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Permissions
Jun. 3rd, 2020 08:08 amPLAYER
NAME: Izzy
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
izzyryu @ Plurk or Izzy#7865 @ Discord
BRACKETS/PROSE: I use prose for my own posts, but if I'm replying to someone I'll match their format.
OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS & TRIGGERS: Pregnancy is a big squick for me, so no plots involving it, please. Doubly so for parasitism or egg incubating. Interacting with pregnant characters is fine. Interacting with parasite/egg-ridden characters is not fine.
CONTACT:
BRACKETS/PROSE: I use prose for my own posts, but if I'm replying to someone I'll match their format.
OFFENSIVE SUBJECTS & TRIGGERS: Pregnancy is a big squick for me, so no plots involving it, please. Doubly so for parasitism or egg incubating. Interacting with pregnant characters is fine. Interacting with parasite/egg-ridden characters is not fine.
IN CHARACTER
PHYSICAL AFFECTION: Go ahead!
RELATIONSHIPS: Yes, though getting him to commit might be a challenge.
PSYCHIC & PSIONIC INFORMATION: He doesn't have any protection from that sort of thing. If your character can read minds let me know and I'll make sure to give you more information.
PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: A-OK.
INJURY: Ask first if you want to do permanent, non-cosmetic damage (giving him scars is fine), otherwise yes.
DEATH: Ask first.
RELATIONSHIPS: Yes, though getting him to commit might be a challenge.
PSYCHIC & PSIONIC INFORMATION: He doesn't have any protection from that sort of thing. If your character can read minds let me know and I'll make sure to give you more information.
PHYSICAL VIOLENCE: A-OK.
INJURY: Ask first if you want to do permanent, non-cosmetic damage (giving him scars is fine), otherwise yes.
DEATH: Ask first.
OUT OF CHARACTER
BACKTAGGING: Absolutely, yes.
THREADHOPPING: Yes, but give me a heads up first.
FOURTHWALLING: Go ahead! He'll think you're crazy though.
NOT INTERESTED IN: Writing explicit smut. FTB is fine though!
THREADHOPPING: Yes, but give me a heads up first.
FOURTHWALLING: Go ahead! He'll think you're crazy though.
NOT INTERESTED IN: Writing explicit smut. FTB is fine though!
☆ code by kimmiserate ☆
Origin story
Oct. 14th, 2019 02:59 pmI should probably explain a little bit about mages before I start, and to do that, you need to know about aether.
To over-simplify a bit, aether is life-force. It's the energy that makes a person or an animal more than just meat, or a tree more than just dead wood. And it doesn't just flow through living things, it's everywhere. It's like the earth's blood in a lot of ways, delivering life to all that is physical in the world.
Now mages, we can see these currents. Touch them. And with the right tools, we can coalesce aether into something that can affect the world directly. Like a flame, for instance, or a bolt of lightning. It's not an ability that can be taught, sadly. If you aren't born with the ability to perform magic, there's nothing that can be done to change that. And I was not born with it.
It broke my heart to discover this as a young boy dreaming of adventure and heroism, of course, but, well, boys grow up, and so did I. Grew up, got married, learned a trade as a clothier, had two beautiful daughters. Hardly the stuff of legends, but we were happy. Even the coming of the Empire changed little. I spent more time on uniforms for the war than on party dresses and mage's robes, but the battles were distant things, heard about through rumor and the stories delivered by couriers from the front.
But then came the descent of Dalamud. The lesser moon. Nophica's Hound. An imperial weapon, it was said, summoned by a madman to cleanse Eorzea of all life. And all we could do was watch, helpless and terrified, as the bright morning star we knew grew larger day by day, week by week, until it blotted out the sky.
It was to end at Carteneau, one way or another.
[ He goes on to describe in detail the Seventh Umbral Calamity, albeit from a much more distant vantage point. ]
Should I have run? I'm sure it would have made no difference, but as everyone around me fled I could only stand paralyzed until the twin shockwaves of the moon's fury and the magic trying to contain it swept over me like a tidal wave.
I don't know why I didn't die.
I should have died.
Instead I was swept away, carried on a river of aether down and down and down until I reached the beating heart of the planet.
What came next is...fragmented, at best. It's not a place that the mind can grasp or properly remember. It's just...too big. Too much for a mind as small as mine. Clumsy analogies and superlatives are the best I can manage for this part of my tale, and it barely brushes against the reality of what I experienced. But I suppose they'll have to do.
Imagine that you've lived in a pitch-dark room all your life. You have a single window, and it's your only source of information about the outside. But you've never known anything else, so you're more than content with what little you can see.
Then imagine that room is filled with light, and for the first time, you can see that what you thought was a window wasn't a window at all; it was just the smallest facet of an impossibly complex gemstone. And for the first time, you can see every facet in all its glory, each unique, each reflecting and letting through light in it's own unique patterns. And what's more, you soon realize that this...
[ For several lines there is just a long series of scribbled-out words. ]
...marvel, this miracle, is YOU. And everything you thought was "outside" was just another part of yourself.
That's the closest I can come to describing what it was like. When that torrent of aether flooded over and through me, I just...wasn't.
I don't mean I ceased to exist. There was no "I" to be. No "you", no "them", just infinite Self, reflected and refracted into the world like a rainbow of infinite color. I was a mountain with snow settling on my peaks and slopes like a cloak. I was the forest below, my roots tunneling through the earth and my branches reaching for the sunlight. I was the poacher hidden among the leaves. The antelope she was stalking. The fleas that crawled across its haunches.
Coming back to myself, returning to that tiny, dim sliver of light that was Jophrey Lethe, was the hardest thing I have done or will EVER do. But...I had to. For my wife. For my daughters. I couldn't leave the people who needed me most behind.
I remember reaching back through the threads of existence for what I once was, and the horrible sensation of separation from the whole. It was like being cut into a million pieces, and with each cut I lost a bit more of myself. And then...I was once again.
I later learned that it had taken me nearly five years to return to myself and to the world I knew. Five years.
I remember almost nothing of the first few days, save what I was told by the adventurers that found me. They found me wandering the forest of corrupted crystal that was all that was left of my home. I was naked as the day I was born and delerious with a fever so high that it blistered my skin.
Okhi, Twelve bless her, did her best, but it wasn't the sort of sickness that even a skilled conjuror could fix, since it wasn't a physical ailment at all. My aether, which had once been barely as bright as a candleflame, had through my time in the lifestream become something more akin to a blast furnace. And it was killing me.
Melisende was the one who actually saved me. She was a thaumaturge, a mage of fire and ice, and reasoned that if I could learn to channel my aether into the creation of magic, my condition would stabilize as I burned up the excess aether inside me.
I still remember my first lesson; the metal of the wand in my hand as she showed me how to coax my aether through it, the knot of power coalescing inside the crystal at its tip, ready to be released like a stone from a slingshot. I remember a great pressure inside my head being released as fire burst from my hands and consumed the makeshift target we had set up, and the sweat that poured down my back as my fever finally broke.
And just like that, I was a bloody mage. Not a good one of course; there's a vast difference between keeping my own aether from burning me alive and actually controlling it. Until I got proper training, I was still a danger to everyone around me.
My companions and I parted ways in Gridania, and I found myself on a carriage to Ul'dah with nothing but secondhand clothes, an old wand, and a note of introduction to the Thaumagurge's guild from Melisende. I suppose that's where the rest of my story began now that I think about it. Everything since has felt like another life, as if that clothier from an unnamed village died in the Calamity. But I daresay this tale has grown more than long enough, don't you think?
To over-simplify a bit, aether is life-force. It's the energy that makes a person or an animal more than just meat, or a tree more than just dead wood. And it doesn't just flow through living things, it's everywhere. It's like the earth's blood in a lot of ways, delivering life to all that is physical in the world.
Now mages, we can see these currents. Touch them. And with the right tools, we can coalesce aether into something that can affect the world directly. Like a flame, for instance, or a bolt of lightning. It's not an ability that can be taught, sadly. If you aren't born with the ability to perform magic, there's nothing that can be done to change that. And I was not born with it.
It broke my heart to discover this as a young boy dreaming of adventure and heroism, of course, but, well, boys grow up, and so did I. Grew up, got married, learned a trade as a clothier, had two beautiful daughters. Hardly the stuff of legends, but we were happy. Even the coming of the Empire changed little. I spent more time on uniforms for the war than on party dresses and mage's robes, but the battles were distant things, heard about through rumor and the stories delivered by couriers from the front.
But then came the descent of Dalamud. The lesser moon. Nophica's Hound. An imperial weapon, it was said, summoned by a madman to cleanse Eorzea of all life. And all we could do was watch, helpless and terrified, as the bright morning star we knew grew larger day by day, week by week, until it blotted out the sky.
It was to end at Carteneau, one way or another.
[ He goes on to describe in detail the Seventh Umbral Calamity, albeit from a much more distant vantage point. ]
Should I have run? I'm sure it would have made no difference, but as everyone around me fled I could only stand paralyzed until the twin shockwaves of the moon's fury and the magic trying to contain it swept over me like a tidal wave.
I don't know why I didn't die.
I should have died.
Instead I was swept away, carried on a river of aether down and down and down until I reached the beating heart of the planet.
What came next is...fragmented, at best. It's not a place that the mind can grasp or properly remember. It's just...too big. Too much for a mind as small as mine. Clumsy analogies and superlatives are the best I can manage for this part of my tale, and it barely brushes against the reality of what I experienced. But I suppose they'll have to do.
Imagine that you've lived in a pitch-dark room all your life. You have a single window, and it's your only source of information about the outside. But you've never known anything else, so you're more than content with what little you can see.
Then imagine that room is filled with light, and for the first time, you can see that what you thought was a window wasn't a window at all; it was just the smallest facet of an impossibly complex gemstone. And for the first time, you can see every facet in all its glory, each unique, each reflecting and letting through light in it's own unique patterns. And what's more, you soon realize that this...
[ For several lines there is just a long series of scribbled-out words. ]
...marvel, this miracle, is YOU. And everything you thought was "outside" was just another part of yourself.
That's the closest I can come to describing what it was like. When that torrent of aether flooded over and through me, I just...wasn't.
I don't mean I ceased to exist. There was no "I" to be. No "you", no "them", just infinite Self, reflected and refracted into the world like a rainbow of infinite color. I was a mountain with snow settling on my peaks and slopes like a cloak. I was the forest below, my roots tunneling through the earth and my branches reaching for the sunlight. I was the poacher hidden among the leaves. The antelope she was stalking. The fleas that crawled across its haunches.
Coming back to myself, returning to that tiny, dim sliver of light that was Jophrey Lethe, was the hardest thing I have done or will EVER do. But...I had to. For my wife. For my daughters. I couldn't leave the people who needed me most behind.
I remember reaching back through the threads of existence for what I once was, and the horrible sensation of separation from the whole. It was like being cut into a million pieces, and with each cut I lost a bit more of myself. And then...I was once again.
I later learned that it had taken me nearly five years to return to myself and to the world I knew. Five years.
I remember almost nothing of the first few days, save what I was told by the adventurers that found me. They found me wandering the forest of corrupted crystal that was all that was left of my home. I was naked as the day I was born and delerious with a fever so high that it blistered my skin.
Okhi, Twelve bless her, did her best, but it wasn't the sort of sickness that even a skilled conjuror could fix, since it wasn't a physical ailment at all. My aether, which had once been barely as bright as a candleflame, had through my time in the lifestream become something more akin to a blast furnace. And it was killing me.
Melisende was the one who actually saved me. She was a thaumaturge, a mage of fire and ice, and reasoned that if I could learn to channel my aether into the creation of magic, my condition would stabilize as I burned up the excess aether inside me.
I still remember my first lesson; the metal of the wand in my hand as she showed me how to coax my aether through it, the knot of power coalescing inside the crystal at its tip, ready to be released like a stone from a slingshot. I remember a great pressure inside my head being released as fire burst from my hands and consumed the makeshift target we had set up, and the sweat that poured down my back as my fever finally broke.
And just like that, I was a bloody mage. Not a good one of course; there's a vast difference between keeping my own aether from burning me alive and actually controlling it. Until I got proper training, I was still a danger to everyone around me.
My companions and I parted ways in Gridania, and I found myself on a carriage to Ul'dah with nothing but secondhand clothes, an old wand, and a note of introduction to the Thaumagurge's guild from Melisende. I suppose that's where the rest of my story began now that I think about it. Everything since has felt like another life, as if that clothier from an unnamed village died in the Calamity. But I daresay this tale has grown more than long enough, don't you think?
Info & Permissions
Jul. 20th, 2019 04:58 pm JOPHREY LETHE "I'm not asking to be saved." | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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