angry at us, do we?’
‘No...’ 
‘Right.  So we should give him the book back.  Tell him we had nothing to do with it, honest, it was all Billy.  He’ll be really angry probably, because the book is probably really expensive, right?  So then we tell him that Billy is dead…’
Gavin caught on.  ‘And ask him if he knows anything about what to do with a body like Billy’s…’
‘Yeah.  I mean, either he knows some occult shit for dealing with this kind of thing, or, you know, he deals heroin.  He probably knows people who know how to deal with bodies, make them disappear.’
Gavin ran his fingers down his jaw. ‘It’s risky.  He might decide to blame us anyways. Throw us in with Billy.’
Sean shook his head.  ‘He wouldn’t.  He would have to kill us, yeah? But why would he want to do that?  That’s two more bodies to deal with, which become his deal not ours.  And he needs someone who knows Billy’s clientele.  And that’s us. He helps us with Billy, we can move into Billy’s territory, and Damien will know we’re loyal, because he has dirt on us.’
‘If he had dirt on us, why doesn’t he just go over to the police?’
Sean shook his head again.  ‘Heroin dealers are never gonna mix it up with pigs, especially when a body’s involved.’
Gavin nodded his head.  ‘Yeah, yeah, that might work…’
The basement door shook. 
Gavin looked at the basement door.  Then he looked at Sean.  Sean was looking at him.  The basement door shook again.  The knob was turning back and forth.
Neither of them moved.
‘Guys?’ called out Billy weakly.  ‘Guys?  Are you there?  The door’s locked.  Are you there?  Guys?’
The microwave dinged.  Gavin’s Hot Pocket was done.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

The Corner of Your Eye

II.
One Friday, Evelyn came in to work the closing shift at the occult shop. She went over to the check-out counter, off to the left side from the entrance, and smiled in hello to Morganna, who was hunched over the counter, her chin upon her folded hands. Morganna's name was really Mariellen. She had straight black dyed hair, and wore black lipstick and matching corset, skirt, and knee-high leather boots. Evelyn's hair was curly strawberry-blond, as it had always been, and fell halfway down her back. She wore a knee-length skirt covered in several folds of glittered cellophane, hiking boots, and her bomber jacket. She had a carrying case strapped across her chest. Morganna matched the décor of the shop much better than Evelyn did.
“Don't look now,” said Morganna in reply, as Evelyn set the carrying case down upon the counter, “But there is a thin, pale young gentleman in the store.”
“A thin, pale young gentleman?” replied Evelyn, with the proper note of irony.
“Yes, a thin, pale young gentleman.”
“I didn't know they still made gentlemen. Much less young ones.”
“I know. I thought the model was obsolete too. Yet, one stands in this very shop, right this moment, looking at the antique book case.”
“The antique book case?” Evelyn had an airy way of speaking which could make even the most sarcastic of expressions sound wide-eyed with wonder, but this was not a sarcastic statement. The antique books were set in the far back corner, encased in locked glass. They were more for show than for sale. Nobody ever bought any.
But now there was a man at the bookcase. He was tall, as Morganna said, maybe six foot, or an inch or two more. Evelyn couldn't affirm his thinness, as all she could really see over the other bookcase, (the one with all the normal magic books) was the back of his head, but she was confused why Morganna would refer to him as “young.” Every hair on his head was at least as silvery as mercury, and some of it had crossed over into an almost shining white.
Morganna slapped her on the wrist. “Shh! Don't stare! Can't be being rude now, can we?”
“You said he was young.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, he's one of those Steve Martin types.”
“Ohhh, yeaaah. Yeah, I think that Isaac Newton was like that too.”
“What's Newton got to do with anything? Hey, I got to go now, all right? Watch the aristocrat. Don't scare him off. Maybe he will actually buy something from there.”
“Always has to be a first time.” Evelyn slid past Morganna to take her place behind the counter. “Going out tonight?”
“Yep.”
“Say hi to Derek for me.”
“You've never met Derek.”
“Doesn't mean I can't be polite.” Evelyn smiled her smile.
“Toodles, freak,” said Morganna good-naturedly. She had put her coat on and was walking towards the door. Evelyn wiggled her fingers in reply. One thing that Evelyn had found about Goths is that, after a certain age, their personality had absolutely no relation to the character of their dress.
For several minutes after the doorbell dinged Morganna's departure, nothing much happened. Evelyn took her books and notebooks out of her case, set them in a neat pile, selected a particular of each, arrayed the notebook off to one side, leaving only one side facing up, and placed the book before her. She began to read, taking notes casually about details she found particularly interesting.
After a reading only a few paragraphs, Evelyn suddenly felt a gentle, calming presence in the room—a kind of warmth without heat. She looked up.
She noticed, without any surprise, that a faerie had just entered the store, passing through the outer door. It was about a foot and a half tall, at least if it ever stood, and was a bright, orangish pink. It had thin arms and legs and a plump potbelly. Smoky tendrils trailed out of the back of its head as a poor imitation of hair. Its mouth stretched all the way across its head, and its eyes were the size of teacups. It drifted fleetingly through the air, unburdened by any physical law, and when it noticed her noticing it, it made a beeline for her.
Evelyn knew this faerie, as she knew many of the faeries that frequented the occult shop's section of town, and as most faeries did not bother with names, or if they did were too reticent to tell anybody, she had taken to calling this one Minnie. There was no particular reason for this name. Maybe she had been watching cartoons the night before their first meeting, or was thinking of a nickname based on “minute”. As it was, she had long ago exhausted simpler, more descriptive names for such faeries, like Smiler, or Happy, or even more off-the-wall things like Whiz-Bang. Human names always felt wrong, so she was now reduced to naming new friends, as they came along, from cartoon characters and nonsense words: whatever popped into her head.
Minnie was the kind of faerie that Evelyn had taken to calling a Moody. She had found no real precedent for them in mythology or folklore, although sometimes their characteristics were hinted at in the descriptions of other more standard faeries, and they seemed to be described in a variety of ways by different occult authors, although none of these descriptions matched her own experience of such beings. These faeries flew around living things and in some way drew out or emphasized certain emotions lying within them. If you have ever gone from happy to sad or from considerate to carefree without really any reason one way or another, perhaps it was because a passing Moody took an interest on you. If you have ever noticed how small crowds out in the street can begin to take on a singular mood, perhaps becoming self-serious, or suddenly talkative and outgoing, it is likely that a wandering Moody had decided to follow along. Some Moodies would alternate the emotions they pulled out of people, while others would stick to the same one at all times. Some pulled very general emotions, like happiness or sadness; some pulled very specific emotions, like a mild, non-belligerent annoyance, or a bittersweet sense of longing for some long-past memory. Minnie always pulled for a kind of light-hearted giddiness. (Giddy had been taken as a name while Evelyn was still in high school.)
Winnie the Moody flew about Evelyn's head three times, then came to a rest hovering, like a cloud, at her upper left. Hello, thought the Moody at her. There was no real sound to the greeting, nor words, really. But the sentiment was so clearly felt that Evelyn could not help but translate it into words in her own head, the way one might translate a foreign language, except in this case, she was not translating from one language to another, but into language itself. (After having done this for so many years, the college courses she had taken in Latin and Hebrew and Greek had come quite easy. In fact, the book at which she was now reading was a second-hand textbook in Sanskrit. She had an original text copy of the Upanishads at home, waiting to be read, when the time came.)
Hello, thought Evelyn in return, and shoved it out as pure sentiment. She smiled wide and unhinged, as the first wave went over her, like she had taken shot of whiskey a few moments ago. She let out a high-pitched giggle.
The man, who for at least the last quarter-hour had been staring intently through the glass of the antique book section, turned briefly to look in her direction. A clean, pale face, thin and angular, though not severe in any way—and indeed young, somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, though hard to tell which—looked at her, slightly confused, or maybe just interested.
“Sorry, sorry,” said Evelyn, briefly flashing back to her childhood. And her milky-white skin burst out in a rosy blush.
The thin, pale gentleman smiled with a gentle understanding, and turned around.
Careless... taunted the faerie.
Oh, don't be so bright, returned Evelyn. You mess me up.
Oh, I am so truly sorry. Truly.
Insolent. Most of them were insolent, but in a cute way. Yes, well, let that be a lesson to you.
Oh, yes, I have learned. Minnie coasted backwards, like a swimmer doing a scissor kick, but without moving. What is he doing here?
He is a customer, said Evelyn. They look at things.
He is odd, said the Moody.
Odd? How so?
Minne did a loop. I do not know. That is what is odd.
Why don't you go over and try to cheer him up?
I do not want to. Usually, the sentiments Evelyn translated in her head had a bit of tone to them, some sense of meaning beyond just the words, but also a sense of how the words might be said. But there was none that she could find in this sentiment. It was a flat feeling of negative desire, nothing more or less. An oddly blank sentiment, especially for a Moody. Evelyn turned to look at Minnie, to see if there was some expression to add to the phrase.
“Excuse me.”
Evelyn jerked back around. The pale thin gentleman was walking around the rows of bookshelves and comings towards her. Only staring off into space, she thought.
She understood, now, why Morganna had seen fit to describe the customer as a gentleman. Everything about the man looked expensive.
First off, he was carrying a cane, though he seemed to walk without a limp. It was old, yet polished, and made of some kind of wood that was stained almost black. His suit was as black as raven's feathers, just about as shiny, the cut of it quite arresting. Elegant and sleek, yet lacking in the formal, business-like attitude common for modern suits. It was more like a suit from the late nineteenth century, something you might see someone wearing in a portrait painting: a more expensive version of what they wore every day. The suit jacket, for example, was actually a jacket, not some outer formal layer. It was meant to keep him warm, and it was evident why the man had no need to wear an additional coat on top of it.
And indeed, he was tall, and thin, and pale, with silvery hair come much to early. And with those angular yet somewhat softened features, there was something of the elf to him, though more an elf from Tolkien, then one of the things that she was actually familiar with. Something feminine almost as well. He was very beautiful.
“What is your policy in regards to the locked books?” he asked.
“Locked books?” she echoed, momentarily confused. Minnie suddenly darted off to the left, into the center of the store, and with several aerial loops along the way. Evelyn couldn't help but follow the fast movement with her eyes.
The man noticed. “Excuse me, is something wrong?” He looked about, expectantly. “Is there a fly in the room? A bee? I'd hate to be stung.”
“Uh.” Evelyn closed and eyes and forced herself to focus. “Sorry. The books. What about our policy was it you wanted to know?”
“Well, I was wondering to what extent I was able to look at them. Is it possible to take them out and peruse them? May I see more than one at a time? Could I sit down and read one for a bit, or do I have to be supervised very closely? That sort of thing.”
He had gone with the flow of conversation, but she could tell from his eyes that he was still wondering what she had been looking at. Just keep plowing ahead, and eventually he will forget about it.
“Well, uh, the truth is, we don't really have too much of a policy on the locked books.” She smiled. “The truth is, they're mostly just for show. Nobody buys any.”
“Oh,” replied the man, looking crestfallen. “Then they're not for sale?”
“Oh no! They're for sale. It's just that nobody buys them! I mean, they can, but...” and here she leaned forward conspiratorially, “the truth is, we have them mostly so we come off like a real magic shop, like, 'Oh! We have real magic books! We must be a real magic store! Fake magic stores don't have real magic books!' Nobody wants to buy their energy crystals and Gaia figurines at a fake magic store, right?”
“Obviously not,” replied the man with a smirk. “Where's the fun in that?”
“Right, right!” She laughed, not without a little relief. “But yeah, the books are for sale. I mean, if they weren't for sale, what would be the point, right? ...I think there's a binder around here, somewhere, with all the big ticket items listed. Let me check.”
Behind the counter was a small bookshelf stuffed with a variety of old binders and half-filled journals. She began flipping through them, hoping one would catch her eye.
“Hmm, well, while you're doing that,” said the man, “would it be possible for me to take some of the books out of the case? I really would like to examine them closer.”
“Oh, right!” she reached down behind the counter, where a ring of keys hung upon a small, discreet nail. “Follow me!”
They walked over to the case. “So, which books were you interested in looking at?”
The man looked thoughtful, and tapped his chin lightly with a long finger. “I suppose I will start with this one first,” and he pointed to a old, leather-bound volume, thick, about six inches tall, and with the lettering on the binding faded almost to the point of invisibility.
He removed it from its placed with a fanciful tap upon the top of the spine, knocking it out into a waiting palm. The book fell open as it came to settle there, and with his free, tapping hand, he began to skim through it, back and forth, as if the entire contents of the tome could be absorbed by random sampling.
After fifteen or so seconds of this, he seemed to give up and tipped the pages over to arrive at the book's front.
“What an odd little volume,” he said after a moment.
“I'm sorry?”
“It appears to be The Book of Umberto de Fiorenze, an Italian magician of the late fifteenth century. Obscure fellow, not well known. You won't find him with Google. But a prolific note-taker. This edition seemed to have been published in the early 1800s by some anonymous publisher in England. Probably didn't want to admit to publishing such volumes. Probably riddled with errors too.” He snapped the book shut, then placed it sideways upon a low shelf. “Still, better than not having a copy at all.” He bent down and continued looking.
This continued for a good quarter hour, the pale young man taking out a book, paging through it, listing off some obscure details about their relevance, rarity, veracity. Some he put back on the shelf, some he added to his pile. Once he was through, there was a precarious stack of books on the floor about a foot and a half high.
“These I will get, then.”
Evelyn nodded, then shifted the glass and locked the case shut. She picked up the stack of books, which was quite heavy, and carried them over to the counter.
“Just let me look of the prices of these first. Oh, shoot. I forgot to find the binder!”
“That's quite all right. Take your time.” The pale thin gentleman stood calmly at the counter, drumming his fingers lightly along the the glass.
Finally she found the binder with the big ticket items and began looking up all the books in his pile.
“Uh, mister...”
“Frost.”
Evelyn looked up from the ledger. “Really, Frost?”
The pale thin gentleman smiled slightly. “Yes, really. Frost. Jonathan Frost, in fact.”
“Jonathan Frost? Oh, that's so cool! Wow! You must love your name!”
“It is quite evocative, I must admit. And may I ask, what it is you are called by, my dear?”
“Oh, ah. Evelyn. That's not my last name though. It's my first. My last is Sharp. So, uh, Evelyn Sharp!”
“Sharp?” he said, raising his brow. “I don't find you so at all.”
“Oh! Ha ha!”
“Forgive me. You must get that kind of comment all the time.”
“No, no! I mean, people make jokes about my last name all the time, but not that way. It's usually like, 'oh please don't cut me,' or something lame like that.”
“Only playing off of the adjective to go straight to the topic of knives, not referencing the emotional disposition.”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I think that's what I mean. I...”
Since she had begun her conversation with the pale thin gentleman, she had not been keeping track of Minnie. In fact, thoughts for Minnie and her whereabouts had completely flown out of her mind. In the back of her mind somewhere, she must have decided that Minnie had gotten bored with the store, deciding its atmosphere wasn't appropriately conducive to light-heartedness or giddiness, and had shot off to find some new people to animate. So Evelyn was taken completely by surprise when Minnie shot out of nowhere and circled three times about Jonathan Frost's head. All Evelyn could do for the moment was stare.
Minnie stopped dead in the air, over Jonathan Frosts left shoulder, grabbed the sides of her non-mouth with both hands and stuck out her non-tongue, making a disgusted masque, her normally pinkish hue turning a sudden bright green. Then she shot out through the front window at Looney Tune speed, leaving a little puff of nonexistent vapor behind her.
Evelyn, stunned by this completely uncharacteristic display from the faery, could not help but follow the course of its flight with her eyes.
“I'm sorry?”
“Huh?”
“Is it something I said?” Jonathan Frost wore an expression of such confusion he almost seemed to be in pain.
“Uh, uh...” She had to do something to recover from this. Think Evelyn, think.
“Well, it's just, uh, these books? They seem to be really expensive? I mean, this first one on top? The Catalaunian Grimoire? It's listed in here as being 456 dollars. Just scanning down the list, the rest of the books aren't that far different. I mean, some or them are even more. Are you sure you want to spend this kind of money?”
The pale thin gentleman Jonathan Frost stared at her calmly, coolly. “I can quite assure you I can pay whatever the price of these books may be. Money is, quite fortunately, not something I need to consider.”
“Oh,” squeaked Evelyn. “Oh.” She nodded, more to herself than to him. “Well, uh, I'll just add all these up then.”
“Do take your time.”
For the next several minutes, Evelyn added up the price of the magic books, punching each one into the cash register. She did not look up, but just as she could see faeries she could feel the pale thin gentleman's eyes staring at her, dark with suspicion. When she added up the final price of the books, it was more money than she made in a year. Evelyn was pretty sure the owner, Miss Faith, had deliberately priced the books out of what other people would be willing to pay for them, so no one would, and she wouldn't have to look for more of them to fill up the case.
But still, they were for sale.
Jonathan Frost paid for his books using a Debit Card from Bank of America. His purchase was approved almost immediately.
“Well, there's your books, and, there's your receipt,” said Alison. She had packed the books all up into two large plastic shopping bags, with the store logo printed on the front in black against an absinthe-green background. She placed the receipt all folded up into one of the bags, turned their handles towards the pale thin gentleman and smiled as warmly as possible.
“Thank you,” he said, his eyes flickering back and forth between her and the bags.
“So, it that all then?” she said, with utmost chipperness.
“Yes,” said Jonathan Frost, his eyes scanning slowly across the store. “I don't think that today I will be requiring any trinkets.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He only stared at her in response. A long, unfathomable stare, betraying hidden depths at work churning and colliding end over end, but on the surface as calm, as inviting as could be. Underneath that stare, Evelyn could only stare back in response, weakly, like an animal at mercy.
“May I ask you a question?” he asked softly. It was almost a whisper.
“Shoot.”
“Just now, before you started talking about book prices, it was as if you...saw something.”
“Yes?”
“What did you see?”
The man standing in front of her, this well-dressed gentleman, had just spent over 20 thousand dollars on books, books that claimed to contain magic. There they were, sitting in front of her, dressed in the colors of the Green Fairy.
“A spirit encircled your head three times and shot out through the window.”
A weight, one that Evelyn had not even been aware off, evaporated off her shoulders and flew up towards the heavens.
The pale thin gentleman rocked back slightly on the balls of his feet, as if taken aback, but possessed of enough will to withhold it. “You can see spirits.” It was almost a whisper.
“Not...the dead,” said Alison, shifting her eyes down towards the counter. “But, spirits of the air, and the earth, of objects and emotions.”
“Faeries.”
“Faeries, yeah.” she looped her hair behind her ear. “That's how I think of them, actually. But it feels strange to say the word out loud, you know?”
“Yes, yes I think I do.” His eyes scanned up towards the ceiling. “Can you always see faeries, or does it come and go?”
“It seems like I always can. I mean, I see them all the time. I even talk to some of them. In my head.”
Jonathan Frost's eyes went a little wide at this. He looked about the shop-room. “Are there, are there any faeries in here now?”
Alison shook her head. “You scared off the only one here. They don't actually come inside buildings all that much. It's why your emotions often seem...brighter somehow, out of doors. Faeries are more likely to be influencing you.”
“That's...that's quite astonishing.”
“Well, yes. Most people are pretty surprised to hear that faeries exist, but...”
“I mean that you can see them.”
At this, Evelyn could not help but look, for a moment, totally lost.
“I do know that they exist,” assured the pale thin gentleman.
“You-you do?”
Jonathan Frost nodded, almost sagely. “I am quite aware of the existence of faeries, it is only that I have never been able to see them. My studies, unfortunately, have not been that advanced.”
“They aren't? ...What studies?”
Jonathan Frost nodded his head forward in a motion of enclosing counsel. “I too, am a magician.”
“You are?” Evelyn almost certainly looked as shocked as she was feeling.
Jonathan Frost motioned towards the books wrapped in absinthe paper. “I do not buy these books for their value as curiosity, Miss Sharp, but for their utility.”
“You can do magic?”
This exhortation must have been slightly louder than was normal for polite conversation, for Jonathan Frost casually reclined his head and cast a careful scanning glance across the length of the shop, searching, one could only surmise for any other residence who may have overheard.
Evelyn felt her face flush.
“Yes,” returned Jonathan Frost calmly, his rounds complete. “I can do magic. Can't you?”
“What? No! I mean, no. Why would I be able to do magic?”
“Why, however else would you be able to see faeries? Such a feat seems, from my reading, at least, to be one of great training.”
“No, I-I didn't train for it at all! It's just, always been there. Since I was a kid. For as long as I can remember.”
A truly inscrutable look passed across Jonathan Frost's face then, a look that seemed to combine awe with disappointment. “So you are an adept.”
“An adept?”
“Yes,” said Jonathan Frost slowly, “it is a term used among those to in the study of magic for those are are naturally, well, adept at some aspect or another of the arts.”
“Oh.”
“...And I take it, from your lack of familiarity with the word, that, despite working within the walls of a magic shop, you are not well-acquainted with the study of magic?”
She had been, of course, in a way. She had studied witchcraft, divination, folklore, ritual magic. She even knew what an adept was supposed to be, when she had time to think about it. But that was all academic study. The way Jonathan Frost used the word study, it meant something much, much more.
“I...no.”
“Despite your tremendous gift?”
Jonathan Frost sounded exceedingly disappointed.
“I...should I have?”
Jonathan Frost shrugged, regaining his composure. “It is not a question for what you should, or shouldn't do, Miss Sharp. You may do as you will. It is just that it seems to be to be such an awful waste, to have such a ability, such adeptness, and to do nothing to build upon it. After all...” The absinthe bags moved. They moved of their own accord, or so it seemed, and slid off the counter. On their downward trajectory the bags uprighted themselves, turning in the air at such an angle that without any annoyance they found their handles within Jonathan Frost's waiting hands. “...the world is so much larger than all this.” The ashplant cane, which had, until moments before, been grasped in Jonathan Frost's hand, hovered momentarily upon the ground, then, as if thrown, rose up into the crook of his arm.
With a slight smile over his shoulder, his cane parallel to the floor, Jonathan Frost walked gracefully out of the shop. Pausing to open, the door, he tipped his head gently, with a wry smile. “Miss Sharp,” he said with courtesy, and was gone.
Later that night, after closing the shop, having had not too many more customers and none as significant, hungry, shivering, lying in bed in her pajamas, staring up at the bar of moonlight falling across her ceiling, occasionally eclipsed by the passing light of a car's headlights, she was still thinking about Jonathan Frost, what he had said and how he made the bags move. They had moved without him touching them. She was as sure of it as she sure of Minnie. All her life surrounded by wonder, she had felt so privileged, so special. But he had made the bags move. She felt lazy, sloppy. She had been wasting her life, spinning her wheels. She could have done something with herself, achieved something, lived a life, out there. But what was she now? No one. What had she done? Nothing. She was a shop girl. An entry-level no one with nothing to show for it. And somewhere out there magic was being done. She had just been sitting here content, with her faeries, her voices in her head. She suddenly felt very alone. Alone and useless in a dark room, with nothing and no one, while there was the whole world out there, lying on the peripheral, out of the corner of her eye. Now it was all she could see.
A small sprite shot in through the window and zipped across the room. A little person with wings. The sprite flew up to hover beside her face, smiling gleefully at her. “Go away,” she croaked, and turned her head. Evelyn could feel the faerie frowning, could feel its confusion, its wounded pride. Nevertheless, it turned around and zipped out the window. It would be several more hours before Evelyn got to sleep.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

The Corner of Your Eye

I.

Evelyn's earliest memory was as a babe lying down in her crib: not an event, so much as an image that moved—like a hologram viewed at different angles. An absurdly early memory.
She is looking up, lying flat upon her back, her legs and arms up in the air twitching about, balled up, her view framed by the bars of her crib. Around the bars sit tiny beings, as tall as her open palm, their bodies seemingly made of solid light, with wings growing out of their backs, made out of the glints upon a lens aimed at the sun. Around them dance little pinpoints of light—the kind you might spot out of the corner of your eye—traveling around them in patterns unplottable. Behind them, farther from view, sit larger creatures upon the bookshelves and the dresser, the size of the teddy bears she is not yet old enough to be gifted with, translucent yet opaque, in colors brown, white, and blue, with textures rough, smooth and prickly, in shapes angular, globular, and spiky. Creatures made from wood, cloud and color. The prickly blue one has eyes, which stare down a long nose at her with wild joy. The other two do not have eyes, merely empty sockets carved into slits or round hollows. And before them all, standing at the base of the crib, is a figure that almost isn't there, yet is, with features as defined as any human's, but longer in the nose, chin and ears, and looking down upon her with a smile as loving as any of her mother's, yet tinged with a sense of triumph completely alien to the mundane world.
They had been there, before that, she knew, perhaps had been there to greet her when she entered the world—perhaps they were there to greet everyone as they entered the world—but that early flash was the first she remembered of the spirits. Of the faeries.
Later memories were more distinct.
There they are up upon the kitchen table doing somersaults. She laughs in her highchair as her mom tries to feed her baby food. She grabs it with her hands and throws it playfully about, making her mother mad, and the winged ones dart up around them and make silly faces, stretching out their translucent, silent mouths as if they are made of rubber.
She is outside in the backyard on a pleasant summer day. The grass is a vibrant green, and several of the brown ones are crawling out of the ground, down from the depths of the earth. Their heads rise in points, as if covered in caps, which are balanced on the other end by pointed chins that give the impression of thick, well-groomed beards. Their bodies are suggestive of little men covered in layers of clothes, their feet of pointed boots, and their arms and legs bear no signs of anatomy. They look as made of petrified wood. They jump up or roll out of the ground, run and jump and somersault about, then go back within the ground as easily as they came up. Tiny little winged ones, halfway between insects and humans, fly about the flowers growing among the grass. They sit themselves upon the flowers and pause, and the flowers glow with something that is not light. They do not touch the flowers growing in her mother's prim flower patch, and those ones never seem to have the same vibrancy that the wild ones do. She stands up drunkenly and toddles over towards the nearest set-upon flower; it is the first time she has walked. Her mother is somewhere else, just out of view, perhaps having gone inside for an iced tea. She sits herself down before the flower, and just as she does, the thing upon it takes up into the air, leaving her alone before the yellow petals. One of the brown ones from below walks over to her, and looks at her through the slitted caverns that are his almost-eyes. His almost-mouth parts in a circle of concentration, or perhaps confusion. She looks back and smiles. He reaches down and plucks the flower from the ground. She reaches out and takes it politely, though she does not yet know what politeness is. She reaches out and rubs the cap-like point upon his head. Though he had just passed through the earth with more ease than she has walked, it is as hard and cool as stone. He reminds her of something she had seen once, in the garden of her mother's friend.
“Gnome,” she says.
“Gnome,” replies the little creature, in a voice like far-off echoes in a cave, and he smiles.
As she grew older, she learned words to use for the spirits that she saw, fitting whatever captured them closest, and would try to describe them to the people around her.
“Look, there are some pixies!” she cries, seeing the insect-people flying from flower to flower. In the sunlight they are translucent, and disappear completely as they fly nearer the sun.
“That's nice, dear,” says her mother. She does not look up from her magazine.
“Ooh, do you see, over by the forest edge? There are some dryads!”
She is in the park with some other children playing. The spirits moving through the forest are tall and thin and various dark shades of brown. She thinks they look human-like but she knows that that is just a trick her mind is playing on her. She is very proud of the word she has just found for them, and wants to share it.
“You're weird,” says one of the other children.
“Yeah, Evey,” says another, “You can't make up stuff that we can't all see.”
“Let's play tag!”
As they run off, Evelyn stands there silently, not knowing whether she is allowed to follow, her eyes pulling towards the forest's edge.
By the time she started going to school, she had decided to keep the spirits to herself. She did not mention them to anyone she met at school, nor to her parents, who assumed that she had passed out of the stage where kids make up imaginary friends. But they were still there. They did not enter the school house too often, nor the playground and fields outside where the children went for recess, but occasionally she would see one flitting about in class, perhaps in the shape of an oriental dragon, or as an insect, and it would fly about, occasionally settling around some student, where it would place lucky pencils in the wrong spot or tickle a child just above the ear. Sometimes it would do such things to the teacher, too, like moving items on the desk when no one else was at an angle to see. Evelyn would try not to laugh.
But even if children could not see the things that Evelyn saw, they were observant in their own way, and a girl who giggles at things that aren't there is noticeable even when she tries to hide it. They avoided her, drew together in circles whenever she passed by. Quick, cutting glances darted her way as she went by, and soon she realized that even when in crowds she was alone. She was ostracized. Without her doing anything intentional, she found herself written out of all the social pacts young children make. She was weird.
No matter. After all, she did not lack for friends or playmates, and so did not concern herself much with the other-world of School, but focused on the sprites and gnomes and dryads, the beings that would notice her. She left her house to go on walks in nearby parks and forests, where they played games like Hide-and-Seek and Tag with her. She was content with this.
Now, being a child in middle school without any friends is a hard trick to pull off, and invariably invites problems. Her parents and teachers became weary of her lack of interaction with other children, for no one thinks it healthy for young children to speak with nobody of their own age. And Evelyn quickly learned that she would have to do something to adjust to these concerns, because the last thing she wanted to deal with was being sent to counseling or therapy, where people would constantly be asking her for reasons, reasons she could not give.
Luckily, the world had a way of sorting out such difficulties. As grades passed by, other children joined her in ostracizism. There is never just one child in a grade without friends, and who would be perfectly happy to be friends with anyone, even if anyone is someone who always seems to be looking at and reacting to things that are not there. And so, often at the urging and direction of whatever spirits seemed to be around at the time, she soon began making conversation with, and at lunch sitting next to children who, for whatever reasons, being fat or ugly or poor, or too smart or shy or nervous, were unloved by their fellows. And so, since it was Evelyn, covering her tracks, who initiated these friendships, it was Evelyn who became the leader of her very own clique: a clique of outsiders.
By the end of middle school she had settled into a place for herself. She had a loose cadre of friends, made up of an odd mixture of bookish nerds and aggressive would-be bullies. To augment her interests, she joined the school chorus and band (she played the flute). After school she went for long walks where she met with her real friends and had conversations without words. Then she would go home to her mother and father, where she would respectfully retire after dinner to her room to do her homework. She was responsible, friendly, and seemed completely ordinary, at least as ordinary as any kid in middle school.
In high school, her interests expanded. A girl aware, wherever she looks, of the spirits of the world that are moving about her cannot help but have some dawning interest in what is written about such things, and so, in her own time, she took to studying the Occult.
She read up on tarot and other forms of divination. She read books on folklore, magic, and witchcraft. She had little use for fantasy, or games, but a great appetite for actual information on spells and past beliefs. She wanted the real thing, to find anything that fit with her own experiences—though this meant wading through much dreck and obvious lies. So though she studied the various religious affiliations associated with magic—the Wiccans, the Ritual Magicians, the Theosophical Society, various New Age sects—she joined none of them. The goth kids in school, who included some former friends that, over the years, she had drifted away from, would ask her questions about such things from time to time, seeing her as a source of knowledge that nobody else had or was interested in collecting about topics that they, too, found interesting, but that like most people had not the wherewithal to autodidactically engage in depth, and she would gamefully engage such queries.
Now, Evelyn was not a goth kid herself. As her own personal style developed, she took to wearing longs skirts and dresses, with stockings in a variety of colors, styles and patterns. Sometimes she wore sneakers, sometimes ballarina slippers, sometimes combat boots. Sometimes she wore t-shirts with her skirts, sometimes dress shirts. At the beginning of her junior year, she acquired, as a hand-me-down from family friends, an old bomber jacket, which she took to wearing incessantly until senior year, when she began alternating it with a leather jacket which she had asked for for Christmas. And instead of the Industrial Rock favored by such kids, she listened mostly to old folk songs and ballads, although she did like Led Zeppelin. She put down her flute and learned to play guitar. She would go down to glens and fords along the edges of town, and sit down and play, and sing soft, wistful songs for all the beings nearby to hear. By the time she was done, she had invariably gathered an invisible audience.
At college, she took up study in ancient languages, folklore, comparative literature, and music—which as she saw it, was as necessary as any other language. She took classes on ancient mythologies, mystery religions, superstitions, women's studies courses that concentrated on such matters. She studied Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. After a first year in the dorms, where she had a roommate she barely talked to, she moved into a small studio flat, which she inhabited alone, just her and whatever spirits decided to visit. Once she was at college, she found, there was freedom, and she no longer had to keep up the appearance of reveling in the company of other people. She conversed easily with students and professors in class, and when she started working at a bookstore, she was nice and amiable with her co-workers. But she did not go to parties, or join any clubs, or go to bars. She did not seek out others.
She graduated with a double major in linguistics and comparative literature, with a minor in music. She had no interest in continuing on her studies, nor was she interested in moving home, or going anywhere else in particular, so she filled out the hours she was not working at the bookstore with time as a clerk at an occult shop. On weekends, she would sit in the back and do Tarot readings, which was a fairly easy way to earn some extra pocket money.
And so she came to make a life for herself that way. Living alone in a little apartment, learning lackadaisically about myth and magic, and with her free time, going out to the edge of town, past the farm fields, to the smattering of woods, to meet and play with the fairies.

Dead Billy (cont.)

‘Aw man,’ said Gavin.  ‘Aw man.  Look at all the blood.’
Sean didn’t say anything.  He was sitting on the ratty yellow couch on the far side of the basement, shadowed under a naked swinging lightbulb, lighting up a hit of meth.
It was Billy who had done it, actually.  Not Gavin or Sean.  He had done all of it.  It was Billy who had come home with the big spellbook looking thing (‘It’s a grimoire,’ he had said,), something extra he had pilfered from his mushroom-and-heroin dealer Damien.  It was Billy who had spent hours deciphering the Latin of the spell, checking it a Latin textbook and an online dictionary, and who had bought all the supplies that they would need.  The candles, the pigs blood, the cows heart, the eye of newt, the massive wooden cross, the lighter fluid and the matches, the brazier, and of course the hunting knife.  It was Billy who painted the pentagram in pig’s blood on the ground.  It was Billy who had lit the candles, and invoked the words intoning them aloud in a deep, sullen voice.  Gavin and Sean just kept the chant from the sides of the pentagram, as Billy lit the cross on fire over the brazier, then poured the eye of newt over the embers, then threw in the cow’s heart.  And it was Billy who, at the apex of the spell, as Sean and Gavin’s voices grew higher and louder and as the cow’s heart blackened and the embers were finally snuffed out, plunged the knife into his chest.  A final offering, it was meant to be.
‘Don’t you think that’s risky, dude?’ Sean had said.
‘No no, man it will be all right,’ replied Billy.  ‘It’s just like, a down payment, you know?  After the spell is done, we three will be like gods.  I’ll be fine!  I’ll be better than fine! Don’t you want unlimited power?’  Billy might have been tripping at the time.
Now, the room was starting to smell sickly sweet.  The smells from the blood and the body were overwhelming the smoke from Sean’s meth pipe.   Sean was shivering.
‘Oh shit, man, what are we going to do?’  Gavin was kind of leaning against a support pole over by the stairway, if leaning was something that could be agitated and intense.
Sean kept shivering.  ‘Aw man.  Aw man, this can’t be happening.  This isn’t happening.’  There was a faded orange blanket thrown on the couch.  Cradling his meth pipe in one hand, he wrapped himself in the blanket with the other, got up, and walked past Gavin and up the stairs without saying another word.
‘Sean?’ called out Gavin.  ‘Sean?  We got to do something, man.’  Gavin followed Sean up the stairs.  ‘We can’t just leave him here.  We can’t just leave him like that.’
The door to the basement slammed shut.  A light turned on underneath it.  The lightbulb was still on, but after awhile it stopped swinging. 
Billy didn’t move.

Dead Billy

Billy was dead.  Very dead. 
There was a twelve inch serrated hunting knife sticking out of his chest, the blade plunged 6 inches into the gut, just below the apex of the ribs.  It looked kind of weird, the rest of the blade and that big handle, all wrapped in black leather except for the silvery hilt, just sticking out.  It seemed so out of place, like, ‘Hey, where is the rest of that thing?’  There was blood too.  Blood dribbling out from the wound and pooling on the floor, smeared along the ground from the pentagram painted on the floor to the wall where Billy had slid over to die.  So he at least could be sitting up, you know.  And that he was.  His back against the concrete wall of the basement, the blacks of his Cannibal Corpse t-shirt and jeans all soaked in red, his legs sprawled out and his arms hanging limp, but palms up, as if asking for alms.  His face pale, mouth hanging open, eyes staring wide at some unknown point on the floor, head cocked to one side, the will to hold it to aloft having long since fled.  And everything about him was very very still.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Magic on Venn-La

There are many different magical disciplines on Venn-La. 
  • telekinesis. controlling objects with one's mind.  allows for flight.
  • scrying. seeing the future or present, or past.  several different methods developed to tap into this, including merely concentrating upon the mind's eye, but also using methods such as mirrors or pools or entrails of beasts. 
  • mind control.  usually used for the taming of wild beasts.  use on other kuls is outlawed in most lands. 
  • energy control.  like telekinesis, only with energy not matter.  lncludes manipulating fire, light, lightening, but also controlling temperature or creating illusions.
  • spirit walking.  making one's spirit leave one's body and go waking and traveling elsewhere, then returning with what information one has gained.
  • teleportation.  moving your body from one place to another, traveling in the corridors between reality. 
  • healing powers.  The manipulation of energy at a deeper level to heal and alter the body.  can also be used in the cultivationg of plants or animals, imbuing them with more spirit or order.
  • transmogrification.  turning one substance into another.  water to wine, lead to gold.  
  • necromancy.  controlling the dead or spirits of the once living.  often illegal, and widely viewed as evil.
  • wizardry.  simply shaping or altering reality in total with one's own will.  creating something from nothing.  Very rare, often outlawed.  such a being, if suffiently powerful,  can become like a god.
Many of these abilities can be used in a variety of creative ways to perform many technological functions.  

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Venn-La

On the planet Venn-La, the dominant species, a race of intelligent beings who call themselves kuls, have long ago learned how to use magic.  After an initial stage of tool developement they began to move more and more to a dependance on the mystic arts.

They build buildings by shaping the earth, create weapons by molding the rare materials.  Feed themselves by creating cauldrons of plenty, or bewitching creatures from the seas, or gardens by controlling the flowering of plants.  They light their houses with orbs of energy floating in the air.  They cook in furnaces lit with magic fires.  They communicate across vat distances by water pools, and in hulls with flying spells cast upon them.  They teleport from city to city.  They have built cities in the air, on mountains upturned and made to float by ancient spells.  They keep cities that float upon the seas. 

Their are two types of Kuls, those with magic, and those without.  The magical ones all have green skin, and are called mors.  Those without magic are orange skinned and called wors.  Kuls of both skin types can breed with one another, and have children of different colors.  Wors have children who are mors, and mors have children you are wors.  Only about one tenth of kuls are mors, and they tend to be women (there are two sexes on Venn-La).  Those born wors train to be great fighters, or fine artisnas, creating the simple tools that will aid the Mors in doing the magic that runs society.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Save for later

The sounds of battle were cleaning up outside, but Torquesville was not there to hear them.  Or if he was, he was willfully ignoring them.  Instead he was focused upon the dirtflecked, unpolished lookingglass set before him, its edges rough yet straight upon his washstand.  He was eying his reflection within, mysteriously, as if expecting sudden moves, though none were made.  The face within rotated back and forth like a cobra, moving from one near profile to the other, the eyes locked in place, forever staring outwards.  He noticed, as if for the first time, though also he was certain the thought had crept about before, that he could not quite place the age of the face behind the glass.  It was much too set, too defined to be within the third decade of life, or even into the early years of the fourth.  Yet the comparative lack of wrinkles meant he could not have been older than five and thirty.  No face should have appeared quite so lived in, and yet so unmarked.  And to top it off, the subtle, practiced motions of the face, the dart of the eyes, the slow raising of brow, the set of the mouth, betrayed the easy practice of a soul that had been living for over a century.  It was a face that was perfectly unnatural.  And it was his. 

"How weird," he thought.  "Men should no longer be living."

Outside, there could be heard the sound of a man falling to ground nearby the tent, and being set upon and torn open by long blades, screaming in wet horror.  The dying sounds caught hold of Torquesville and pulled his soul back across whatever oceans it had crossed.   The fae were making sport of another town, and he had business out-and-about.

Monday, January 10, 2011

DnD: An Introduction

Once upon a time, a new race of creatures was born from out of the earth, a race known as man.  This race walked upright, and  had thoughts, and stared back in on itself in contemplation, and contemplated that contemplation.
And when this bright light was lit, it threw flickers of light out into the shadows, and saw echoes of itself there, spirits walking in the dark. Spirits of the earth and water and sky.  And the spirits, who had always been there, stared back at man, contemplating its contemplation.  Then the spirits came and walked with man, and took man's form, or some form of man.
The spirits of the earth took the form of dwarves.  The spirits of the air took the form of elves.  The spirits that walked between them became gnomes. But there was darkness and chaos in the spirits of the world as well, and some took the form of goblins and drow, and other things besides.
Other spirits took other forms, and others remained spirits, but the ones who walked with man took to the mundane world lived and bred and died.
And so it has been, for countless generations.

DnD: quick shots

  • There are large markets to the west of the Merchants Quarters, where most of the city will mingle and exchange goods.
  • The dwarf and halfling settlements within the city walls reside along southern bend of the river Gar, just north of the second set of docks in that region. Both the dwarves and halfings are heavily involved in the shipping economy of the city, though dwarves are more involved as stevedores and bookkeeping and halfings are more involved as sailors.  
  • A series of canals is dug up from the river below where the dwarves reside, to allow more ships to dock in the city.
  • Dwarftown, as it is called, is made up primarily or small, squat houses, all tightly joined at the sides in thin, narrow streets.  The houses have no more than two stories and are connected below by subterranean tunnels that also lead out into other parts of the city.  The entrances are scattered throughout the entirety of the city, coming up to entrances peppering the city streets, where they are guarded by dwarven guards.   A price of one silver piece is required for their use, and in this way the guards earn their keep.  For elves and half-elves, it's one gold piece. 
  • Halfsburg is built in a crazyquilt of styles, stealing architectural ideas from all the other areas, but smaller, as if the halfings are trying to tell everybody else that anything they can do, halflings can do as well.  Just smaller.
  • The human section of town is north of the dwarves and to the east of the main market, and closely resembles the streets of ancient Rome, with large public buildings built over narrow or wider streets, store fronts and artisan shops opening up onto the ground floor, with living quarters rising to fearsomely high levels, five, sometimes seven or eight, into the air.  The human section of town, which already resides on a slight rise in the land, is easily the tallest section of the city.
  • The tallest building in the entire city is a single white tower (though other towers exist, especially in Merchants Quarters) that rises above the human's section of town.  There are no doors and windows opon the lower levels, though several windows can be seen on the top five, where lights can be seen in the night.  It is whispered that a magician of great power lives there.
  • The elves' district lies to the north of the humans' district (neither district has anything like an official name).  It is built of a number of towers, houses on stilts, or just generally tall, thin buildings, the elves in town trying to create structures that mirror the tree dwellings that they have been used to in past centuries.  The streets are more like mazes that roads, and often require one to travel upwards along staircases and ladders.  Bridges of wood and rope connected the raised dwellings along the upper levels.  It's almost impossible to travel through the elves district in any mode other than by foot. 
  • Between the elves and human district there is a kind of no race's land, not as run down as the Thieves District, that includes races of all sorts.  The buildings here, like Halfburg,  come in all architectural varieties, but normally sized (well, except for halfling dwellings). The East Gate is in this section, and is run by an order of Paladins devoted to Safe Passage.  "Safe passage to you" is their offical greeting, and this phrase resides above the Gate in both Common and Elvish.  An official donation, meant to fund people's safe passage, is required, but is only five coppers.
  • Another halfing dwelling is to the west of the elves district, along the bend of the Gar.  It is called Shantytown.  Lying on marshland, it is made of a number of houses on small raised stilts, connected by small paddling boats and boardwalks.  It is closely connected economically to the isle of Gibbob to the east.
  • On the northern side of the bend in the Gar is farmland, farmed entirely by human's, that serves as a source of produce that can be protected should the city ever be put to siege.  The North Gate lives along here, and is run by an order of monks known as the Kites.  No toll is required, but donations to the upkeep of the Gatehouse are accepted.  There is also an order of clerics who meet in this region around a large standing stone every thirdday.  
  • The days of the week are Oneday, Twoday, Thirdday, Fourthday, Fiveday, Sixday, Seventhday or suchlike.  Some races vary on which days are numbers and which are numerals and which are orders.  The elves use only orders (firstday, secondday, etc.).